Reporting Focus Points for Human Trafficking Housing Grantees

HARIF BALOGUN: Good afternoon, everyone or good morning to our Mountain and Pacific Time Zones in Hawaii and Alaska. My name is Harif Balogun and I'm the OVC TTA specialist for the OVC Performance Management Team. Thank you for joining us for this session in which we'll be highlighting some key reporting points for you, our Human Trafficking Housing grantees, to keep in mind for the July and future reporting periods. Before we get started, I want to highlight just a few items. As I mentioned, this session is being recorded, and it will be available on the OVC website at a later date. A copy of the slides will be sent out to all attendees and housing grantees after the session. If you have any questions during the session, please use the Q&A box. If you don't see it, it's in the bottom right corner of your screen, those three dots, you click that, you'll open up the Q&A, so ask your questions in there and our team will respond. If you have any comments to me or the team, please feel free to use the chat box, which you can also open up if you don't see it, with those three buttons, the three dots in the bottom right corner. And if you have any issues with audio or any other difficulties during the session, please send a private chat to my teammate, Aubrey Sneesby. To ensure that everyone is able to access and use the chat box, let's get started with a question. If you could put in the chat, what's your favorite city to visit? I know it's summertime, there's summer vacations, people traveling. I may or may not be using this to plan some of my own travel, so I might incorporate a few of your ideas into my own plans. So, let's see. I see Edinburgh, Scotland, Paris, Mexico City, Savannah, Georgia. I've heard good things about Savannah, Georgia. I need to go down there. Pittsburgh. Ooh, I've been there before. I don't know if that's my favorite city to visit, but it was definitely interesting. Okay, great. I see a lot of responses coming in, so seems like everyone's able to access the chat box. All right, perfect. Thank you. Before we get started, I'll turn it over to Kristin Weschler, a Program Manager in the OVC Human Trafficking Division to provide some opening remarks. So, Kristin?

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Harif and thank you all HT housing grantees. It is such a joy to have you with us this afternoon. I apologize for the late notice of getting this out, but we did want to get this webinar out to you before the next reporting period, which Harif mentioned is upcoming. So luckily this will be recorded so you can share it with fellow colleagues or partners if they're not able to make it. But I want to give a huge shout out and thank you to the PMT team for making themselves available this afternoon. I also want to acknowledge and thank especially our FY ‘20 and 2021 grantees, given the transitions we have had with our performance measurement platforms across the years. I know we've put our older grantees through quite a few hoops, we have now landed in the PMT officially and really excited about the capacity of it. So I'm hoping that this presentation will give you some insight and answer some questions you have. And for our new staff or new grantees, I hope that the information is helpful as well. There'll be several resources shared at the end. And then finally, if you feel after today's presentation that you need to make some changes to past performance PMT reports that you've submitted, please reach out to the PMT Helpdesk or your OVC Grant Manager and we can assist you with that process. The PMT Helpdesk contact information will be provided at the end of the presentation and then hopefully you already have the contact information for your OVC Grant Manager, but we'd be happy to assist you with that because the data is so critically important, not only for us, even though it might feel a burden at times, we do get reports and requests from Congress. We also use it for program planning. And then of course, we hope that the data is also helpful to you as you make pivots or changes based on those who are presenting to your program as individuals and survivors of human trafficking and the services that they're providing. So, with that, I am going to hand it back to Harif and we'll get started. Thanks, everyone.

