Bay Area Homeless Services

Through the years since 1982, Bay Area Homeless Services has determined that most incoming residents are willing and able to work but lack the basic skills to gain or maintain living-wage employment. Our agency provides a well-defined Client Pathway carefully designed to assist homeless individuals and families adjust to community living while learning the skills needed to find suitable employment and return to permanent housing.

Of primary concern is providing safe and secure housing, three meals daily, and basic life skills training. Our secondary concern is working with each resident on an individual basis to formulate a case management plan unique to the resident that will be resident oriented to meet the goal of exiting to permanent housing as quickly as possible.

Bay Area Homeless Services provides a safe, secure shelter for men, women, children, and intact homeless families. In stark contrast to most urban shelters that offer only overnight services, our shelter operates with a stable initial thirty-day program, with options to extend beyond that time if needed.

Incoming residents meet with our professional case management staff within 24 hours of admission to delineate a personalized case management profile, complete with realistic goals. Our Client Pathway is a structured strategy for clients to follow as they work toward meeting their individualized goals. These well-defined steps are Stability, Education, Employment, and Permanent Housing. Each step reinforces the preceding activities and goals and increases the level of personal accountability needed to meet each level's target.

Bi-weekly meetings with each resident to document progress and challenges ensure continued accountability and focus on the end result of exiting to permanent housing.

Strong collaboration with other local and regional nonprofits helps to avoid duplication of services for our residents as they work toward their goals.

People are the reason for our success as a homeless services provider. Success begins with an all-volunteer Board of Directors strategically selected from business and local community leaders, each dedicated to our mission and residents' success. Our professional staff members are selected for their zeal in working with the local homeless population, and their educational accomplishments.

Our Program Manager has an MS in Counseling from University of Houston-Clear Lake. Our Case Manager has an MSW from Stephen F. Austin University. Each of these individuals with direct line supervisory responsibility for their tasks reinforces the professional performance of staff duties. Monthly staff meetings introduce best practices to all staff as a means to increasing their professional capabilities.

The Executive Director has more than twenty-five years of supervisory and management experience in nonprofit and social services agencies. He has nine years of tenure at this agency alone. He has a BA and MA from Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, LL.B. from the University of London, and LL.M. from Western Michigan-Cooley School of Law.

People, innovative programs, community collaboration, and support make Bay Area Homeless Services uniquely qualified to deliver proven quality outcomes for our residents.

By comparing our internally developed data with that released by the Coalition for the Homeless - Houston we can clearly show our progress in returning residents to local housing. Greater Houston data shows that the average time spent in an emergency shelter before permanent housing is 46 days, compared to 29 days at BAHS in 2019.

The same Coalition report showed households in Transitional Housing programs staying an average of 254 days, as opposed to 37 days at our Britton-Fuller Center for Intact Homeless Families, which houses six families at any one time.

Because homelessness is considered a stigma by many, former homeless services residents usually do not wish to be identified or contacted once they have returned to more permanent housing. Therefore, we track our former residents for one year following exit on the
Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) associated with the Homeless Coalition of Houston. We have developed a recidivism report which shows that less than 5% of our residents have entered another homeless services provider's shelter within the past year.

What is next is unclear due to the ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and the potential toll it will take on nonprofit funding. We already have determined that our agency's total fundraising by donation will suffer, and we have received word that our grant income from The United Way of Greater Baytown and Chambers County will not be increased this year, after a significant reduction in the 2019-2020 cycle.
However, we do note that while we may be able to expand the number of successful programs at our agency we can improve on past successes with the three current programs that really matter to our residents and community. In order to accomplish the goals set in our Strategic Plan, we have begun a Capital Campaign (goal $1,250,000) to replace our two 1930'3- era buildings with safe, modern facilities built for the purpose. One will be a Men's Shelter with increased capacity; the other is a modern Administration Building to house program offices, a conference/training room, and updated technical and security equipment.