The City is working to create a feedback loop for homelessness solutions that will improve resource utilization and make solutions more accessible to those in need. A key part of this process is listening to people with lived experience with homelessness to understand how we can make it easier to navigate the complex system for obtaining and using homelessness solutions. On today’s episode, I’m joined by Chad Bojorquez, chief program officer at Destination: Home, and Greg Pensinger, homelessness response manager in the City of San José Housing Department. We talk about the Live Experience Advisory Board and how homelessness solutions are evolving to better meet the needs of homeless residents.
Thanks so much, Chad and Greg, for joining me on today’s episode. To learn more about the Lived Experience Advisory Board, please visit https://leabsv.org/.
Info on Interim Housing Communities
Lived Experienced Advisory Board(LEAB) - The board is a leadership development community created and operated by individuals with current or past lived experience of homelessness. Members make recommendations for improvement and assist with the implementation of programs and services. LEAB is a platform to evaluate and shift power from traditional systems of care to those with lived experience.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) - one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It administers federal housing and urban development laws.
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Jeff Scott: Chad, let's start with you. Can you introduce yourselves to our audience and tell people what you do for destination home?
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Chad Bojorquez: Hi, Jeff. Yes, my name is Chad Bojorquez. I'm the chief program officer of Destination Home, and I lead all of our initiatives and program work around ending and preventing homelessness in Santa Clara County.
00;00;55;18 - 00;01;00;28
Jeff: Nice to have you with us. Thanks for making time to talk today. And Greg, how about you? What's your role in the Housing Department?
00;01;01;16 - 00;01;18;13
Greg Pensinger: Hey, Jeff. Yeah, I'm Greg Pensinger. I'm the homelessness response manager in our homelessness response team here in the city of San Jose's Housing Department. And basically, I oversee a lot of our housing based and crisis-based interventions as far as our homeless resources and initiatives.
00;01;18;22 - 00;01;25;22
Jeff: Thank you for joining us, Greg. Appreciate it. Chad, my first question, I'll start with you. Can you tell our audience what is the LEAB?
00;01;25;27 - 00;02;25;02
Chad: The LEAB is the Lived Experience Advisory Board. You can think of it as like a consumer advisory board, but it's kind of has a unique take here in Santa Clara County in that it's really an independent kind of autonomous board of people who all have current or former experience of homelessness and I actually wanted to read the LEAB’s current mission statement because I think it's really powerful and gives a great sense of kind of this was kind of collectively written by the board itself. So this is the what the LEAB is from the board's perspective leaves the mission. The board is a leadership development community created and operated by individuals with current or past lived experience of homelessness. Members make recommendations for improvement and assist with implementation of programs and services. LEAB is a platform to evaluate and shift power from traditional systems of care to those with lived experience.
00;02;25;11 - 00;02;45;17
Jeff: Well, thanks for that Chad, you're right. That is very powerful, and I think does a great job of encapsulating exactly why the LEAB was put together. So thanks for sharing that. How was the LEAB actually established? What entity convened It brought the people together, selected the original members of the LEAB, and also, how long has the LEAB been in existence for?