HARIF BALOGUN: Thank you, Kristin. You know, we, the OVC PMT team is happy to help. You know, our housing grantees do some very important work. So it's honestly a privilege to be able to help out and help them be, you know, as successful as they can. So here's a brief overview of the topics that we're going to discuss during today's session. We will review how to accurately report the various shelter or housing services, highlight a future change to the rapid rehousing service and the PMT, talk through how to interpret the new semiannual PDF report format. And then also, review the two-step process for submitting a PDF report, as well as where to report your responses to the semiannual narrative questions. And lastly, we'll showcase a few resources available on the OVC website and how to contact the PMT team for assistance. So we're going to get into reporting housing and shelter services in the PMT. So there are two types of performance data that you will report for the victim services category in the PMT. Those are the number of individuals served, and the number of times each service was provided. For question 18D, you will report the number of trafficking victims and the eligible family members, or in other words, you know, the total number of individuals who received shelter or housing services during the three-month reporting period. Questions 18D-1 through 18D-7 encompass each of those service categories. For each category, you will report the number of times that each service was provided during the reporting period. Because one individual, individual may receive multiple services, or one service more than one time, the number of times that services are provided, that might be greater than number of individuals served. And that's perfectly okay. I'll repeat that. So, because one victim or individual may receive multiple services, the number of times that a service is provided might exceed the number of individuals who were served. And if you, in the PMT, going, if you hover your mouse over question 18D under the blue and underlined text, it will reveal the blue insert with some guidance about how to report on this question. For question 18D-1, as I mentioned, for the service categories, you'll report the number of times that each service was provided, not the number of individuals served per category. However, a few of these services may be reported per night, while others are reported per instance. So with 18D-1, starting with emergency shelter or placement, this involves providing emergency short-term shelter to individuals and that's reported per night. So if you provided shelter to one individual for 10 nights, then you would report 10 nights. If you provided two people shelter for 10 nights, then you would report that as 20 nights in your data. Question 18D-2, transitional housing, that occurs when you provide temporary housing for individuals who cannot safely return to their former housing. And this is also reported per night. For 18D-3, that pertains to relocation assistance, which is assistance with initial expenses, relocation fees, or deposits. So this includes assistance with long-term housing, and this service is reported by instance it occurs and not per night. So for example, if you provide one person with one deposit and two separate or, and two moving fees, then you would report that as three total instances. For 18D-5, rapid rehousing. So if you previously reported on this, there is a change that is coming to the PMT. So starting in July 2025, so July of next year. You know, previously this has caused, you know, confusion for grantees and our team, along with the grant managers have received questions about it. So, we know that it can be difficult and confusing to determine what should be reported under this category versus other categories. So starting next year, in July 2025, rapid rehousing would no longer be in the PMT and you would no longer, it won't be an option for grantees to report on. So, we recommend that between now and July 2025, that grantees no longer report anything under this service, but instead use the other categories to report your services, as appropriate. Throughout the next year, we'll be sharing more info about this change via emails, training sessions, and webinars. But if you have any questions, you can reach out to your OVC Program Manager, our team, or the PMT Helpdesk. For question 18D-5, rental assistance, that is providing assistance for a location that's not a shelter nor a resident in a period of transition. So the individuals plan to be in the same location for an extended period of time. This service is also reported by the number of instances. So for example, two people were to receive three months of rent payment. You would count that as six instances. For host homes, that is transitional housing that allows the movements of families, victims to permanent housing within a reasonable amount of time. This is a service that is reported per night. And then, for, if you do not provide any shelter or, I'm sorry, if you do provide any shelter or housing services that don't fit in any of the aforementioned categories, group with them under the other shelter and housing category. If you do, if you do include info in this category, then you must provide an explanation in the PMT. There is an area under this question for open-ended responses. So if you include any information in this category, then you must provide an explanation in the category. If you do need help determining what should be counted per night or per instance in this scenario, then again, reach out to our team and we can help. Okay, so that's it for reporting of housing and shelter services. But before we get into the new semiannual PDF format, let's see, are there any other questions we should address in chat? Okay, we can go right into the, oh yeah, so I can go back to the transitional housing. Yeah, if you have a question about that, feel free to put it in the Q&A and our team can assist. Yeah, no problem, going to go forward into the, the semiannual PDF report format. So, in the recently updated PDF report, the data are presented per quarter rather than presented as an aggregate total. So the number of total confirmed or potential victims of trafficking served in question 2 per quarter does not include duplicate individuals served. However, if you aggregate the total number of victims that were served across both quarters, that total may include duplicate individuals due to the client being served across reporting periods. So in the screenshot here, the eight individuals reported in quarter one and the 10 reported in quarter two are circled in blue, each of those represent a unique count of individuals that were served. However, if you add them together and get 18, that total might include duplicate individuals who returned for services across both of those quarters. But if you, in question 5, the number of new individuals served does not include duplicates, even if you aggregate them across quarters, because individuals served, individuals reported in this question should only be reported as new during the period when they first received those services. And then, so moving on to the two-step semiannual submission process in JustGrants. So these are the steps for generating your semiannual PDF in the PMT. So you'll navigate to the "Reports" tab and then choose the applicable award. Then you'll locate the current period and select the semiannual PDF link, the one circled in red in the screenshot. Once the PDF has been generated, you'll download that to your computer in a place where you can readily access it. So just right to your desktop, you know. And then after it's saved, you'll go over to JustGrants and upload that PDF to JustGrants by the due date. So next month will be July 30th, but in January, you know, January 30th. So you'll make sure that you upload that by the end of the reporting month. And then here's just an example. You know, we've, we've seen grantees upload their, because in the PMT, like there are multiple options to download files on that "Reports" tab. So here's an example of the semiannual PDF, what's it look like after you download it. So obviously on the left, you'll see the semiannual PDF, and on the right, is the Excel file of your reporting data. So you want to make sure that you download the PDF and you upload that into JustGrants. And then, so when you do log into JustGrants, you will navigate to the appropriate performance report and scroll down to the attachment section, and then you'll click upload, attach the file that you just saved from the PMT, and then you'll upload that into JustGrants. We do this so that in JustGrants, there's a record of your quantitative data, and then I'll speak a bit more about your qualitative narrative responses in the next section. So again, reporting on your narrative responses in JustGrants. So in addition to the quarterly performance data that's reported into PMT, grantee, you're required to, sorry, excuse me. They're required to respond to the narrative questions in JustGrants on a semiannual basis. So human trafficking grantees, you should report your narrative data directly into JustGrants and not as a separate attachment. So, the narrative questions can be found under the "Performance Management" tab in JustGrants. When you go to that tab, again, you'll find the appropriate reporting period, and you'll choose the corresponding report number. And then, you won't see it if you go in there today, but in the, you know, come July 1st or January 1st, you'll see in the second screenshot the "begin" button. So you'll click that button and then that'll take you to where you enter your narrative responses. I believe there's been, you know, times when grantees will upload their, their quantitative data in this section, but this is where you just, you go in and you enter your narrative responses. And I like to think of those as just, if your grant manager were to walk into your office and ask you how things are going, anything that you would, you know, anything that you would say in that conversation would probably be appropriate to, you know, enter into JustGrants as your narrative responses. And again, wanted to just highlight some resources on the OVC website that you might find helpful. So there are performance measurement questionnaires. There are recorded trainings. The resource, the, sorry, the terminology resource where you'll find definitions of, you know, OVC terms that appear in your question sets. So, if you, not sure how to define nights, instances, you know the best ways to respond to those questions. And then, yeah, you'll also find copies of your, of your performance measures, PDFs that you can distribute to your staff that work in the PMT. For assistance with JustGrants, there's JustGrant's resources, as well, you know, for navigating and uploading reports into JustGrants. You can, you know, go to the JustGrants website and there'll be plenty of resources to assist you there as well. And then, yeah, if you contact the PMT Helpdesk, you can schedule a assessment with our team, a short 30-minute session to, you know, to ask about the best ways to track your data, the best ways to report your data, anything and everything as it relates to performance measurement. Our team will be happy to help. And then if you do need assistance in the PMT, you'll contact the PMT Helpdesk. With JustGrants, you'll contact with JustGrants Helpdesk. I know it can be a bit confusing having two different places to report, but you know, if you need help with either, either team is more than capable of assisting you. And then here's the contact information for both of those Helpdesks. You can call, email, in July, you know, it'll be busy. But our team is happy to help, happy to assist you as best as we can. As I mentioned earlier, you all do very important work and you know, it's our job and honestly our privilege to help you do that work as best as we can. And I will just leave it here on this slide if anybody wants to write down this information. As I mentioned, the PDF of these slides will be sent out to you all after the session, so but if you want write things down for your own notes, you're welcome to right here. And with that, we're at the end of our session. If anyone, you know, if you have any questions, feel free to continue putting those in the Q&A. Any comments in the chat. Kristin, if you have anything you want to mention, you know, can go ahead and include that now

