Hudson asks Mata about equitable access and shelter options

And then I wanted to, for Commissioner Mata,

You referenced in your testimony strengthening equitable access for women veterans, LGBTQ plus veterans, older veterans, veterans with disabilities, and communities that may face additional barriers to services.

Can you just share what that looks like?

And if someone prefers to be in a different type of shelter environment, what that process looks like if they didn't want to be at somewhere like a Borden Avenue?

And also on the website, it says that Borden Avenue houses both male and female veterans.

Can you verify?

Whether that's accurate?

When it comes to Borden, I will defer the questions to Commissioner Delton.

There's two answers to that.

First, to the component of the outreaching that we are doing when it comes to women veterans, LGBTQ plus veterans, and veterans with disabilities.

We are working in conjunction with other city agencies, such as the Commissioner for Disability, the Commissioner of Aging,

to ensure that we have a collaborative effort to outreach properly to those veterans.

We also have held various roundtables to ensure that we can hear directly from the veteran groups as to how we should be outreaching.

Further, we also want to thank City Council for...

when it comes to outreaching and more information is going to come out on that.

We just finalized that specific plan.

And I will further refer this to my chief of staff, Nicole.

But at DBS, further what we are doing when it

Our main focus is to be the sole connector.

So what we do is our focus is to place veterans into housing, and that is a very rigorous process at the agency.

We assess the needs.

We develop individualized housing plans, help identify units, arrange viewings, gather documents, coordinate subsidies and inspections with the responsible agencies, and provide the aftercare component.

So after Nicole explains further the outreach, Donnie Smalls will go further on the aftercare.

Thank you so much again for that question.

And just to emphasize Commissioner Mata's response, as well as we're really focused in this administration under the leadership of Commissioner Mata on veteran feedback on a lot of programming and things that we are doing.

This includes the inclusion on our website of a feedback form that a veteran can fill out if they have issues with any aspect that's going on in the veteran community.

This helps us to identify what these issues are and being able to better support, as well as Commissioner mentioned, the collaboration with different city agencies, city council members, so that we can all be in constant communication about these issues otherwise, as well as ideas that veterans have.

So that includes roundtable discussions, partnership with our independent board, and just understanding what the community needs.

I'll pass over to Dane.