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- Planning and Reporting for ESG
IDIS is the system that ESG recipients use to draw down funds for eligible expenditures. It is also the system in which the eCon Planning Suite is established, for recipients’ Consolidated Planning and annual reporting. View ESG IDIS guides, tools, and webinars.
The 3- to 5-year Consolidated Plan describes a jurisdiction’s community development priorities and multiyear goals for using Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME), Emergency Solutions Grants Program (ESG), and Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA).
The ESG application is part of the jurisdiction's Consolidated Plan. This planning document contains a description of the community's homeless assistance needs, details available resources, and provides a five-year plan and a yearly action plan identifying the ESG projects. Its preparation must include citizen participation and public involvement.
Each jurisdiction should submit its Consolidated Plan to the local HUD field office no later than 45 days before the start of its consolidated program year in accordance to the regulations at 24 CFR Part 91.
The Consolidated Plan is carried out through Annual Action Plans, which provide a concise summary of the actions, activities, and the specific federal and non-federal resources that will be used each year to address the priority needs and specific goals identified by the Consolidated Plan. Grantees are required to post their Annual Action Plan online.
State and local governments that receive CDBG, HOME, ESG, and HOPWA funds report all activity occurring through the last day of the program year in the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report (CAPER). Annual performance reports are due 90 days after the close of the grantee's consolidated program year. Grantees request their ESG payments using Integrated Disbursement and Information System (IDIS) and report their accomplishments in the community's CAPER for all its community development programs. Grantees are required to post their CAPER online.
View ESG CAPER Reporting: HMIS Programming Requirements
In May 2012, HUD's Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD) introduced the eCon Planning Suite, including the Consolidated Plan template in IDIS OnLine and the CPD Maps website.
HUD announced new tools for the Consolidated Plan to support need-driven, place-based decision-making that will inform public participation and improve community and economic development outcomes. These tools are designed to make the Consolidated Plan useful beyond a budget exercise by integrating community need and market data and mapping capability into a new, electronic planning template for Consolidated Plan preparation and submission. This template will also make planning and reporting more efficient by connecting the planning, implementation and performance reporting processes, eliminating redundancies and automatically entering data from HUD systems wherever possible.
Date Published: April 2012
Recipients with HUD funding received through the ESG Program are required to submit a Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report (CAPER) to HUD annually. Data collection for the ESG portion of the CAPER is aligned with the most recent version of the HMIS Data Standards. Beginning in October 2017, ESG recipients may submit their accomplishment data in the Sage HMIS Reporting Repository (Sage). This means that recipients will no longer need to use ESG-CAPER Annual Reporting Tool (eCart). Instead, project reports (Comma Separated Value (CSV) downloads) generated by HMIS or comparable databases that were previously uploaded into eCart can be uploaded directly into Sage.
Section 416(f) of the McKinney-Vento Act requires for the first time that projects receiving funding under Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) program participate in an HMIS. The ESG Program interim rule makes certain HMIS costs eligible to the extent necessary to enable this participation.
The Housing Inventory Count collects information about all of the beds and units in each Continuum of Care homeless system, categorized by five Program Types.
The Housing Inventory Count also includes information about unmet need.
The Point-in-Time Count provides a count of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons from either the last biennial count or a more recent annual count. Counts are based on:
Counts are further broken down into subpopulation categories including counts of persons who are chronically homeless, persons with severe mental illness, chronic substance abusers, veterans, persons with HIV/AIDS, and victims of domestic violence.
The Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) is a report to the U.S. Congress on the extent and nature of homelessness in America. The report is prepared by HUD and provides nationwide estimates of homelessness, including information about the demographic characteristics of homeless persons, service use patterns, and the capacity to house homeless persons. The report is based primarily on Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) data about persons who experience homelessness during a 12-month period.