00;02;45;26 - 00;06;34;29
Chad: Basically back in late 2017 I was a relatively new employee of Destination: Home and some people with lived homeless experience had recently been housed in San Jose, especially several members, individuals who had stayed in contact with myself and our executive director, Jen Loving. We're kind of housed as part of the effort from the jungle encampment. We're kind of just kind of in our ears and saying, Hey, you know, our community needs a consumer advisory board. We need a board of some kind of people who have access to services, who are able to kind of communicate, inform for improvements and change around the system and really, I think the opportunity from our perspective at Destination Home was that I had lived experience of homelessness. It wasn't why I was working at Destination Home, but it was just kind of an opportunity, I think, for us to be authentic about building that board from scratch. So really what we did is we began having a series of lunches like two or three sit around the table and start talking about what we would want to do. I don't think any of us really knew exactly what it meant to kind of create a peer led experience board. I know I didn't. And I was kind of learning about other efforts across the country. We worked early on with HomeBase, which provides kind of technical assistance and compliance support to our entire system of care here in Santa Clara County and other communities in the Bay Area. So they were able to really kind of tell us about what's going on in some other communities across the country, like what these boards look like, what they could do. And eventually, pretty rapidly, we kind of formed a little more officially and created bylaws to kind of govern what the LEAB board would look like most. Essentially, I think some of the decisions that were made really early on that have carried us forward and kind of are the spirit of the board, is that official members, members that board that that vote on decisions and kind of help evolve the board all have to be current or formally homeless. We do have people on the board, non-voting members from the COC, so we have always have had somebody from the continuum of care. So that's like somebody who works at the County of Santa Clara Office of Supportive Housing. That's been a really great kind of conduit so that we can have direct access to the system both ways. And then we've always had HomeBase in the room to help kind of support some of the infrastructure, you know, taking minutes agenda, making sure that new members have the Zoom link right once COVID hit, things like that. But for the most part, the, the meetings have been really driven by people with lived experience of homelessness. Destination Home has supported financially and kind of with, you know, space meeting, space ordering dinners in the early days before the Live Experience Advisory Board had their own kind of programmatic budget. And so we've always supported financially and in faith and kind of in partnership in our community around our common mission to end homelessness in Santa Clara County. But we really have always maintained that the LEAB as an independent body, autonomous, we don't get in the way or influence the decision making where we agree. You know, we come together, and we fight together where we where we disagree or where it's not as relevant to the work of Destination Home. You know, we just don't get in the way, but we don't necessarily we're not going to say, oh, you can't do that, right? Like even though we're funding. So it's really independent in that way. And then since then and I'll pass it over to Greg, you know, we've had this really great opportunity to get buy in and support from the county and from the City of San Jose. So I think our system partners are really starting to not only like appreciate the value of leave, but invest actual money and kind of equity as well.
00;06;35;12 - 00;06;40;15
Jeff: Great. Thanks for that chat. And I don't know, Greg, if you had wanted to jump in with a comment there. Before we move on.
00;06;40;27 - 00;06;59;05
Greg: I'll just say that Chad and I have known each other for a long time. We've worked together at a different organization together, and it's always been something that Chad talked about as a passion project. And so when I learned about kind of the progress developing the LEAB, I was very excited to see that Chad had been able to make that vision coming to fruition.
00;06;59;16 - 00;07;06;08
Jeff: Chad, you mentioned the COC, The Continuum of Care, can you explain for people what the continuum of care is?
00;07;06;27 - 00;09;09;20
Chad: Absolutely. Yes. The Continuum of Care, we have acronyms for everything. So we call it the COC, is is mostly based on federal funding jurisdiction. So HUD, the Housing and Urban Development Department of the Federal Government has jurisdictions across the country that kind of their geographical jurisdictions to where. Okay, we're going to give this certain amount of federal funding to this geographic area. For us, it's essentially Santa Clara County and the county of Santa Clara itself is what they call the collaborative applicant. So think of that as like the main point of contact that communicates with HUD and applies collectively for our community, for funding that is now approximately $35 million and growing every year. So this pays for, you know, critical shelter, permanent housing, rapid rehousing, really essential housing services in Santa Clara County. And part of the requirement of being that kind of collaborative applicant and having a Continuum of Care is that you have a really robust stakeholder involvement from all the different organizations that are serving to support the homeless services system of care. So think of all the nonprofits and all the government entities and all the advocates and all the people with lived experience that kind of come together collectively to address this really large social issue that we have, especially here in Santa Clara County. And so there's it's kind of a governance, a governance structure around these dollars, but we also use it in Santa Clara County, I think even more than that, just as a way to bring us all together around this common issue. So there's regular meetings there are trainings, there are best practice resources and just kind of a collective effort that we can all share and learn from each other and lean on each other so that solving homelessness and preventing homelessness in Santa Clara County is not a one organization job It's like a collective responsibility that we have in our community.
00;09;09;24 - 00;09;18;25
Jeff: So, Greg, from the city's perspective on an issue like homelessness, why is it so important and so valuable to get the input from people with lived experience?
