The Albany City Council meeting on June 21st featured a presentation about the Berkeley Food and Housing Project (BF&HP) and Albany Project Hope. Albany Project Hope is staffed by BF&HP that has a vision that everyone has the right to affordable housing and eating healthy food every day. They advocate for and partner with individuals and families experiencing housing and food insecurity. Their mission is to ease and end the crisis of homelessness within communities by providing emergency food and shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and permanent supportive housing with services for individuals and families,

The motto in Albany Project Hope is A Pathway from Homeless to Housing. The process begins with referrals that usually come from the Albany Police Department or the Albany Cares Team which does direct outreach with their housing navigator, who meets people where they engage them and try to conduct an intake followed by document gathering and a coordinated entry assessment which is the key to getting people into permanent supportive housing. The project helps each person retrieve and obtain all of the documents they need to be eligible for permanent support of housing through the Alameda County coordinated entry system.

This project assesses each person with two goals in mind. The first goal is making sure that they’re addressing people’s immediate needs which could include food, water or shelter. Shelter is directly linked to the coordinated entry assessment which is required to enter into any shelters. It ensures that each client completes an assessment with the Alameda County Coordinated Entry System. This can place the person in the Housing Cue which could result in access to permanent supportive housing.

The second goal is to assist each person with obtaining five core documents: Identification Card, Social Security Card, Disability Verification, Homeless Verification, and Income Verification. Once the documents are obtained, they are submitted to Homestretch and uploaded in the Homeless Management Information system.

To learn more about Albany Project Hope and how to donate, you can go to https://tinyurl.com/nhe9zkvd.

–Maggie Ju