Striving for a Connected Carroll County

Every day hundreds of people in Carroll County’s human service agencies struggle to make a difference in our community. Technology should help us make that difference, not keep us tangled in red tape. CSP is designed to make sure clients receive the best, most complete service possible. While it can’t give anyone a home or the services they need, it is an indispensible tool to those who can. Through technology, CSP creates a community of care and a virtual one-stop entry point for client services.

Community ServicePoint is a web-based data collection tool by WellSky. It was adopted by Carroll County to meet Congress' mandate for data and analysis on the extent of homelessness and the effectiveness of McKinney-Vento funded programs by maintaining an HMIS (Homeless Management Information System). CSP will fulfill the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s directives that, to remain eligible to receive grant awards, all federally-funded jurisdictions:

• Develop unduplicated counts of clients served at the local level;
• Analyze patterns of use of persons entering and exiting the homeless assistance system; and
• Evaluate the effectiveness of these systems.

Carroll County has taken it a step further, striving instead to create a CMIS (Community Management Information System). CSP's flexibility and robustness allows it to be used for eligibility, intake, case management, follow-up, data collection and reporting that non-homeless centered agencies also find useful. Because many service-centered agencies can use the system, Carroll County's Circle of Caring Homelessness Board CMIS Steering Committee (now called the CSP Steering Committee) chose "Community ServicePoint" to track the required homeless information and aid non-homeless service agencies on a broader scale.

Carroll County is a place of community – strong connections and caring. Its technologies should, and do, reflect that.