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Marin County has launched a two-year initiative to prevent homelessness by providing financial assistance to residents at the highest risk of losing their housing.

The Department of Health and Human Services will pay Bay Area Community Services, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, $742,000 to run the program.

Bay Area Community Services has partnered with All Home, a nonprofit focused on addressing homelessness in all nine counties in the region, to develop a “technology platform” that scores applications for assistance.

The county contract with Bay Area Community Services covers administrative costs and does not include any money for financial assistance. The initiative is also being funded with $1 million from the Marin Community Foundation, $1 million from All Home and an additional $258,000 from the county.

The contract states that Bay Area Community Services and All Home are expected to serve 340 households over the two years.

Bay Area Community Services and All Home are managing similar homeless prevention programs for San Francisco, Oakland and Contra Costa County.

“A recent analysis of our prevention pilots across the Bay Area shows that targeted assistance has reached about 25,000 households,” said Joanna Karchmer, the chief executive officer of All Home.

Karchmer said 92% of households surveyed remained housed after one year.

Lisa Warhuus, director of the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, said the program “provides a new upstream approach to identify households at highest risk and supports their housing stability before a crisis occurs.”

It is unclear, however, how Bay Area Community Services will determine which households are at higher risk.

The county’s announcement said the program will focus on such factors as imminent eviction, significant rent debt, previous episodes of homelessness, families with children and people with disabling conditions.

The Independent Journal submitted a public records request to the county for the weighting formula for determining who will move to the front of the line for receiving financial assistance. The county responded that it did not have the information.

“The County requested this information from BACS, and they have identified it as proprietary information,” Deputy County Counsel Kate Stanford wrote in response.

When asked to provide the list of factors that would be used in deciding who receives assistance and the weight each factor would be given, Edie Irons, a spokesperson for All Home, supplied a sample copy of an emergency rental assistance application. Along with questions about income, the application included queries about sexual orientation, gender identity, preferred pronouns, race and ethnicity.

Irons said the information she provided was a template and not the exact list of factors for Marin.

“An exact list is decided on by the jurisdiction and the service provider they contract with to run the program,” Irons said. “I don’t have the weights awarded to each factor, or the exact methodology. That will be up to the county and their chosen service provider to agree upon.”

The Bay Area Community Services contract specifies that if it varies from Marin “coordinated entry system” policies and procedures, it must consult with Marin County regarding what is “most appropriate for the work being done under this contract.”

In an email, an unidentified spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote, “The County verifies that BACS follows Coordinated Entry policies through regular oversight, data review, and weekly coordination meetings with BACS and All Home, which focus on program operations rather than individual client cases.”

The coordinated entry system is a countywide collaboration that prioritizes housing for the most vulnerable applicants. The system has its own algorithm for determining which people have the greatest need.

The Independent Journal submitted a public records request to Marin County for its assessment tool. The county responded with a heavily redacted copy of its questionnaire, but declined to provide the scoring algorithm, the weighting of the questions.

“Making the scoring publicly available could undermine the effectiveness of the prioritization system,” Stanford wrote.

About two years ago, the county stopped using the Vulnerability Index-Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool, or VI-SPDAT, an algorithm once used widely across the United States, after it became controversial over racial equity concerns. The county now employs an algorithm that it developed specifically for local use, the Marin Assessment for Vulnerability-Single Adults, or MAV-SA.

“Marin, like many jurisdictions, previously transitioned from the VI‑SPDAT to the MAV‑SA tool because MAV‑SA provides a more accurate and equitable assessment of vulnerability,” the spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote.

The initial questions of the MAV-SA include name, date of birth, age, gender — it provides seven options — and race/ethnicity.

Prevention is gaining traction as a strategy for addressing homelessness statewide. On Sept. 29, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1924, which requires the Department of Housing and Community Development to develop a statewide homelessness prevention strategy. The legislation calls for targeted interventions such as financial assistance, eviction defense, case management and predictive data models to identify people most at risk of homelessness.

In March, St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin County received a $3 million grant from the Marin Senior Life Foundation to help prevent older residents from falling into homelessness. About $1.8 million of the money will be used for rent subsidies and other early intervention supports.