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Sure, I was thinking just in case folks don't see the Q&A when in the recording, I just thought I would mention some of the questions and answers. So one of the questions was if we could re-review or repeat what we said about the duplicate count of data based on the new format of the quarterly reporting in the PMT PDF report. And I copied the information in the response, but it's basically that the number of total confirmed or potential victims of trafficking served, which is question 2, per quarter, does not include duplicate individuals served. However, if you aggregate the total number of individuals served across both quarters, that may include duplicate individuals served. So that's what Harif had mentioned in his comments. But there wouldn't be any new clients that should be duplicated because you would only be reporting those at the time of intake. Let's see. And then the other question that was posted was if we have been reporting, it's basically if you've been misreporting some of your data based on the presentation today, is it possible to catch up the entry on your next report in JustGrants or do they need to modify or do you need to modify each individual quarter? And Virginia responded, she said you could always edit previous performance data as needed. Feel free to reach out to the PMT Helpdesk if you want help unlocking previous reports, you need to modify each quarter individually though. And then Aubrey also chimed in that you could always reach out to your OVC Grant Manager and the PMT team to determine how far back you're going with that 'cause of course we're recognizing we have some grantees on the call who may have a 2020 or 2021 award. And then some of you are newer, like 2023 grantees. So, feel free to reach out accordingly for some direction. Let's see, thank you for, I see the comment about stopping the use of rapid rehousing. Yeah, it was causing some confusion, which is why we were seeing it as OVC Grant Managers in our correspondence in our work with you as grantees. So we raised it up with the PMT team to see if that is something that we could modify in future reports. And luckily we can, it's just not a quick fix, but it is coming. And as Harif mentioned in the presentation, just, you know, in the meantime, just stop using rapid rehousing as a reporting category and default to the definitions that were provided earlier. And then I have not been in chat so I'll defer back to Harif or anyone on the PMT team if you have any other comments or questions you want to address.

