As D.C. agencies plan for 2025, one is running into a few delays.
Ahead of its last meeting of the year, the D.C. Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) delayed the approval of its 2025 Work Plan to March. The body, which is tasked with organizing the city’s response to homelessness, originally expected to pass the work plan at its final meeting on Dec. 10. But the plan still needs to be updated to account for community feedback received earlier this month and the ICH’s updated 2024 Annual Report, which is expected to be finalized in February.
Meanwhile, the ICH Full Council, the body supposed to approve the plan, is operating without a full slate of confirmed members thanks to delays in the mayor’s office. The ICH does not expect the delays will impact the approval of the plan, a spokesperson wrote in an email to Street Sense. While the ICH has been allowing unconfirmed nominees to participate in meetings and does not anticipate stopping the work of the city’s homelessness response, the delays could hinder the body moving forward.
The work plan, as drafted, outlines the agency’s priorities and focus to address homelessness during the upcoming year, and depends on data from the annual report, which reviews progress toward ending and preventing homelessness in D.C. The draft 2024 annual report itself highlights disparities between housing placements for families and individuals experiencing homelessness, particularly single adults and Black men, and a troubling rise in homelessness over the past two years. The draft work plan suggests addressing this disparity by focusing a majority of resources in the upcoming year on individuals experiencing homelessness.
In order to be implemented, and used to advise the city’s strategy, the work plan requires approval from the ICH Full Council, a rotating leadership slate for the body. However, half of the community members the ICH recommended to be seated on the council in recent years haven’t been confirmed by the mayor, potentially impeding the body as nine more seats open for the 2025-2027 term.
The ICH Full Council is composed of 15 agency heads appointed by the mayor, 20 community members, including service providers, advocates, residents with lived experience, private sector representatives, and two District Council representatives. The other ICH participants choose community members after an open nomination period, and the ICH Executive Committee approves the list, which then goes to the mayor and Mayor’s Office of Talent and Appointment (MOTA) for review before final D.C. Council approval.
But the 12 community members ICH appointed in 2023 still haven’t been reviewed by MOTA. Members nominated in 2022 have only just recently been confirmed, Theresa Silla, the ICH’s executive director, said during the meeting. Street Sense reached out to MOTA for comment on what is causing the delay and expected confirmation dates but did not hear back.
The delays have made it difficult to determine leadership for committees that work under the Full Council. One of the 2025 plan’s major initiatives would create new forums and establish leadership positions for all ICH subgroups. During the Dec. 10 meeting, Silla said the plan is to have a list of all chosen names by February.
“While we have been maintaining the community seats [despite lack of confirmation], we have not been maintaining leadership slates or voting slates for our committees and workgroups,” Silla said. “We would very much like to standardize how we are governing our committees and workgroups. It cannot be a nebulous space where any and everybody can show up, we need a dedicated set of people.”
The January and February meetings to establish leadership slates for all ICH forums will also give the body another opportunity to review and finalize details of the work plan, an agency spokesperson wrote to Street Sense.
During both the Dec. 10 meeting and the pre-session at the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library, ICH members and attendees with lived experience of homelessness expressed their frustrations with the body, arguing there’s a lack of representation in ICH leadership, a disregard for the feedback people with lived experience bring to discussions, and a lack of fair payment for the work they provide. Attendees said it was hard to see what concrete improvements ICH or the homeless services system was making in the lives of D.C. residents.
“When we come before you and speak to you about the things that cripple us, and that’s harming us, whether it’s through these agencies or the people that you bring on, you deny them, you ignore them, pretend they don’t happen, and we continue in these same cycles without dealing with the issues of these policies and the economic instability among our people,” Jakia Caroll, a community leader and advocate said.
Drafted 2025 plans focus on singles, health
While the work plan won’t be approved until the spring, its focus on ICH governance, individuals experiencing homelessness, and health care is unlikely to change. The draft of the plan calls for the ICH to create workgroups focused on behavioral behavioral health, income, and justice-involved populations.
The plan would create a new Health Care Committee and a supporting behavioral health workgroup due to the disproportionate impact of opioids on individuals experiencing homelessness — the most affected group, according to the ICH’s annual report.
The draft 2024 report details that 20% of individual adults experiencing homelessness have a substance abuse history, compared to 0.2% of adults in families. Overall, single unhoused adults — especially single Black men, who make up 67% of this group — have the toughest time accessing housing in the District. Just 11% of single adults experiencing homelessness receive a housing placement each year, compared to 73% of families.
Figure 1: Proportion of housing placements of singles and families
“This disparity has its roots in racist notions of the deserving poor and the idea that single adults, especially single Black men, can and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” the report states.
As a result, the report recommends the city focus all of its new housing investments on individuals until the gap between the family system and single adults can be closed.
Figure 2: ICH organizational chart, including proposals from Work Plan (Chart from ICH)
While homelessness has decreased in the city since 2015, it has been rising both for families and single adults in the past two years. The Dec. 10 Council meeting reflected this, with tension between those with lived experiences who shared their stories and frustrations and ICH members, who said they were doing the best they could.
“I’ve been on both sides of the fence,” Roxanne Murray, a service provider on the Full Council, said. “When we come together, despite the fact we might have some differences, I just want to say this: we are really a community, and we are in this together. And there are some of us [council members] that fight just as hard as some of the folks here fighting for their freedom to make sure it happens.”
A woman standing beside the front row of audience chairs spoke loudly after Murray’s statement: “We not in nothing together. There is a divide. We’re not together when there is a divide.”