Farewell Interview with Sharon Alford

This month we bid a fond
farewell to Sharon Alford. Sharon joined BFHP in 2007, and in her more than 12
years with us, she has played an instrumental role in developing BFHP’s
Community Meal and our Veteran’s Transitional Housing program, as well as in
the design and implementation of many of the tools we use to serve our clients,
including: HMIS (the digital Homeless Management Information System), the City
of Berkeley Shelter Reservation hotline, and Berkeley’s Coordinate Entry System
for homeless services (CES).

For Sharon, it has always been a priority to create safe and
inviting spaces for our most vulnerable community members, to treat them with
respect, and to foster that value in her staff. We are grateful for Sharon’s
many years of service, her straight-talking, her passion for her job, and her
commitment to working with high-risk and underserved populations. “What I love
most about my work,” she says, “is that we are changing lives.”

We interviewed Sharon at the beginning of August.

Have you
seen the issue of homelessness change since you started at BFHP?

Certainly it has increased in
numbers, and the face of homelessness has changed. There are many middle class
or long-term housed individuals who are now homeless due to the rising housing
costs.

What are
the biggest challenges in the fight against homelessness?

Affordability – there are few units
near Berkeley that are affordable to our clients on a fixed income. Without
rent control that is the biggest challenge, the lack of inventory. There is
funding provided, but we also want to make sure that a client is able to
sustain that unit if the financial subsidies they receive decrease. Some
available subsidies decrease because the goal is to lead the client toward
independent living.

The results
of the latest Point-in-Time count show an almost 43% increase in homelessness
in Alameda County over the last two years, but only a 13% increase in Berkeley.
Why do you think that is?

We have very strong partnerships
connected to the Coordinated Entry System. I believe those partnerships working
hand-in-hand contributed, because each partner has a specialty, and so there is
not one agency trying to do everything. There are agencies that are connected
to each other and together they provide coordinated wraparound services to the
client. The CES provides the funds to house clients and the case management to
keep them housed while they’re working through their challenges and being
connected to partner services. These services often include mental health, such
as Berkeley Mental Health and medical, such as LifeLong, because we know there
is a direct correlation to physical fitness as well as mental health in order
to stay housed.

Also, I think there may be a direct
correlation with Coordinated Entry Services and the changing focus on Housing First.
Housing First is when you place the individual in housing and then you work on
the challenges that they face that had kept them in homelessness, so using that
approach will tend to decrease the number of newly homeless individuals.

What do you
want people to know about the homeless?

That they want to be seen and
valued as human beings. At BFHP we believe everyone has a right to have a home,
food, and medical care.

What is the
most rewarding thing about working with the homeless population?

The possibility of it all, that’s
what drives me. When you work with a homeless individual you are supporting
them with wraparound services and navigating them toward permanent housing. It’s
the possibility of the end result, that’s what drives me and keeps me going. The
fact that after all these years that I’ve been working here we still have
clients who call us after being housed for 12 or 13 years. Because we built
that trust relationship, they are clear that if they call us they’re going to
get an answer and we’re going to work with them to find a solution to whatever
their immediate challenge is. We build lifelong relationships with clients who
want that. They know that we’re here and we’re available.

What are
you most proud of when you look back over your work here?

I’m proud to have been part of the
design and implementation of many of the tools and programs we use to serve our
clients, especially the City of Berkeley Coordinated Entry System introduced in
2016. I’m happy to have had a seat at the table with the BFHP leadership team
as we grew and expanded the agency.

Also, training our staff in
customer service was one of my greatest rewards here. To see the difference in
how staff greeted and treated our clients as they entered our doors, made me
proud.