00;09;19;00 - 00;10;18;28
Greg: Yeah, I think it's a great question and one that probably has not been asked for long enough. I think, you know, for a long time the approach has been very patriarchal, top down. We know what's best for you. Whereas now as we're starting to share power, you know, we're starting to learn what the experience is and how we could implement those experiences and voices into the work that we fund as a as a city. And I think it's important because, you know, it makes sure that there's the empathy and the knowledge and the experience and the struggle that folks who have lived experience have had as they try to navigate a very complicated system, they can say, hey, no, that's not going to work, or, Hey, no, we should do it this way. Because, you know when I was trying to navigate the system that I ran into this barrier. And so really being able to incorporate that voice, to learn from that experience and that expertise is very, very important and I think, you know, we as a city have fully committed to making sure that we are, you know, utilizing those voices to the full extent.
00;10;19;25 - 00;10;37;07
Jeff: Greg, when we talk about getting input from people live experience, are we talking about input for the physical construction of housing or of a shelter, or are we talking about input for processes and systems to deliver services? Or is it some combination of the above?
00;10;37;13 - 00;11;27;23
Greg: It it's the full gamut. So for instance, we were at a recent meeting with Public Works where a partner over there complemented Claudine, who's the director of the LEAB on her paint choices at the New Guadalupe Interim Housing Facility that we're going to be opening up. So they were theyre on the ground, helping to choose what the design would be of that facility and community when it opens up. But I think even more importantly, though, it's the policy and the way we approach the services that we want to fund so that, you know, when we have an operator or an agency that we might select to run interim housing community or rapid rehousing program or an outreach program that that we're really, you know, doing our due diligence, collecting that feedback from folks with lived experience in making sure that those programs are at the design phase, are including those voices and that experience of lived experience.
00;11;27;23 - 00;11;41;04
Jeff: But can you give us some examples? You mentioned kind of the paint color, the interim housing site that's currently under construction. But can you give us a few other examples? Can of tangible examples of how the city and even the county are working with the LEAB?
00;11;41;08 - 00;13;40;01
Greg: One of the big projects that we're working on is looking at all of our interim housing sites and as some of our audience may know, we operate currently five interim housing sites here in the city of San Jose, which are temporary housing opportunities that are meant to be dignified and meant to be a step forward, to get people off the streets rebuilding services so that they're successful exits out of those programs. With the current one that we're about to open up on the Guadalupe, we're really digging in with LEAB, going over the policies and procedures that the operator is suggesting, making sure that they're that they make sense. You know, and this goes from everything from the infrastructure of the Internet connectivity to the way communication is handled, to the way grievances are handled, and accommodation requests are handled, really digging into the policies and procedures on a very finite level to make sure that it makes sense and that so if there's something that is predictably going to go wrong from the perspective of the LEAB members that we can initiate that change and be proactive about promoting a better policy or a better process with our policies and procedures. The other thing that's actually happening right now as a big abatement of Columbus Park is taking place, we have some folks who are a little bit hesitant to utilize some of the resources that we're offering at those interim housing sites. So they might have a spot over there, but they're not yet ready to move in. So there's they're also staying at the encampment. And so with Chad and his team and I and my in our team here at the city got together. We developed a process where some LEAB members would actually go out to the park alongside our staff, go have that conversation with those folks about kind of what what's holding them back kind of what their concerns are. And so as we speak, you know, we're having we're having that feedback we're developing that feedback loop so we could better learn about how we can make those that process more welcoming to individuals and those resources are more utilized. And so it's been going great. We've just started it this week and we're really hoping to build on this sort of small pilot to see how we can work together more robustly and into the future.
00;13;40;11 - 00;13;53;06
Jeff: And Chad, Greg was just telling us about some examples of how the city is working with the LEAB. Are you seeing similar interactions with the lead from smaller cities throughout the county and also from the county itself?
