Homelessness Services Specialist
Mr. SmithGraybeal has over 25 years of experience working with nonprofits and specializes in community development and homelessness reduction strategies. He serves as the Vice President of Community Development with United Way of Weld County, where he has been part of the regional leadership team that received permission from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to found a new continuum of care (CoC) for homelessness services, named the Northern Colorado Continuum of Care (NoCO CoC). Only the third time that a new CoC has been formed out of a larger Balance of State CoC, the request of HUD to found the NoCO CoC was approved largely because of how successful the NoCO CoC 40-plus member agencies have been in reducing the amount of homelessness in Northern Colorado. Since the beginning of shared regional efforts in February 2016, the NoCO CoC and its partners have assessed over 2,000 individuals and families as experiencing homelessness and helped two-thirds of these regain housing. It is likely there will be an end to veteran homelessness in 2022, which will mean the combined rehousing of over 550 Weld and Larimer County veterans.
Mr. SmithGraybeal has also served on the board of many nonprofits, most recently with Pura Vida, a Colorado-based nonprofit that facilitates primary and secondary education opportunities and catalyzes community development in the highlands of western Guatemala. Mr. SmithGraybeal has a master’s degree in community economic development from Eastern University.
“Thank you so much for this training. This was the best PIO training I’ve ever received.”
S-403 Information Officer class participant
“I was absolutely thrilled with the report because it was very comprehensive, very detailed. I call it the ‘time-in-motion study’ almost and some of the aspects [are] ‘how does your paper flow? How can you make your processes better? . . . As a government agency, how can we provide better service to the constituents?’ And to us we think that this study identifies those things down to all of the small paper processes and flows.”
Retired City Manager City of Vista, CA
“I am really, really impressed. I am impressed at the exhaustiveness of your study, impressed at the honesty and candor with which you expressed your findings; I am very impressed at the constructive tone of it, and that you came in under budget as well. So, thank you very much. I think that this document is going to be a cornerstone for us really moving forward for the next five, ten, twenty [years], half a century.”
Salt Lake City Council Meeting
“Thank you very much for a comprehensive report. Thank you.”
Palm Springs
“I think this is one of the most comprehensive reports and I think probably one of the best presented reports I’ve seen in my years in government service. I want to start off by commending you for that and acknowledge that the work that you were able to do with cooperation from all of the different firefighting agencies in this region was second-to-none.”
Supervisor First District San Diego County
“I am very much appreciative of Citygate’s comprehensive view of all the issues. And you have been very candid and very forthright in the problem areas that you have identified and we appreciate that. Quite often sometimes people choose to gloss over those issues and therefore we never can get a real good handle on the problem to resolve it. And I very much appreciate your insight and your intuitive natures that you have all experienced in your government services and trying to identify where our problem areas are so we can identify for the public. I very much appreciate the idea and the comments that you made that we are talking about the citizens who come to the planning Department as customers. And so you’ve done a great service for us and we are certainly appreciative of all your efforts.”
Commissioner Jackson County