I started Gilvar Consulting Services to partner with organizations providing health care, housing, and homeless services and help expand their capacity to meet the needs of patients, residents, clients, and the broader community. I especially wanted GCS to support community partnership development and efforts to bring to scale cross-agency collaborations integrating physical and behavioral health care as well as housing and shelter services. As the director of large Health Care for the Homeless programs in both Texas and Washington, I developed and managed numerous successful collaborative initiatives with these same goals. I’m now using my strategic planning, advocacy, policy development, and operations management experience in a variety of new ways.
I want to strengthen leaders coming together from different sectors with a realization that they need to work together to transform systems in service of greater health and housing equity. Increasingly, Continuum of Care planning entities, Managed Care Organizations, hospitals, Community Health Centers, community mental health agencies, substance use disorder treatment providers, housing authorities, Public Health Departments, Medicaid agencies, and city and county governments are finding ways to break down silos, reduce fragmentation, and more systematically address homelessness and racial disparities in health and housing outcomes. Some examples of how I can help support such efforts include:
- Executive coaching
- Leadership development, mentoring, and team building
- Strategic planning, including facilitation, research, analysis, and workplan preparation
- Facilitating health and housing collaborations
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work
- Training and technical assistance, including:
- Board of Directors development
- Federal grant compliance, including Operational Site Visit preparation
- Community Needs Assessments involving patients and front-line service providers
- Public-entity Community Health Center special issues
- Mobile medical, dental, and behavioral health services
- Medicaid 1115 waivers
- Communicable disease prevention
- Disaster planning
- Medical respite care program development, financing, and management
- Provision of clinical services in shelters, supportive housing buildings, and other non-traditional settings
- Outreach-based health services for unsheltered individuals and families
- Grant proposal development and writing
- Integrating services across disciplines, agencies, and sectors, including:
- Medical care
- Oral health care
- Mental health care
- Harm reduction and other Substance Use Disorder services
- Vision care
- Social work
- Outreach and case management
- Communicable disease prevention
- Benefits enrollment