00;13;53;08 - 00;20;26;22
Chad: We have seen, just like a profound growth in the number of opportunities for people with lived experience to engage and share in decision making power with kind of more traditional system players like the city of San Jose or the county of Santa Clara or the Housing Authority, as well as some of our large nonprofit providers that have been providing shelter and housing services for quite some time. A couple of years ago, one of our really kind of groundbreaking and exciting projects at the time for the lived experience Advisory Board was one of the largest shelter and housing providers in San Jose, approached the board really early on. So this was kind of like the first project of this kind and said, hey, you know, we are having some trouble with our shelter intake process. You know, we're getting some feedback from people that it's not that great and we would love for your board to help us kind of audit that process and review that process and make some recommendations. And so the Lived Experience Advisory Board went down actually a nine month process that involved serving people, staying at the shelter, serving staff, providing services on multiple different shifts because of the 24 hour operation, having several focus groups, some people like, you know, more of a one on one kind of survey approach. Others kind of like to be in a group and kind of have a conversation as well as being able to actually go through the shelter process, kind of like a secret shopper type scenario and then kind of put all of that information together because through all of those kind of data collection methods, if you will, we gathered quite a bit of information and put it together into a real kind of professional report that we were able to present to the leadership of that organization. And I think there were some really great both positive and constructive recommendations in that report. But the most powerful thing I think, that came out of the initial conversation where we were able to share the findings with leadership, was kind of a new level of accountability because LEAB basically said, you know, we did all this work. It's great. We think the recommendations are strong. We think that we collected a lot of data and feel good about what we're sharing with you. But all of that will be for nothing if if you can come back and tell us, like what you did with this information after a period of time. And so there was an agreement that actually this nonprofit fulfilled to come back a year later and basically say, what have we done with these recommendations and what are the changes? And that's what's really powerful. I think, is like it's beyond just kind of one way advisement or feedback, right? Like, Oh, it'd be great if, you know, suggestion box type thing. It's a really collaborative process, you know, an ongoing dialog about like, Oh, you made these recommendations because of that, we made these programmatic changes and now we're seeing these improvements, and that has been really powerful. I think other areas where people with lived experience and especially the Lived Experience Advisory Board has been heavily involved with the county and now the city for quite some time now are on policy recommendations, as Greg mentioned, grievance recommendations. What kinds of services are being provided at sites? How do we get to a place where even if we have different providers and different physical buildings, there's some uniformity in the services provided so that we can, you know, know what to expect when there's a basic level of care that's provided across the system, as well as pretty major funding recommendations. So people with lived experience have been on the review panels for HUD funding, state funding, local funding recommendations to both weigh in on where the priorities should be, so to say, hey, you know, we really think that more funding should go toward shelter or interim solutions or homelessness prevention, for example, as well as, you know, the actual providers that based on their proposals and their performance, past performance that people live experience, feel like are the best equipped to provide services. So there's like a higher level of accountability. Now that's based on people who are actually going through these programs can say, you know, sounds good on paper, but we really need to see improvements for that provider to be effective in our community. I think now we're getting to a place where we're really seeing kind of the Lived Experience Advisory Board being a platform to launch people who are on that board into other decision making body. So for example, Destination Home now has three of our board member seats set aside for people with the experience of homelessness. We have people on the Executive Board of the C.O.C. of the Continuum of Care that I spoke about earlier, which is a relatively small number of people. So a lot of influence over the activities and kind of focus of the S.O.S. set aside for one, there's one spot for someone with lived homeless experience and then there's one similar but more focused for a youth with lived homeless experience. So that's exciting and then super recently but I think really kind of shows like how the progress has gone. The mayor of San Jose, Mayor Liccardo really strived to get a seat on the HCDC Commission so the Housing and Community Development Commission set aside for someone with lived experience of homelessness. And so we have been partnering with the city of San Jose to make sure that that we're supporting people to apply for that opportunity and the mayor will be making a decision, you know, before he departs to be able to place someone in there for the next I believe it's three more years. So that's really exciting because all of the really critical affordable housing and housing decisions kind of go through the HCDC Commission. And so for the first time they'll be somebody on that commission who has lived homeless experience and they'll be not only will they be up here with all of the other members, but the city has committed to providing additional supports not just to this seat, but all the seats now, if needed, to make sure that people can show up in a powerful way, meaning they have access to technology and reliable wi-fi now that meetings are online and that they have ability to print all of the material so that they can review, you know, these like 35 page pro forma about these developments and be, you know, be able to weigh in with authority and power rather than being kind of that marginalized person who you see on your zoom screen hanging out in their car and it's clear that they don't have all the same, you know, level of support that that we all have when these are, you know, this is our day job, so to speak. So a lot of exciting progress and projects that we're seeing across the board.
