San Joaquin County unveils SHINE homelessness app and reports SJ Cares outreach gains
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Summary
Probation officials and contractor Anshar Labs demonstrated SHINE, a new mobile platform intended to unify data on unsheltered residents; SJ Cares said outreach teams linked dozens of people to housing in the past year.
San Joaquin County probation officials presented two related homelessness tools on Sept. 9: SHINE, a mobile and shelter management platform built by Anshar Labs to centralize field data and real-time bed counts, and an update from SJCares, the county’s probation-led outreach and case-management team.
Chief Probation Officer Steve Jackson said the board approved a contract in October (date not specified in the meeting record) to develop SHINE. Representatives from Anshar Labs described the system as a mobile app for field officers, a shelter-management interface for bed availability and a role-based central platform for secure, discretionary access to client records.
Panaki Saha of Anshar Labs said the company completed ride-alongs with probation, the sheriff’s office and behavioral-health staff and found that data on unsheltered people were fragmented across spreadsheets, texts and third-party apps. The SHINE app — delivered in iOS and Android versions, plus a bed-count app and a central management dashboard — is designed to give officers situational awareness, support risk scoring for encampments and individuals, and allow shelters and outreach teams to coordinate placements.
Anshar Labs said it pre-onboarded roughly 165 client records and plans a countywide migration of analog homelessness data to the digital platform in September 2025, with full back-end analytics and reporting scheduled for December 2025–January 2026.
Jamie Grant, deputy chief probation officer overseeing SJCares, reported operational results for July 2024–Aug. 31, 2025. The outreach team recorded 4,463 contacts with 770 unique individuals; 37% signed releases to work with the team, and 33% accepted resources without signing. SJCares said it has 146 active clients and linked 484 people to services, with behavioral health and housing referrals among the most common connections. The program also reported 85 people placed into some form of housing in the period; 30% of those placements were described as permanent housing and 10% were reunifications with family.
Grant offered case examples of persistent outreach leading to placement, including a Lodi resident who, after four contacts over six working days, accepted transportation and a housing intake and “sat on the bed and said he wasn’t leaving.” Grant credited persistence and cross-agency collaboration for the placements.
Sheriff’s and probation staff said SHINE is intended to reduce risks for staff in the field by enabling officers to see prior encounters, known hazards and site-level intelligence before returning to a location. County staff said the project will integrate probation, sheriff, behavioral health, public health, shelter operators and community-based organizations on the platform.
No formal board vote was required; county staff said the project will proceed with further testing and phased rollout and return to the board with implementation milestones.
