ARCH is the HUD-designated lead for Coordinated Entry across the 37-county Alabama Balance of State CoC. This page covers how someone experiencing homelessness gets connected to help, how to file a grievance, and how to request a Street Outreach Team.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 first. RACAS and the resources on this page are not an emergency response service.
This is how someone gets connected into the Coordinated Entry system. Anyone can start it: people seeking assistance themselves, family members, school liaisons, or partner organizations submitting on someone's behalf.
RACAS is the referral process that serves as the starting point for anyone experiencing homelessness across our 37 counties. The goal of RACAS is simple: connect people fairly to housing and other resources as they become available, no matter where in rural Alabama they're starting from.
If you're experiencing homelessness and need help, the process begins with a call to RACAS or the Coordinated Assessment above. A team member will ask some basic questions to understand your situation and connect you toward housing and other resources as they're available.
The Alabama Balance of State CoC has established a grievance process so clients and agencies can raise a concern without fear of retaliation, whether from the party involved or from anyone else in the system. If something about your experience with RACAS, Coordinated Entry, or a partner agency didn't sit right, we want to hear about it.
You're welcome to file a grievance anonymously. Fill out the form and our team will review it and follow up if you've given us a way to reach you.
If you see someone experiencing unsheltered homelessness, you can request a Street Outreach Team to connect them with our homelessness response system, so they can be assessed for needs and connected to available resources.
Give us as much detail as you can about where you saw them and what you observed. A team member will follow up as soon as possible.
Coordinated Entry is one of the most misunderstood parts of the CoC for agencies new to the system. Here's what it actually is, and how referrals get decided.
One standardized way in (RACAS), no matter which agency, phone number, or office a person first reaches out to. Agencies, CE access points, and individuals themselves can all complete the Coordinated Assessment directly.
The same set of questions, asked the same way, so a person calling from any of our 37 counties is evaluated consistently.
Assessed households are ranked by vulnerability and need, using written standards that apply the same way across every agency.
Openings are filled from that prioritized list, matched to whichever household's needs best fit the specific opening.
Referrals aren't first-come, first-served, and they aren't agency-to-agency. A common misunderstanding is that an agency can pull straight from a waitlist, or that referrals move however an individual agency prefers. Under HUD's coordinated entry requirements, every household is ranked using AL-507's written prioritization standards, and openings are filled in that order, not based on which agency did the assessment, how long ago someone was assessed, or which agency happens to have a unit open. That's what makes it a coordinated system rather than a collection of separate ones.
Every month, people across our 37-county service area connect to the CoC through a Coordinated Assessment. Here’s what that’s looked like so far in 2026: how many assessments RACAS has completed, where people were staying beforehand, and where across Alabama they’re reaching us from.
We ask every CoC partner agency to complete this update each quarter: funding, staffing, and resources across our CoC can change throughout the year, and RACAS referrals are only as accurate as the information ARCH has on file about what your agency can currently offer. Please complete this even if nothing has changed since last quarter.