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Letter Perfect:
Helping those who
help the homeless
Sometimes, it's the little things that
make the biggest difference. In L.A.,
like virtually any large city, the
problem of homelessness is
daunting. Tens of thousands of
people crowd the city's too-few
homeless centers every day looking
for food, shelter, medical attention,
and help. But even with dozens of
agencies doing great work, L.A.'s
Weingart Center stands out for
special praise as a model that
centers around the country look to.
Project Close-up
“Weingart is a lot more than what
you'd think of as a shelter,” says Brian
Sheets, who oversees funding and
finances for the center. “We treat the
symptoms of homelessness: food, med-ical
attention, and a place to sleep, but
we also provide our clients with the
tools to take back control of their lives.
Our real mission is to break the cycle of
homelessness.”
The effort seems to be working.
Since opening 15 years ago in the heart
of L.A.'s Skid Row, the Weingart
Center has become one of the nation's
largest and most comprehensive centers
for homeless men and women. Its
greatest innovation is providing such a
range of services under one roof, not
just food, shelter, and medical help, but
educational, vocational and life skills to
help clients get off the streets perma-nently.
That's a sizeable task. Every day, the
center responds to more than 2,000
requests for help. It houses 650 a night,
serves nearly 1,300 meals a day, and
center physicians treat more than 100
clients daily. In addition, the center
offers counseling, substance abuse pro-grams,
special programs for ex-inmates,
and more.
“These people are treated as clients,”
explains Rick Wilton of Conejo
Systems, a Los Angeles-based software
developer that has worked closely with
Weingart to create a revolutionary
database that records all of the day-to-day
information needed to provide
client services.”
More than 100 members of the cen-ter's
staff — front desk workers, case
managers, security, custodial, café
workers, and others — use Conejo's
CaseTrack ® system to gather client
data. ID cards are issued, then the
cards are swiped to keep track of and to
charge back meals, rooms, and services
to any one of a dozen or so public and
private agencies that support the center.
At end of a client's stay, there is a com-plete
record of how many nights they
were there, what programs they attend-ed,
and what other services they used.
“In addition to factual data, the case
workers enter a lot of free text case notes
into the system,” says Wilton. “They
needed some way to spell check the data
because typos can create legal liabilities
as well as poor communications. We
originally set them up with Microsoft
Word for Windows for their spell check-ing
but it turned out to be a big
headache. It didn't make sense to start
up four or five megabytes of Word just to
spell check three paragraphs of notes,
then put Word away again. It was all
very cumbersome.”
What Weingart people and Conejo
did next was contact Microsoft to ask for
permission to just use the spell checker,
without using Word.
“Microsoft told us they only had a
license to use the spell checker in their
own programs,” said Wilton, “so they
sent us to L&H, where the spell checker
was developed. We spoke with Chuck
Kaliris, who told us the license fee was
$7,000. But, when we explained our
need and asked if L&H would consider
donating a license to the Weingart
Center, the folks at L&H said yes.”
“Now case workers simply hit the F7
key and run the spell checker. When we
set it up for them, there was a collective
sigh of relief. It turned out to be a happy
ending all around.”
Contact:
Rick Wilton
Conejo Systems
(323) 939-0405 |
