Housing Program Specialist

The Office of Homeless Services is recruiting for a Housing Program Specialist*. The Housing Program Specialist serves as a liaison with the local U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) field office and among the Southern California Continuum of Care (CoC) Alliance members. They are a noted subject matter expert of the countywide collaborative application and serves as the primary contact for all CoC related activities in the County. Duties will include maintaining the CoC Congressional mandated housing inventory chart, and Point-In-Time information.  The Point-in-Time County (PITC) is an annual count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons.

In addition, the Office of Homeless Services has assumed the direct responsibility for administering the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) for the County that provides regular data to HUD and Congress for continued facilitation of homeless related services programs such as the CoC Homeless Assistance grants, Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG), Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), CoC Homeless Emergency Aid Program (HEAP), and HUD Veteran Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH).

• Plans and conducts studies of administrative and operational activities, which includes fiscal operations of all CoC funded agencies, programmatic preparation and control, budgetary review, compliance with HUD mandates; plans training and maintains exchange of various informational systems (i.e., HMIS, HUD data exchange, etc); develops reports and recommendations for the Homeless Services Officer for appropriate action based on an analysis of gathered data.
• Develops program navigation to include emergency shelters, transitional housing, permanent supportive housing, and permanent housing.
• Assists in preparing housing and homeless related grant applications and all subsequent follow-up; recommends and monitors procedures for CoC grant implementation and countywide coordination with a variety of funding streams (i.e., Emergency Solutions Grants, Emergency Food and Shelter Program, Coordinated Entry System).
• Develops and recommends various policies and procedures as identified through review of local, state and federal regulation changes; develops written procedures to implement adopted policy or to clarify and describe standard practices; designs and improves forms to expedite procedures and coordinate the publication and dissemination of forms to the Continuum of Care.
• Develops CoC wide training plans; coordinates the provision of services for all CoC funded agency needs, including grant preparation, trainings on CoC rules, and mandated changes that affect all CoC funded agencies.
• Assists the Homeless Services Officer in preparing budgets including grant related funding (i.e., acquiring and identifying sufficient match and leverage); assists in the development of budget recommendations; monitors budget performance on various HUD CoC funded agencies; reviews and analyzes financial data on an on-going basis through the HUD Line of Credit Control Services to assure conformance with CoC established performance and expenditure guidelines; prepares background information for grants, policy items and board items; and provides programmatic information to various organizations (such as HUD, the VA, state Housing and Community Development, municipalities, etc.) upon request.