PPTFH Hosts Community Meeting on Homelessness Intervention

By LILY TINOCO | Reporter

The Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness hosted a virtual community meeting on Monday, September 26, to discuss “intervening before homelessness happens.”

PPTFH invited Janey Rountree—executive director of UCLA’s Policy Lab—to help attendees learn more about what the program is doing to confront homelessness.

The Policy Lab was launched in 2017 as a pilot program and has since turned out results with “real world impact,” according to UCLA.

“The objectives of the California Policy Lab are to generate new, scientific evidence that is at the frontier of academic research, and to help state and local government partners tackle issues such as homelessness, poverty, crime and education inequality,” according to the program’s description. “Since its inception, CPL has played a growing role in contributing to the body of evidence on homelessness solutions.”

Rountree joined PPTFH to discuss the Policy Lab’s predictive model that helps Los Angeles County focus on individuals and prevent them from falling into homelessness.

“I can’t think of a better way to spend a Monday evening than talking about how to solve homelessness,” Rountree said at the start of the meeting.

Within her presentation, Rountree explained that the Policy Lab has research partnerships with many public agencies in the county and has completed at least five research projects focused on prevention.

“If we don’t understand how to stop people from becoming homeless … we’re never going to be able to get our arms around the homelessness crisis,” she said. “It’s really important to understand not just what the risk factors are for homelessness, but what are the potential points of intervention and who really needs assistance.”

Rountree explained that the program does experimental predictive analytics in collaboration with the Department of Health Services, the LA County Department of Mental Health and more.

It predicts county clients who are at high risk of homelessness by taking data from different county agencies, then uses predictive modeling and eventually determines the people who are at highest risk of homelessness.

Once someone is on that risk list, the county can help determine what approach to take to help that individual. Rountree explained the data is unidentifiable by the research team, meaning they never know who they’re actually looking at.

“There are millions of people in the data,” she said. “It’s not the kind of datasets that can be reverse engineered in terms of identity.”

She said the group’s priority is to keep experimenting and pushing what they think is possible.

“Predictive analytics seem promising, but they’re very experimental, and there aren’t a lot of counties that can do what we did,” she said. “We thought this is a really promising approach … And so you’re able to customize a really human-centered approach to serving these people.”

Rountree went on to answer a handful of questions from attendees before signing off and passing the torch to PPTFH Co-President Sharon Browning.

Browning provided general updates, and shared that PPTFH has not been able to fill its clinical case manager position and is seeking applicants and referrals.

PPTFH invited community members to attend its next meeting, slated for Monday, November 14, at 7 p.m.

For more information or to watch the meeting, visit pptfh.org.