00;20;26;22 - 00;21;07;10
Greg: Kind of capitalize on what Chad was saying in terms of, you know, really involving those folks, but also recognizing their time is valuable and that it should be acknowledged and in some way compensated. And so the city has a couple of weeks ago actually formalized a partnership, a formal partnership with the LEAB in which will allow Destination Home to give their members a stipend for the time that we ask them to spend with us on this consulting and stuff like that. And that's something that they can put on their resumes is something that they could they can be proud of and brag about in interviews and things like that. And so it's, it's really contributing to the solution in that way as well. And, and we want to recognize that their time is valuable as well.
00;21;07;15 - 00;21;26;23
Jeff: Is what's happening here in San Jose and Santa Clara County with respect to the LEAB part of a growing trend, either regionally or nationally to try to incorporate the voices of people with lived experience, or is the Silicon Valley area kind of ahead of ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the country? Maybe we'll start with you, Chad.
00;21;27;07 - 00;25;18;18
Chad: It's a little of both. I think that we are definitely in the early stages of a movement around centering and sharing power with people with lived experience, not just in the homeless services sector, but in really all sectors. You know, I like to compare to any successful business who is frankly obsessed with their customer base and have, you know, a very robust, long standing mechanisms in place to get feedback from their consumers because they know that's how they're going to make more money. So I think that in parallel when it comes to social issues, public nonprofit, public private partnership, trying to address, you know, major issues like homelessness, you know, we need to involve the people going through our system to make sure that all of our solutions are really the best they can be, in the most relevant and informed by people's actual experiences. And as Greg mentioned early on, that is a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the service sector has been traditionally kind of top down. We know what's best. This is what makes sense as we're sitting in our offices designing programs on paper and the reality is, if you look outside, we have nearly 10,000 homeless individuals in Santa Clara County. So clearly we have more work to do around our solutions. So I am really excited about this, you know, very relatively new phenomenon of bringing people into that accountability structure, sharing power with people who have been in the system. Not to say that we're going to go out of the way and let the people who are accessing services recreate the whole system. But it's about partnering and expanding the tent and having like a bigger table of ideas and opportunities to kind of tweak and redesign our programs and make sure that they're successful. Because at the end of the day, we really want to house everybody. We want to end homelessness. We want to prevent homelessness for people and avoid having, you know, new families have to experience the trauma of homelessness. And we need all the help we can get in order to do that. And we need to have our solutions based on people who are going through them and have been through the programs and telling us, like, this worked, this didn't work. We need programs to have, you know, less strict, arbitrary timelines. A lot of traditional programs have time limits. You know, it's a 90 day program, for example, which is mostly based on the nonprofit's desire to serve as many people as possible in a given amount of time, because they have a funder that says for X number of dollars, I need you to serve this many people. But it's not based on how long does somebody need to be in this program to successfully leave into a permanent housing solution. And so that's really where this is coming from, is we're looking at like what are people's actual experiences? What do we need to actually solve homelessness? And without that, not only voice, but but that space in the room where we have people who have been there and or are currently experiencing the situations that we're trying to solve for we kind of lose touch with what is actually needed. And so it's extremely powerful. As Greg mentioned, you know, having a peer, peer component to our solutions. We have such tremendous people working in our nonprofit and public sector partners toward ending homelessness. And it's just really about like, this is the final frontier, this is the missing piece. We never really aggressively incorporated people who had been experiencing homelessness into our system. And so I would say five years ago, really authentic across the system. And then just the last point, you know, I've only recently discovered that this is kind of a movement across the country and in other realms. We had a really exciting panel last week with the Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits, where we had people from other sectors talking about very similar work. And again, it's just about like, who are you trying to serve? Who's your customer? And how can we center the work on those individuals? Greg what's your experience been?
