A Lack of Collaboration

Unhelpful Websites

I was doing some searching various websites to see if there are negative or positive stories about the Coalition, and I noticed a few strange things. By looking at the websites it is clear that there is very little collaboration among the homeless service providers. One rare exception was not even a homeless service provider at all. We do not always see eye to eye with Downtown Cleveland Alliance, but at least they have the courtesy to put a link to the NEOCH website on their website about homelessness.

On the opposite extreme, I checked many of the other homeless social service providers in the community and I could not find one that linked to NEOCH. The worst was the County Office of Homeless Services barely mentions NEOCH (1 time), and never provides a link to our website. site. OHS does not provide a link to the housing website or the United Way First Call for Help website. There is very little helpful information on any of the homeless social services websites especially anything that might be useful to homeless people.

The Downtown Alliance talks about the Grapevine and provides a link to NEOCH on their Homeless Education Page. The County Office of Homeless Services did a complete change of their website (no link--go find it yourself), and did not include one mention of the NEOCH website. This is strange since we coordinate the outreach for the community, we produce the Street Card--one page guide to homeless people on available services, and we have our most popular part of the website--the schedule of where lawyers are staffing clinics in the shelters. We are five of the top 10 search results for "cleveland homeless" on Google, and have 3,000 unique users a month to our website. NEOCH staff and board regularly complain and criticize the County for their slow response to the problems faced by homeless people, but why not provide a link so that homeless people can get off the streets?

I checked Hitchcock Center, Volunteers of America, Y-Haven, West Side Catholic, Salvation Army, and Mental Health Services websites. On all of those site there were only two mentions of the Coalition and no links. We all think that what we do is the most important thing in the community, but the Street Card lists every service available to homeless people and is updated every year. It seems that the providers would want to provide access to a one page guide to homelessness. Since the public libraries are busiest drop in centers for homeless people in our community, there are a great many web surfing homeless people. Most of the emergency shelters kick people out during the day and a large number of the 1,200 homeless people sleeping in the emergency shelters go to the air conditioned, comfortable libraries in our community.

Of course one of the best resources in the community is the 211/First Call for Help website. You can find every homeless service provider, and nearly every social service provider in the community on those sites. The 211 website combined with the Housing Cleveland website provide all the information that anyone might need to get off the streets. It is a shame that the County does not support these two valuable resources with all that they need, and they do not even provide a link from their Office of Homeless Services website.

Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.