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The Emergency Services and Homeless Coalition is committed to coordinating efforts to raise, distribute and manage resources for preventing and ending homelessness.

Committees

Advocacy Committee

The Advocacy Committee is responsible for establishing, conducting, and reporting the annual homeless census and survey, and promoting the advocacy of issues by the ESHC and its members.

Best Practices Committee

The Best Practices Committee is responsible for identifying best practices from around the country and using them to develop a best practices guide for our community. The Best Practices Committee also develops standards and customer satisfaction surveys for agencies to use to gather input from their clients.

Membership Committee

The Membership Committee is responsible for identifying and contacting potential members to the Coalition, as well as identifying and nominating members to the Board of Directors.

Outreach Committee

The Outreach Committee is responsible for coordinating outreach efforts between non-profit service provider outreach programs, Downtown Vision Ambassadors, and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

Task Forces

From time to time, the Coalition will convene Task Forces to deal with specific issues. Once the issue has been satisfactorily addressed, the Task Force will disband. Examples of current and future task forces are:

Social Security Task Force – this task force brings together homeless service providers, representatives of the Social Security Administration and the Disability Determination Department to provide presumptive eligibility to mentally ill homeless individuals
Corrections Discharge Planning Task Force – this task force brings together representatives of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, the State Corrections department, and organizations that serve ex-offenders to develop a discharge protocol that will reduce the number of ex-offenders ending up in the homeless shelter system.
Mental Health Discharge Planning Task Force – this task force brings together mental health providers to develop a discharge protocol that will reduce the number of mentally ill persons that are discharged from crisis detox units, mental health treatment facilities, and the state hospital into the homeless shelter system.
Foster Care Discharge Planning Task Force – like the Corrections and Mental Health groups explained above, this task force will focus on developing a discharge protocol that will allow youth aging out of foster care to move into independent living and not into the homeless shelter system.
Health Care Discharge Planning Task Force – this task force will bring together representatives of the community hospitals to develop a discharge protocol that will reduce the number of patients discharged into the homeless shelter system.
Mainstream Benefits Task Force - this task force will focus on systemizing enrollment in mainstream benefits by clients of homeless service providers.