Employee Spotlight
January 18, 2022
Sandra Stolfi; Coordinated Entry Specialist
Coordinated Entry Specialist
Housing and Urban Development-VA Supported Housing (HUD- VASH) Program
San Francisco VA Medical Center
San Francisco, CA
Q: How long have you been employed by VA?
A: I’ve worked at VA for close to 3 years.
Q: Tell us about your job at VA. Describe a few of your duties and how long you have been in this.
A: As a coordinated entry specialist, I am a liaison between VA staff and the community providers for my assigned counties. I work to ensure that there is effective coordination of community-wide services for Veterans experiencing homelessness and at risk of homelessness. I also provide advice and education on programs, plans, procedures and regulations from VA health care and the community.
There are a variety of important duties that go along with this role. I serve as an elected board member for one of our homeless Continuums of Care (CoC) and am a voting member in another CoC. CoC’s are networks of 60+ community providers. I also serve on many CoC committees that range from strategic planning to performance measurement. To do this well, it is important for me to build and maintain alliances between VA and community providers who are committed to prevent and end Veteran homelessness..
For each of the counties I work with, I help review and maintain their Veterans by-name list (BNL), the real-time list of actively homeless Veterans. With BNL maintenance, I often lead interagency teams comprised of staff from VA and community providers to efficiently identify, monitor and evaluate community performance and make timely decisions that quickly connect Veterans to housing.
Lastly, I regularly develop work standards–outlines of processes that help at risk and homeless Veterans to enter the healthcare system and to exit into permanent housing. These work standards facilitate continuity of care for Veterans as they transition from homelessness into programs.
Q: How do you help to prevent and end Veteran homelessness? Are these actions connected to your work at VA or independent of it? How many Veterans do you think have been impacted by your contributions?
A: I help to prevent and end Veteran homelessness by regularly assessing and evaluating how the homeless healthcare system functions. I am able to understand the many steps that Veterans take from homelessness to housing, and translate them into standards of work that ensure consistency in how services are delivered.
I also help to end Veteran homelessness by ensuring that our counties’ BNLs are accurate and up-to-date. The meaningful partnerships that emerge from this maintenance lead to concrete results. Because of the BNL, the number of Veterans experiencing homelessness in Sonoma County decreased from 210 in 2019 to only 59 in 2021.
Q: Tell us about what inspired you to become involved in helping to end Veteran homelessness.
A: There are too many Veterans experiencing homelessness across our country, and I want to be part of the solution. I think that the position of coordinated entry specialist helps to accomplish this goal through the coordination for supportive services for homeless Veterans and partnerships with community providers and VA staff.
Q: Tell us about the greatest challenge you faced in your efforts to end Veteran homelessness and how you overcame it.
A: Working with the community providers to achieve an up to date BNL has been challenging. Keeping the list current involves routinely integrating information from a number of different data sources into a single database. It also involves a lot of data cleaning to address erroneous, conflicting or stale information. Lastly, it involves transferring this information into evaluation tools and reports that will demonstrate how we’re doing towards achieving an effective end to Veteran homelessness. All of this effort is worth it because this information provides us with insights that we use to make our systems better.
Q: What advice would you give to other VA employees who are interested in helping homeless and at-risk Veterans?
A: To achieve the goal of preventing and ending Veteran homelessness, it is crucial to build partnerships with the community providers; these partnerships facilitate the development and integration of programs that directly reduce barriers to housing. These alliances also provide consistent and proactive communication and outreach to community providers and VA, and establish professional relationships that benefit homeless Veterans.
Q: What else would you like us to know about your efforts to end Veteran homelessness?
A: I created and lead the VISN 21 Coordinated Entry Call. These calls allow staff throughout VISN 21 and within the VHA Homeless Programs Office to help strengthen coordinated entry through sharing of best practices systems improvements towards ending Veteran homelessness.