00;25;18;28 - 00;26;06;00
Greg: Thanks, Chad. So I have worked in three counties and it is beginning to make more sense everywhere that I've worked, you know, as people think about the idea like, Oh, why didn't we think about that before? It makes so much sense. What Chad and his team is doing is pioneering this process in a lot of ways, as we were want to do here in the Silicon Valley. And that the system that we have here is more advanced than any that I've seen in my career. And so I think definitely it's something that we will see grow and as it should. And as we start to see the successes and the data coming out of how having a lived experience, consultation process or feedback loop enhances our programs, we'll start to see it grow and become more and more of a best practice. But as it stands today, I think as far as I've seen, we have one of the more advanced level experience and collaborations with.
00;26;06;02 - 00;29;47;07
Chad: I appreciate that Greg. And I also want to recall as Greg mentioned, we were able to work together for quite some time in our previous roles, our previous employers. And I remember we were we were making attempts in this direction at that time. And really what it was about was just like, as you mentioned, just like treating people as like human beings and as equals, like just because I'm in a position where we provide funding or we provide services, it doesn't make me any different than the people that were helping it on a human level. So it's kind of about leveling the playing field a little bit. And we used to do a lot of just gathering and equalizing up people, like throwing barbecues and having gatherings where it was just around like, let's, let's bring people together and how can we all play a role here and get away from the, you know, the power dynamic that's imbalanced, I think, was really the starting point of all this work. And when this idea about creating a lived experience advisory board first came around, I mean, I honestly like I did not know what it meant or how we would go about it. I was fearful that we would not be able to get enough people to show up. That was what I was mostly worried about, because people's lives are so complicated, especially when you're currently homeless or recently housed, that I was just imagine it would be difficult for people to commit, but we literally have never had that problem. We've always had a really robust, regular attendance to all of the lived experience advisory board meetings. And now like we have like 30 active members at this time, which is just incredible. And it started out with four of us just sitting around a table and talking about it. It can be intimidating, but if you're thinking about doing this kind of work in your own organization or your own community or your own sector, I encourage people just to kind of get around the table and start talking and getting together as a people, right? That's how you can build a community and a center of power, of organized power. I think it's the essence of this work, which is to share power with people who traditionally have been left out, who don't have any power, who have been marginalized by our systems of care. But sharing power can actually make us all more powerful in a way, if that makes sense. But we have been in some situations where we've run up against roadblocks and hurdles, where this movement has bumped up against people's comfort levels. And people have felt like, oh, this means I'm going to have to give up some of my power. And so I just kind of bring that to the service to say that it's not all rosy and it's not, you know, like, you know, like let's just get some, some of our clients to the table and we'll, we'll give them a stipend and we'll give them food and we'll talk to them and we'll get their input. You know, there is a very real movement that's kind of been generating and we're learning along the way and we've made some stumbles. But it is about like building a base of power so that people with lived experience can have influence on how they're treated, how services are offered to them, how moving people are in extremely traumatic, compromised situation. It's coming to us collectively, us for help, whether it's to the city of San Jose's city hall front door and saying, I'm homeless, I need help or I'm about to be homeless, I need help, or I live in my vehicle through all the myriad of organizations that make up the Continuum Of Care and I think we owe it to people who are in these situations to put ourselves in their shoes as much as possible and create experiences that are like welcoming and are building people up and getting people back into the fold and becoming part of our community.
00;29;47;14 - 00;30;03;24
Jeff: Very well said, Chad. Very powerful. I can tell you're it comes through that you're very passionate about this. Greg, I have a question for you about what is the city learned or are there tangible examples that you can share with our audience about results that have been achieved in collaboration with the LEAB?