HARIF BALOGUN: Yeah, thanks Kristin. I think there's a question about where to report coordination of housing. I think you could put it under the, put it under the category that fits best, as needed. So if it's, you know, as it relates to the type of housing that you're coordinating, if that makes sense. So put it under relocation assistance if it's, you know, transitional housing, put it there. I hope that answers your question.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: And I see. That's okay. Yeah, I see Suzanne's question in the chat, which I know you've reached out to us at the office Suzanne, know a response is coming. So that's a particular question that I'll address with you directly. Any other questions? 'Cause as I said, I know I have gotten some doozy questions from some of my grantees about data. So I encourage you, we have the experts on the line if you have questions or any confusion, even like even if you don't, if something is not clear, we can revisit it again. Now is the time, we have still another, you know, almost 20, 25 minutes, we've blocked off a whole hour. So, I want to make sure that we're here for you. And this is, and we made it specifically to housing intentionally 'cause we were seeing a lot of reports we had to do change requests for. So, I see another question in the Q&A. Is there someone, I don't know if it's a program question or a PMT question.

AUBREY SNEESBY: Hi Kristin, I can read the question. So it looks like we have a question from Andrea. It says if we help a client get into a transitional housing program at another organization and they live there for one to two years, do we only report it for the quarter that they moved in or would we report it for each quarter that they continue to stay there? Harif, do you want to answer this one?

HARIF BALOGUN: Yeah, so you said a grantee that you're assisting with housing over a period of one to two years and you're asking, and the question is, that should be reported only in the first, the first time they stay there? Yeah, I believe that you would report that as just one instance, but if Kristin or rest my team, if I'm mistaken, please let me know. But I believe that you would report that as one instance.

AUBREY SNEESBY: Yep, that's right, Harif. So it would be dependent on whatever is your funding. So if you obviously have services that you're providing to a client and you have them go to another transitional housing program and that's where, you know, the OVC funds end, you would only put that coordination help for that first quarter that you get them into the transitional housing. The only exception there would be if that transitional housing program is a subgrantee of yours, where you're funding or allocating OVC funding to them. And that funding's being used for the transitional housing program, but most likely it's just going to be for that first quarter that you provide that coordination.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Yeah, this is Kristin. Thanks for the clarification, Aubrey 'cause that was my first thought was, is that other organization funded under your OVC HT housing grant? And so per Aubrey's response, if so, then you would track, if that other agency is being funded with OVC funding, you would track the services and housing assistance out, you know, beyond, as long as they're still receiving housing assistance. But if they are not, that other organization, is not a subrecipient, then it would just be for the quarter.

