What are the responsibilities and job description for the Housing Specialist position at Veterans One-stop Center?
Responsibilities:
The Housing Specialist is a key component of the overall agency team responsible for providing housing services and assistance to Veterans, service members, and military families. This is achieved through both internal programs and community linkages with local, regional, and national resources.
The Housing Specialist is responsible for maintaining a Veterans First mindset, becoming a subject matter expert (SME) on the VA SSVF program as well as other housing resources, maintaining accurate records and data integrity through a Salesforce-hosted database system, delivering quality and timely service, and continuously ensuring a high level of knowledge regarding potential resources. Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Collaborate with peers and community partners to ensure seamless service to Veterans, service members, and military families.
- Maintain extensive awareness and knowledge of housing resources available for Veterans, service members, and military families as well as general community resources.
- Perform participant needs assessments and screening, including eligibility for both internal programs and community services and referral to community partners for services.
- Continuously screen for possible housing assistance and/or homelessness prevention, and ensure referral to appropriate resources
- Creation of individual, integrated housing plans for SSVF clients.
- Coordinating with Veterans, partners, and colleagues to develop client-guided, actionable, timely, and reasonable goals intended to address the participant’s obstacles to obtaining services.
- Conduct outreach as needed to specific populations, and assist with other outreach duties as assigned.
- Build and maintain relationships with landlords to facilitate faster turnaround for connecting Veterans with potential housing resources.
- Conduct quality control to ensure quality service and data integrity.
- Continuously monitor personal workload and quality of notes.
- All other duties as assigned.
Qualifications/Knowledge/Skills:
- Enthusiastic about the agency’s mission.
- Attention to detail is critical.
- Extensive Military/Veteran cultural competency.
- Ability to work with diverse populations.
- Proven ability to continuously deal with mentally and/or emotionally challenging situations.
- Experience in dealing with resources in the community.
- Extensive experience with modern office IT systems, including Microsoft Office suite - computer literacy is an absolute must.
- Salesforce or other databases / CRM system familiarity is a plus.
- Excellent communication (written and verbal), interpersonal, and organizational skills.
- The ability to multitask and prioritize workload in a fast-paced environment is vital to this position.
- Complete mandatory background check, training, and 90-day probationary period.