Investing in the Homeless Response Workforce

Helping Alameda County Use Data to Address Homelessness

A group of five colleagues gathered around a table in a bright office, collaborating on documents with charts on a whiteboard in the background.

Project Context: 

  • Alameda County is working to improve how residents experiencing homelessness are connected to housing and supportive services. 
  • Homelessness service providers rely on program and administrative data to understand needs, track progress, and measure outcomes for residents. However, many frontline staff and program managers have not had formal training on how to use data to guide decisions.  
  • Strengthening the workforce’s data skills and developing stronger practices that incorporate clear performance measures and better tracking tools can help ensure that programs are as effective as possible in helping residents find and maintain stable housing.  

How the GPL is Supporting: 

  • Training staff at housing-focused organizations across Alameda County on how to use data to make decisions and improve their programs. The training covers the basics of working with data, setting clear goals, tracking progress, and sharing information in ways that support action. 
  • Providing hands-on support to three local organizations to apply these skills to their homelessness prevention work: 
    • Bay Area Community Services (BACS): Helping the Keep People Housed program strengthen how it collects and uses information to make services more efficient, include resident feedback, and better understand program results. 
    • Alameda County Housing & Community Development (HCD): Supporting efforts to improve how data is collected and shared so that Alameda County Housing Secure, the county’s largest eviction prevention program, can coordinate services more effectively. 
    • EveryOne Home’s Housing Stabilization and Homelessness Prevention Committee: Helping identify shared measures of progress that align with the county’s goals and make it easier to track and improve prevention efforts across programs.