00;30;04;13 - 00;31;53;27
Greg: Yeah, I'll start off by saying that my favorite meetings every single week are the ones that I get to share time with members of the LEAB or others with lived experience because they make those meetings dynamic, fruitful. They don't let us. They keep us accountable because they have a stake in this issue more than any of us sitting in City Hall do. And I think that informs everything that we do, you know, from our director all the way down to, you know, the folks on the ground who are who are doing this work on behalf of the city, learn constantly that we need to be accountable for the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the programs that we support in our community. In terms of tangible results, I mentioned earlier this outreach projects that we kind of just conceptualized two weeks ago, and we're able to, you know, have boots on the ground two weeks later. And that's already starting to have to bear some fruit. And in motivating some people to take advantage of some of the resources that the city of San Jose is able to offer. You know, Chad and I are talking about developing some employment programs with the input of lead and which would hopefully benefit. Our folks will have the experience to continue their path toward self-sufficiency in negotiations with our partners. It helps us inform that process from the beginning so that we're not spinning our wheels or wasting time to where we're going. Have to go back and revise something or that we look back a year on and say, Hey, we really should have taken that advice of the lead because they predicted that this would happen. So we're really being proactive about how we incorporate that feedback. And I think that's a that's tangible and important. And I think it's a credit to that to our director that she has been committed to that to that, that partnership with the lead gen.
00;31;53;27 - 00;32;12;11
Jeff: Maybe if you can kind of piggyback on what Greg just said from the LEAB members perspective, how does it feel to be part of the solution, to be part of the power structure, to go from living on the street with almost nothing, to actually having people treat you with respect and seek out your opinion in your expertise?
00;32;12;15 - 00;35;49;19
Chad: Yeah, it's incredibly powerful and vindicating and a little scary. Sometimes it's powerful because if you have been kind of out of society and marginalized and just kind of not really integrated or contributing in a traditional way to our community and our society, it can be very empowering and motivating to feel like you have a purpose. And I think that's one of the core components, right? Is just like I went through this really tragic life experience and I can kind of flip that around and turn it into a source of power and I can actually help other people who are going through it and it can actually propel you much quicker into like a solutions focused kind of, you know, moving through the traumatic experience much faster than if you're kind of on your own right, trying to figure out like, how am I going to give back? What is my what is my purpose after I lost everything and kind of have to rewrite my history and rewrite my life, it's vindicating because I have stayed in shelters and interacted with people on the front lines and have experienced some of the real life hurdles and barriers to accessing services. So to have somebody actually want to hear about those things and make improvements based on that experience, it's like if you only knew how hard it is now that I've spent so much time on the other end and building the systems, and we always have these really great ideas and we have such tremendous resources in Santa Clara County to help people. But the path to access those resources is not always clear or accessible to the people that we're trying to serve. So it can be really vindicating to be heard and to be able to actually influence and make that better for people. And it's scary too, because you get into these meetings where people really seem like they know what they're talking about and they're kind of have their awesome, you know, Zoom backgrounds and they're kind of just like, that's what they do all day long. And you kind of come into this new world and you kind of have like a little bit of imposter syndrome or what have you where you're like, Do I belong here? Like, who am I? Like, These people don't care what I have to say. And so that's a normal feeling, I think, for all human beings in a new environment or an environment where you're trying to influence. So I think that's something that we at Destination Home have really tried to focus on more recently, is making sure that however possible and it looks different for each person that we're equipping people to be successful and that we're not relying on the rest of the group or whatever the environment is. The context is to do that for somebody that we're making sure that someone has, like a reliable Internet connection or an office space or a laptop or who knows how to use Zoom. We do like basic Zoom trainings as part of our lived experience advisory board, just to give folks a sense of the types of supports that we learned along the way that we need to provide. We have a training called COC one on one Continuum of Care, one on one, you know, kind of like a much longer version of the answer that I gave earlier, right? Like, how does this system work? Because you have to be educated and knowledgeable about how these systems work in order to make them better. I think that's been a continuous request and call from people with that experience that we are trying to answer. And I think we're in an exciting point where it's not just Destination Home or the nonprofits sector that is trying to support this effort. Like we really have incredible support from the city of San Jose and the county of Santa Clara and some of the smaller cities and our nonprofit partners. And it's exciting to see the progress in our community.
00;35;49;29 - 00;36;32;09
Greg: That's I would repeat everything you just said and I would add from a city perspective, you know, it's our responsibility for all the reasons you mentioned, that these individuals are putting themselves out there and what could be an uncomfortable situation. And the City, you know, were not doing this because its cute, we really want to get their feedback and it's our responsibility. And I feel so much pressure when I'm on the phone with Mike or Lisa or any of the LEAB members and they say, Great, can we do this? And I say, Yes, I'm going to I better make sure I'm going to do that. And I feel just as much pressure to make good on those on those promises as I do from my bosses. You know, it's a responsibility that we've taken on and, you know, that we're committed to make sure that this partnership is being built.
