The City of Chico is looking for community feedback on how to best address the homelessness crisis. It recently formed an ad hoc committee on homelessness that met for the second time this week.
The group has been hearing from area service providers. This week's meeting featured a presentation from Taylor Bunch, executive director of True North Housing Alliance, which operates the Torres Community Shelter in Chico. The nonprofit is also on the cusp of opening a housing navigation center.
Addressing the needs of the 'service resistant'
A common theme at the meeting was how to reach so-called “service resistant” unhoused residents. Those are people who are reluctant or unwilling to stay in shelters, often due to the regulations of the site or bad experiences in the past.
Bunch said the Torres Shelter has found success with creating a street outreach team. It was launched in 2023 and is made up of people who’ve experienced homelessness in the past. The team allows them to repeatedly contact unsheltered residents and inform them of the services available at the shelter.
"We've got folks who have serious mistrust of service providers for whatever reason, and in some cases, valid reasons," Bunch said. "So our program is run by those peer support specialists who can really empathize with them, and have been there and know it. And so they're able to build that rapport over time, and then they come into services."
Since the team began operation, Bunch said it's contacted over 300 people, more than 100 of them eventually enrolled in services at the shelter.
"The reason why we had such a successful and high engagement rate was because of taking that time to build that trust and rapport," Bunch said. "It takes a very long time to get through to that population, to get people to even start trusting you or opening up to you, or being willing to engage or talk through next steps."
Future meetings
The committee is planning to hear from Safe Space and Catalyst Domestic Violence Services in the future. It also outlined other topics it hopes to address, including addiction and mental health care; the impact of city policies on unhoused residents; and community proposals for smaller shelter sites and programs that could fill in gaps in service.
The breadth and scope of planned discussions will likely take longer than the timeline suggested by the committee when it was created. Initially it hoped to have a full set of recommendations to present to the city council by the summer. Now the group plans to deliver an update to city council this summer, but meetings are expected to continue through the fall.
Mayor Kasey Reynolds noted that she didn’t want the committee to last as long as the city’s ad hoc growth and community development committee, which has been meeting for over nine months, and is drawing criticism from the community for not moving quickly enough.
The next meeting will be in two weeks on May 28.
