For the last 15 years, I have been working on the frontlines of the movement to homelessness in the United States. During that time, I have had the opportunity to:

✔ Provide frontline street outreach and case management

✔ Manage a growing nonprofit organization

✔ Hold an executive level position in city government

✔ Be named the top national influencer in local government

✔ Oversee $200M in strategic financial planning and modeling

✔ Lead $100M in permanent and interim housing projects

✔ Serve as the Chief Strategy Officer for the 7th largest CoC in the country

✔ Teach a graduate-level "systems thinking"  course at UC Berkeley

✔ Publish a book,  So You Want to Solve Homelessness? Start Here

I have held all the roles and experienced all of the blindspots. This website is my best attempt to share and compile all of the best tools, frameworks, and resources that can help you drive change in your community, today. 

I Believe the Following:

  Homelessness is not inevitable. “The Modern Homelessness Crisis” is the result of a portfolio of upstream issues (e.g., rising rents, declining wages, lack of access to behavioral healthcare, the racial wealth gap) that, since the early 1980s, have been making it more likely for personal crises to result in homelessness.

  We must focus on what we can control. In a fundamental way, the homeless service sector does not control the upstream issues causing homelessness. Instead, we can only control the structure and nature of our response. We’re like an emergency room in a broader public health crisis.

  We have responded by decentralizing. Even though this crisis is happening all across the country, we have fundamentally decentralized our response. For all intents and purposes, every state, county, Continuum of Care, city, and service provider is mostly left to their own devices to figure out what to do.

  This fragmentation is killing us. We have wildly different system designs, even across neighboring communities. We endlessly rebrand and use inconsistent terminology for what are essentially a handful of basic building blocks common to all systems of care, thus preventing "standardization." And because of all this, it is then nearly impossible to create coherent projections about the level of resources actually required to meet the need.

  The solution is a common understanding and strategy. If we accept that we cannot control the upstream causes of modern homelessness, and the only thing we can change is the nature of our response, then from this place of humility, we must seize our agency and begin to create a standard model for all homeless systems of care, ultimately sparking inspiration, innovation, and accountability among peers (learn more about this approach).