I have spent the last 15 years working on the frontlines of the movement to end homelessness. During that time, 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. 

✔ Provided frontline street outreach and case management

✔ Managed a growing nonprofit organization

✔ Held an executive level position in city government

✔ Was named the top national influencer in local government

✔ Oversaw $200M in strategic financial planning and modeling

✔ Lead $100M in permanent and interim housing development

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

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

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

I Have Come to Believe the Following:

  Homelessness is not inevitable. “The Modern Homelessness Crisis” is the result of a portfolio of upstream problems (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 (e.g., a job loss, a rent increase, a health issue) to result in episodes of 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 only control the structure and nature of the response. We’re like an emergency room in a broader public health crisis.

  To-date, we have responded by decentralizing. Even though The Modern Homelessness Crisis is happening all across the country, for all intents and purposes, we – the homeless service sector – have fundamentally decentralized our response, leaving every state, county, Continuum of Care, city, and service provider 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. Because of all this, it is nearly impossible to create logical and coherent projections around 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 (and empowerment), we must seize our agency, create a standard model that can align all homeless systems of care in a way that sparks inspiration, innovation, and accountability among peers.