00;36;32;21 - 00;36;44;29
Jeff: Before we wrap up, I'm just wondering if each of you can share any thoughts you might have about the future of power sharing with a lived experience advisory board? Where do you think we're going next?
00;36;45;10 - 00;37;48;11
Greg: I think it is the future. It's got to be a part of every decision that's made by any city, county, COC, nonprofit to have the voices of the people that they're meant to serve incorporated into their work plans. There's a barrier, and I think sometimes, Chad and I have both acknowledged it, where sometimes we think that it's just because someone might not have a home, that they're somehow less intelligent, less able. And so we've got to get over that hump as a community and as our collective consciousness has to change to realize that these are human beings that are intelligent people with good ideas and ambition. And we just got to provide those opportunities for them to continue to contribute to their community. Throughout my 11 plus year career, some of the most intelligent and creative and ambitious and driven and any, any positive adjective you could put out there have also happened to not have a home to go home to. And so we've got to get over that hump of thinking that theyre somehow or an other or different from the rest of us. And we've got to make sure that their voices are incorporated. And I think it is a future, Chad, I'll go to you.
00;37;49;01 - 00;40;18;15
Chad: Yeah. Thanks, Greg. You know, I think for us, it's right on the frontier are couple of efforts that we are really working to drive a Destination Home and through the Lived Experience Advisory Board and other lived experience groups that we've been able to support is a really exciting, relatively new group called the Youth Action Board, which is a lived experience board for youth. In our Continuum of Care, we have another group that is solely focused coming out of our homelessness prevention system, which is, you know, nearing $20 million program that prevents homelessness for almost 2000 households per year has had a tremendous impact on kind of stemming the tide for people coming into homelessness in Santa Clara County. So we want to continue to kind of cultivate the different groups and the different power bases and movements and support the individuals in those groups and provide resources so that the groups can take themselves in whatever direction they want to go. I think we want to kind of increase the presence of us talking and sharing learnings about lived experience and power sharing at a state and national level. I think also when it comes to our nonprofit providing partners, as Greg mentioned, I think we have some work to do to integrate the value of peer to peer support and the value of people of that experience and how they can contribute to the actual services being provided. Not as like, oh, you know, it's inherently better to have people in our organization who have lived experience because they, you know, they've been there and they know that. But there are actual, tangible benefits of having people on the front lines and interacting with people on the streets, peer to peer, to help people feel more comfortable, more levels of trust and kind of coming into the fold and accessing all these wonderful interim and permanent housing solutions that our community is building. So we'd like to see an increase there. And then finally, you know we want to keep kind of experimenting and expanding the number of tables where decisions are made, where we have people who are impacted by our systems. I don't think it's impossible to see a day where we have someone running for city council who is formerly homeless, right? Maybe someone who was able to be successfully sitting on the HCDC commission, for example. So we want to continue to find where decisions are being made, where we need to expand the table and have more people of that experience involved and support individuals to be successful wherever that takes them.
00;40;18;28 - 00;40;42;19
Jeff: Again, Chad and Greg, thank you both very much for your time, for sharing your thoughts and for forming our audience about the Lived Experience Advisory Board. We really appreciate everything that you've been able to share with us today.
Jeff: Thanks so much Chad and Greg, for joining me on today’s episode. To learn more about the Lived Experience Advisory Board, please visit https://leabsv.org/. Thanks for listening to Dwellings, the City of San José Housing Department podcast. Our theme music is “Speed City,” composed and performed by Ettaine Charles. Thanks to San José Jazz for letting us use your music. If you like the show, please subscribe and share with your friends and family. If you're looking for more ways to get involved with housing and homelessness response, please check out the show notes. You can follow the Housing Department on social media. We're on Twitter and Facebook at S J city housing. If you have questions or comments about today's episode, please send them to housingcomms@sanJoseca.gov. Our artwork is by Chelsea Palacio. Dwellings is produced by me, Jeff Scott and Jose Chavez and the Housing Department.