FY2014 Continuum of Care Competition

Each year, the City of Cambridge Continuum of Care applies for funds available for homeless services from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This annual grant competition brings over $3 million to the City’s continuum of housing and services. Last week HUD released the 2014 portion of the FY2013-14 Continuum of Care (CoC) competition, kicking off a quick timeline for the Cambridge CoC to complete and submit our application by Oct. 30, 2014.

Please review the 2014 Application Process document for additional details about the competition. Additionally, you can access HUD’s resources for the competition on the HUD Exchange website’s NOFA page.

Feedback Survey
Funded agencies and other CoC stakeholders are encouraged to provide feedback on funding priorities and tiering strategy through a NOFA Feedback survey available online. Your feedback is important and will help the CoC make difficult decisions related to prioritizing projects to receive limited HUD funding. Please complete and submit the survey by 5 pm on Friday, October 3.

New Reallocation Projects
HUD’s 2014 NOFA confirms that CoCs may utilize the HUD-defined reallocation process in the 2014 competition to apply for new permanent housing projects to serve chronically homeless individuals and/or chronically homeless families. The CoC Board’s Evaluation Panel will decide whether or not the CoC will utilize the reallocation process, and will determine how much funding will be available for a reallocation project.

To prepare for the possibility of applying for a reallocation project, the Department of Human Service Programs (DHSP) is requesting that agencies interested in applying for a new reallocation project send an email to emengers@cambridgema.gov by Friday, October 3, 2014. The email should simply state the organization’s interest in applying for a reallocation grant, and should specify if the project will be new or will be an expansion of an existing CoC-funded PSH project.  If the CoC decides to include a reallocated project in the 2014 application, DHSP, the CoC’s Collaborative Applicant, will provide detailed application instructions, including the amount of funding available, to each agency that has expressed interest in a reallocation project.