Thunder Bay, Ont., social housing manager launches new system to track homelessness

A new information system has been launched in Thunder Bay, Ont., with the goal of helping social service organizations keep better track of people experiencing homelessness and the resources they access.

It’s called the Homeless Service System Data Tool (HSSDT) and is being led by the Thunder Bay District Social Services Administration Board (TBDSSAB). 

With clients’ consent, the new tool will pull together information from different service providers and allow staff to see “who is receiving supports, which service providers are involved, and where they are at along their journey,” all in one place, TBDSSAB said in a news release.

This includes information such as the city’s by-name list of people known to be experiencing homelessness, case management records, and information about how much capacity there is within the emergency shelter system and in transitional housing buildings. 

“Workers at each individual organization are able to see the exact same information on that single person,” said Aaron Park, TBDSSAB’s manager of housing and homelessness programs, in an interview with CBC News.

“They're not needing to do a new intake process [for] each service that they encounter; as long as they're part of this system, they'll just have to tell their story once and that information will be captured.”

Park estimates just over 1,000 people have connected with services aimed at those experiencing homelessness in the last six months. Meanwhile, the city’s latest point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness — completed last fall over a 24-hour period — captured just over 550 people.

The new tool will give service providers more accurate numbers in real time, Park said, “so we’ll see a much more detailed picture of homelessness at the macro and micro level across the district.”

It’s also hoped to make it easier for the board to meet its provincial reporting requirements, ensuring it will continue to receive funds through Ontario’s Homelessness Prevention Program.

All organizations that receive funding from the board for emergency shelter and transitional housing are required to use the new centralized database.

TBDSSAB says its long-term goal is “to support community organizations to implement the tool across the entire service sector, regardless of funding relationship.”

“The tool will capture information that service providers can use to inform client care, while also showing trends in the system. We can now see all the moving parts in one system, which means the data informing our decisions is more reliable,” said Ken Ranta, chief executive officer of TBDSSAB, in Tuesday’s news release.

The HSSDT was custom-built by Clark Communications, while staff with TBDSSAB and those in the city’s emergency shelter system provided input on its design.

In Tuesday’s news release, Brendan Carlin, executive director of Shelter House, said data tracking is an important but onerous task for his staff.