The Street and Community Outreach (SCO) Team is part of the City of Austin’s Homeless Strategies and Operations (HSO) division. The team connects unhoused residents to stabilizing systems of care and provides resources to meet basic needs through relationship-building, service coordination, and direct service delivery.
SCO serves as a critical front door to Austin’s broader Homeless Response System. Many of the people the team works with have not yet engaged with services on their own, either because they are not ready, or because the system has not met them where they are. SCO changes that by going directly to people in the community: in encampments, on streets, and in public spaces across Austin. The goal is to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.
SCO operates three geographic teams covering North, Central, and South Austin, and provides services across four areas: supplies distribution, direct service provision, service coordination and referrals, and pathways to stability. The team also plays an integral role in the City’s Homeless Encampment Management efforts, ensuring that individuals at encampment sites are offered services before any enforcement activity.
The team is guided by three core values:
Building strong relationships with clients, system partners, and community through honesty, reliability, and respectful engagement.
Meeting clients where they are and leading with client choice, respecting every person’s right to self-determination.
Protecting staff capacity and boundaries so team members can do their best work in a demanding field.
A Community Service Program Coordinator spends most of their time in the field. This means walking routes, meeting people in encampments and public spaces, and being a consistent, familiar face that helps individuals experiencing homelessness connect to appropriate shelter, housing, and health resources, and provide light-touch case management. It is relational work, built on patience, consistency, and genuine respect for the people you are serving.
These positions coordinates with a wide network of system partners, from healthcare and behavioral health providers to housing programs and community organizations. That means this role also requires the ability to communicate effectively with a diverse range of people: community members, service providers, local officials, and elected representatives, which involves participating in ongoing coordination meetings to support a unified community response.
Responsibilities also include transporting clients to appointments, distributing essential supplies, and documenting interactions.