Turning Benchmarks into Standards

I sometimes think about my career in two distinct phases:

1. Pre-Iain De Jong.
2. Post-Iain De Jong. 

I joined the movement to end homelessness in 2010. 

In 2016, after six years working in direct services, I shifted to a role in local government in Marin County, CA (the affluent suburban county and CoC north of San Francisco).  

At that time, homelessness in Marin had become centered around challenges with unsheltered homelessness in the downtown of the county's largest city - my new employer. 

A few months into the job, partners in a neighboring county invited a group of local leaders from Marin to come join a day-long training they were hosting with Iain. 

Nowadays, I tend to take for granted that everyone who works in homelessness knows who Iain is, but at that time, I had absolutely no idea that I was about to witness one of the titans in our sector.

Iain has been working to end homelessness for 20+ years. He is the president and CEO of OrgCode Consulting and the author of The Book on Ending Homelessness.

From Housing First to housing-focused shelters to human-centered engagement strategies to the nuanced dynamics of chronic homelessness - after six years, I thought I was well-versed in our space, but that first training opened my eyes to so much more. 

But more than any technical insights, which have been plentiful over the ensuing decade, if you've seen Iain present, you know there is something much more profound that draws people in.

He is deeply vulnerable and authentic.

He's charismatic, funny, and irreverent, bringing joy and laughter to what is otherwise extremely heavy work. 

But most importantly of all, the reason I am invoking him here, is that for me at least, Iain represents one of the strongest moral compasses in our movement. 

And what Iain does better than almost anyone else is to help turn the focus inward. Yes, there are haters out there who do not believe in what we do, but what fired me up more than anything that first day was the way he sparked and reinvigorated a sense of responsibility among everyone in the room.

We're not powerless.

We can change at any time.

And ... 

• With everything our sector has learned over the last 45 years, knowing what we know now about what works and what doesn't, at some point we have to look ourselves in the mirror and take accountability when the problem is us.   

Momentum for a Better Strategy

This newsletter is still in its infancy, but hopefully the central thesis is becoming apparent.

Over the last 45 years, we have fundamentally decentralized our response to homelessness in the United States, leaving every state, county, CoC, city, and service provider mostly to their own devices to figure out what to do. This fragmentation is the structural issue blocking us from more progress.

One of the many consequences of this fragmentation is our tendency to use inconsistent terminology and messaging for what are essentially the same programmatic building blocks.

This confusing web of jargon and rebranding makes it extremely difficult for both policymakers AND people experiencing homelessness to understand how our systems operate.

Therefore, at least part of a better response must include developing and adopting a shared model of how our systems of care operate. Importantly, we don't all need to be doing the same thing, but we at least need to be playing the same game. 

Last week I shared a model that I’ve been gradually developing and using for the past five years. At its core, STEPS is nothing more than a jargon-free customer journey map illustrating how people tend to move through our systems of care.

While STEPS has a number of proven use cases, which I'll detail in future posts, the biggest benefit for me has been a mindset shift:

• If the building blocks of homeless systems of care are generally the same in every community, then it stands to reason that if you compared all of the various approaches to a given building block, optimal approaches would emerge (i.e., best practices). 

• Thus, the fastest and most effective way to increase local system performance is to identify an underperforming part of the system, look at all of the ways other communities are addressing that component, pick the most effective practice that works within the local context, implement, and repeat. 

Indeed, when you look at the core strategic drive in the communities that are making the most progress around homelessness, I would argue that they are all engaging in some version of this ongoing questioning.

Today, I want to take this concept a step farther. 

Instead of this approach being an observation or even a suggestion, what if it was required? What if, channeling Iain, this kind of ongoing improvement cycle became our sector's moral (and strategic) imperative?

Can Your CoC Beat 60%?

Let's look at a seemingly obscure metric: 

• What percentage of Coordinated Entry referrals in your system actually result in permanent housing placements? 

Last week I caught up with a friend and colleague who leads one of the largest Coordinated Entry systems in the country. 

A few short years ago in their community, the number of Coordinated Entry referrals that resulted in housing placements was 30%. (i.e., the CE provider identified an opening, notified providers, the referral was engaged, and the person was housed). 

Consider this statistic in reverse.

30% means 7 out of 10 CE referrals were unsuccessful. Someone's name finally came up, and they did not get housed.

This might seem trivial, but I think it's actually deeply emblematic of what I have observed repeatedly firsthand and what a lot of people have been replying to me in private - many of our current systems have become inefficient, ineffective, and broken.

Think about it:

• Providers wait in some cases years for a referral - then one comes, it's to someone who can no longer be easily accounted for, their contact information is bad, and outreach has stopped engaging them so there has been no continuity of care. It then takes weeks or months to officially confirm this person can no longer be found, the referral falls through, and the process starts over again. 
• Or, on the other side, let's say providers do find the person, but after all that work, the client doesn't want the referral because it didn't actually take into account their housing preferences or shifting service needs. 

The sum result is that everyone is frustrated.

The system feels annoying.

It's slow.

It doesn't deliver results.

Quite understandably, cynicism grows, and the solution is to work around the system, not with it. 

But here's the thing. Here's the amazing part. WE'RE THE ONES THAT MADE UP THESE SYSTEMS. WE'RE THE ONES WHO CAN CHANGE THEM AT ANY TIME.

And that's exactly what happened over the last three years. This community doubled their conversion rate. It is now over 60% (and rising). That is a 100% improvement!  

This wasn't an accident. They:

• Adopted weekly CoC-wide Coordinated Entry case conferencing
• Created 5+ subregional by-name-lists, each of which has weekly case conferencing
• In some sub-regions, they moved to caseload-based outreach assigned by the BNLs
• Hired more effective facilitators and project managers
• Produced regular public reporting to bring transparency to the CE's performance

While systems of care are complex and have many moving parts, I don't think it's a coincidence that during the same time they engaged in the activities that improved this metric, their Point-in-Time count dropped from 2,893 in 2023 to 1,952 in 2025.

Please Help Spread the Word

If there are practitioners, leaders, and homelessness Change Makers who you think should be reading this blog, I would be deeply grateful if you would consider sharing this and encouraging them to subscribe. 

Thank you so much for your partnership! 

- Andrew