Homeless youth will be the next focus of collaborative regional housing efforts in Shasta

“If you remember back in the summer of 2024 … there was like seven or eight of us who said, ‘What if we chose a specific goal?’”

Supervisor Matt Plummer shared those words Tuesday, in front of a monthly meeting of the Shasta County Advisory Board of the NorCal Continuum of Care, a planning body that serves the homeless and spans seven counties. He was talking about the board’s decision last year to adopt a strategic plan known in nonprofit circles as “functional zero,” and the efforts that have been made under that plan since.

Bottom line? Those efforts, which aim to end homelessness by focusing on one subgroup at a time, seem to have worked. According to a presentation Plummer gave at the NorCal CoC meeting on Tuesday, the county has decreased homelessness among veterans — the board’s first focus group — by 78% since November 2024. As of this month there are, by the metrics he shared, just 21 homeless veterans waiting for services.

After so much success, Plummer’s recommendation was that the NorCal CoC continue working on driving down veteran homelessness while adding another focus group to their plan. After a robust discussion, the advisory board decided on homeless youth — a population that is relatively small and has significant need, while also existing within a strong framework of support organizations specifically designed to serve them.

Under the functional zero ideology, which one advocacy group describes as “both a goal and a method,” organizations aim not to prevent every instance of homelessness, but rather to make sure those instances are “rare, brief, and nonrecurring” by building robust systems that quickly identify and respond to those in crisis. 

Rather than simply focusing on serving the unhoused population in a general way, advocates focus instead on ending the problem within one subgroup — like veterans, youth or seniors — at a time. Doing so provides a working case study for those seeking to combat a chronic and complex problem, allowing providers to discover and solve for issues within a smaller test group as they move together towards a common achievable goal.

The methodology was spearheaded by the nonprofit Community Solutions, based in New York City, and is currently in use in over 170 cities throughout the country. The NorCal CoC embarked on the functional zero approach in 2024, at Plummer’s behest, picking veterans as the first focus group, or subpopulation, because unhoused veterans make up a relatively small sized group that has access to ample services, and broad community support.

Shasta County’s board agreed to support the effort to prioritize responding to veteran homelessness in July of 2025 without using the term functional zero — which some found controversial.  Shasta County’s launch included cooperative efforts between the county’s Health and Human Services Agency and Veterans Services Office along with a call to action to the public: if you see a homeless veteran, call the VSO. 

During a presentation to county supervisors in August, HHSA Director Christy Coleman and VSO Director Troy Payne outlined those efforts, which included coordination with the jail and participation with the broader collaborative effort to clean up data in HMIS, or the Homeless Management Information System, which identifies and tracks how resources are being used to support those experiencing homelessness.

HMIS systems in each locale often contains outdated or incorrect data due to ever-changing populations and inconsistent data gathering. During her presentation to the board in August, Coleman reported that all veteran data in the local HMIS system had finally been reconciled — in other words, there was no more inaccurate data related to veterans in the system, at least for now.

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