AUBREY SNEESBY: Awesome, thank you for clarifying also, Kristin. It looks like we have another question from Heidi. So Heidi is asking, what's the best way to add coordination of services with subgrants, excuse me, subcontractors and landlords? So essentially the steps before the client moves into their new place. She's saying that her org spent a significant amount of time with housing search and placement assistance. To me, that sounds like it'd be going into relocation assistance, but Harif or Kristin, please feel free to add in.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: So this is Kristin, the other area again, I like now that I know the housing assistance or the relocation assistance clarification. I see, I think, sometimes grantees also put this under case management because there hasn't been clear definition between case management, which is outside of the list of housing services and relocation assistance. So this is so much like a conversation back to Aubrey, I guess, of how you would differentiate case management versus relocation assistance.

AUBREY SNEESBY: Sure. So what I would recommend is whatever your organization has been recording or so if your organization has been going into case management or if your organization's been going into relocation assistance, I would just, you know, kind of choose that one, make sure it's consistent and continue to report that way.

HARIF BALOGUN: Yeah, Aubrey, thank you. That's a great point about picking a method and being consistent with it. You know, picking the method that best fits the scenario and just making sure that you're consistent. You know, making sure that you're consistent with that method across each period is definitely a best practice. So yeah, thank you for that, Aubrey. Question, what guidance can we give regarding security deposits. Yeah. Kristin, I know our team that doesn't, you know, typically address the financial questions. So I'm not sure if you have a response for that, Kristin.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Sorry, I was just copying some information into, all right. Is it in the Q&A?

HARIF BALOGUN: In the chat.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Oh, it's in the chat.

HARIF BALOGUN: Yeah, I would think relocation assistance, you would, you know.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Sorry, security. Yes, correct. Yeah, it looked like based on the definitions that Harif provided in the thing, security deposits fell under relocation assistance. Whereas, so security deposits, utility, think of the word "deposits," relocation assistance. If it's rental assistance, utility assistance, ongoing, then that would be under rental assistance. I did also see a mention about the Excel spreadsheet in the chat. Sorry, I've been going in between Q&A and chat. And so yeah, as Virginia noted in the chat, there is no need to use the Excel spreadsheet unless you choose to. So for former grantees, you're familiar with the Excel spreadsheet. That was our transition between TIMS and PMT. That is still available to use. If you don't have another software platform where you track program data. You still need to have that individualized program data to support your PMT data. So, always keep that in mind. However, there are some grantees, I know they're out there, that use their own platform or performance data system. So, if you have that, you do not need to use Excel document, but that is available for those who need it.

HARIF BALOGUN: And I saw that there was a question about the transcript for the recording. Yes, so this will be closed captioned after it's, you know, reviewed and finalized and posted on the website. So yes, there will be captions.

KRISTIN WESCHLER: Okay, I see Marta, a question in the chat about partnerships is confusing because we have MOUs with about 40 agencies. Do we report the partnerships we have used during the reporting period or the existing partnerships? PMT team, how do you usually direct grantees to answer that question for partnerships?

AUBREY SNEESBY: Hi Kristin, I can help out here real quick. So for partnerships recorded within each quarter, you want to put those active partnerships that are a part of, like for example, if you're a part of a task force, you'll be putting those active partnerships that you're working with based off of the, I believe it's a Likert scale, within the performance measures and update it based off of that. So in a way, yes, you're going to be reporting the agencies every single quarter, but it's those that are active, so you know the existing partnerships that are active within that quarter. Hope that helps. And I'll jump in since we're talking about partnerships real quick. Megan also just asked a question saying, is there something or something only considered a partnership if you have MOUs or can you count partnerships that don't have MOUs? So you can count partnerships that don't have MOUs, but you might adjust the Likert scale of how active that partnership is based off of that question. And please let me know if you want further explanation or Harif or Kristin, please feel free to jump in.