2022 Special NOFO Information

On Thursday, July 14^th, 2022, St. Louis County Continuum of Care (MN-509) will host a public information session on the 2022 HUD CoC Special Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) process. This session will be hosted via Microsoft Teams and is open to the public (meeting details below). This session will provide details on this new funding opportunity targeting Rural & Unsheltered Homelessness from HUD. Please contact St. Louis County Continuum of Care Coordinator, Courtney Cochran (she/her) at cochranc@StLouisCountyMN.gov with any questions.

Meeting Details: Thursday, July 14^th from 11am to 12:30pm via Microsoft Teams (See attachment for meeting link)

The Duluth/St. Louis County CoC (Mn-509) Ranking & Review Committee met on 09/26/2022 to review Special NOFO application and we had an amazing slate of applications. However, our CoC proposals came in at $550,976 over the maximum amount ($4,129,591) allowed by HUD in our budget. In review, any project with a proposed budget of $250,000 or less would not be feasible with a smaller budget. The committee reviewed each budget in detail and instead of choosing to reduce the lowest scoring project(s) by that amount, we are looking at the highest budget projects and asking you all to trim your budgets to help get us below this line. Please note that if this is not the approach we choose as CoC, the alternative would be to lower the budget of the lowest scoring project by $550,976. At this point, the lowest scoring project is Salvation Army’s Plover Place project, which would likely not be feasible with this large of a cut from the proposed budget. We do not rank Coordinated Entry, HMIS, or CoC Planning grants as we are required to fund these components of our CoC systems to keep the system running. The Ranking & review Committee is asking all project from the Stepping On Up team to work together to collectively trim a total $550,976 from the budgets of their projects. These projects also have the highest proposed budgets in our Special NOFO grant competition. This includes: CHUM’s Stepping On Up, Lutheran Social Services’ Walkways, Human Development Center’s Unsheltered Outreach, and Salvation Army’s Plover Place projects. Knowing that these agencies entered into this application process as partners with the spirit of collaboration versus competition, the CoC wanted to honor and encourage that by taking this approach. We trust that these agencies know their budgets best and the financial needs of the Stepping on Up Plan better than the CoC. These projects are asked thoughtfully consider if the project could continue successfully with a smaller budget. The Stepping On up applicants (listed above) have collaboratively reviewed their budgets and resubmitted proposed budgets. The attached Project Ranking & Budget shows the revised budgets amounts, which has been tentatively approved. This was approved by Heading Home Advisory Council—the CoC Governance Board on 10/11/2022.