Conference to End Homelessness
Conference to End Homelessness
by Tammy Boros, Housing Program Manager, Associated Ministries
On May 10th -11th 2017, homeless service providers throughout the State of Washington convened in Tacoma at the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance (WILHA) Conference to End Homelessness. This is a yearly conference for homeless providers to come together and learn. Homeless providers were able to attend to multiple workshops that helped them strengthen their service delivery to homeless households. On Wednesday, May 10th, one of the workshop both Associated Ministries (Tammy Boros and Angela Thompson) and Catholic Community Services (Alan Brown and Will Gorbaty) had the pleasure of hosting was on Diversion here in Pierce County and how we utilize Diversion. When a household comes in contact with the Coordinated Entry System(CES) we first have a problem-solving conversation (Diversion) to help prevent homeless households from having to enter into Pierce County’s homeless services. This workshop was focused on Diversion and not the Coordinated Entry System. We tried to make our workshop as interactive as possible so that providers could walk away with having the experience of leading a problem solving conversation (Diversion) within a workshop setting. We had providers from all over the state attend this workshop including homeless providers from King, Kitsap, and Thurston counties.