A recent news story quoted the Executive Director of another agency claiming “GRACE doesn’t report it’s [sic] true numbers to anyone.” That same individual also sent the City Commission an email stating that GRACE receives “over 100k in non-grant funds from the City for Cold Night Shelter.” We would like to address the inaccuracies in each of these statements. 

First, GRACE reports accurate data regularly to a wide range of funders, including the City of Gainesville, Alachua County, the U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development, the U.S. Dept. of Veteran Affairs, the Florida Dept. of Children and Families, and others. For our emergency shelter alone, we report monthly:

• Number of people served

• Our shelter utilization rate

• The number of people housed (and the type of housing)

• The number of meals and services provided

• The number of people served by our campus partners, and 

• How long people spend, on average, in shelter. 

The data points we report are validated and matched to the numbers reported in the community’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), and the reports we send to both the City and the County each month include the reports pulled directly from the HMIS. Beyond that, we are monitored annually by federal agencies and an independent auditing firm, including a separate “single audit” required for agencies receiving more than $750,000 annually from federal sources. For five consecutive years, these independent financial audits (conducted by two different independent auditors) have revealed no findings, concerns, or issues with our financial practices. We post our most recent audits to our website, gracemarketplace.org, annually, where they are available for review. We have also posted a sample of how we report our data monthly to local funders to our website. 

To the second point: GRACE does not receive “over $100k in non-grant funds from the City” to operate Cold Night Shelter. To the contrary, Cold Night Shelter is one of the countless services we provide unhoused people in partnership with the City and private donors. While we do operate under a five-year contract with the City to operate the GRACE campus, there are no additional funds made available to GRACE to provide this necessary service. 

While we remain unclear as to the intention of these remarks, we felt it necessary to respond and make our supporters aware of the work we do and the ongoing data reporting associated with this critical work. This work is important, and exceedingly difficult at times. Difficult circumstances, however, make the need for transparency, integrity, and accuracy more important than ever. We remain grateful to our community partners for the work they do every day as we all work together to end homelessness.

You can access GRACE’s most recent financial statements, and samples of the monthly data reporting we provide to the City and the County, here.

###