A Return to Simplicity

When I think back to the early years of this work, above all else, I remember how simple I thought the solution to homelessness was. The answer is in the name itself. People just need homes. 

Despite this obvious truth, within a few short months of joining this movement, I began to notice a certain realism, dare I say cynicism, from colleagues who had been doing this work a lot longer than me. To them, homelessness wasn’t simple at all. In fact, it was extremely challenging and complex.  

Gradually, I joined their ranks, writing the following in an op-ed in 2013:

• Homelessness is the most complex social challenge we face. The causes are varied, the prescriptions are polarizing, and our perceptions of the issues and those experiencing them are shaped by profoundly personal worldviews.

This perspective was only reinforced when shifting from working within systems as a direct service provider to working on systems in government. 

In many ways, helping someone secure housing is far more straightforward than trying to make sense of how all the pieces of a homeless system of care are supposed to fit together. And even when a clear strategy starts to take shape, getting community leaders aligned around a new way of operating adds an entirely new challenge.

To be completely honest, the complexity of homelessness, its weight and its seeming intractability, have made me want to throw in the towel many times, but I have continued to try to scratch my own itch, repeatedly asking, "If I could go back to day one, what do I wish I could tell myself?"

Finally, thankfully, miraculously, I have found my way back to simplicity again.

A New Working Hypothesis ... 

I have gradually come to believe the following about modern homelessness:

• 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, especially in our most affluent cities.
• 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 to these challenges. 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. And because of all of this, it is nearly impossible to create a logical business plan for the level of resources actually required to meet the need.
• The solution is a shared understanding and strategy. If we accept that we cannot control the causes, but we can control the response, then from this place of humility (and empowerment), we must come together to build a standard model and strategy that aligns systems of care, sparks real collaboration, and creates real accountability to best practices and benchmarks.

Structural fragmentation in the homeless service sector was present 15 years ago when I started in this work, and it will be present another 15 years from now unless we finally do something to overcome it. 

There is so much more to share - and it will be in future posts - but for now, I will simply say that I intend for my final chapter in this work to be about taking one last big swing at trying to reverse this dynamic.

I am hoping this will manifest in two ways:

 #1 - Advocacy for a "Standard Model"

As some of you know (and have actively helped with), over the past few years, I have been working to create a "standard model" of homeless response systems.

At its core, "STEPS" is a customer journey map illustrating how people tend to flow through homeless systems of care. The goal of this simple visual is to strip out all of the unnecessary complexity and jargon that we often bring to our work and instead visualize and identify the core components and features common to every homeless system of care in the country. 

As a service provider at heart, STEPS has never simply been an academic exercise for me. Over the last few years, this framework has helped:

• Structure, evaluate, and implement strategic plans
• Clarify who does what and who funds what in a given system
• Clarify organizational strengths and programmatic focus areas
• Establish performance and financial benchmarks 
• Identify and implement national best practices
• Provide a tool for community engagement and system feedback
• Quantify current and needed financial investment 
• Serve as a tool for onboarding and preserving institutional knowledge

It is my sincere hope that the "STEPS" framework can become a tool to help align local systems of care all across the country. Importantly, we don't all need to be doing the same thing, but we need to at least be playing the same game. 

To help make this a reality, I am officially launching:

• A redesigned and rebranded www.howtosolvehomeless.org
• A weekly newsletter called "Building Momentum"
• A revised training course called "The Paradigm Shift" (launching in September)
• An open-source, sector-wide strategy document (coming soon to the website)

 #2 - Strategic Financial Alignment

After spending many years with this framework, I have gradually come to realize that all nodes are not created equal. In fact, one aspect of the system touches, influences, and drives almost everything else - "funding." 

If you think about it, because of the fragmentation described above, our nation's "housing emergency room" is truly unlike every other sustained government operation, from healthcare to schools to public safety to public works departments, each of which have:

• A generally consistent organizational structure across communities
• A generally consistent level of resources to meet an ongoing need (which is based on the logic of the organizational structure - that is key)

The homeless service sector is not like this at all, and funding is a perfect way to see that. We perennially face:

• Boom-and-bust funding cycles, driving reactive instead of strategic planning
• A scarcity mindset, fostering provider competition over collaboration
• Low wages, increasing staff turnover and reducing program effectiveness
• Inconsistent metrics and outcomes, making impact and results hard to assess
• Misallocations, running out of money in some areas and underspending in others
• Contracting inertia, keeping the current approach stuck in the same place

Simply put, my goal is to disrupt and reimagine this broken status quo, and I have been developing a tool to do just that. This will also be the subject of future newsletters, but if you're curious now, feel free to reach out!

Please Help Spread the Word ... 

If there are leaders and practitioners who you think should be reading a blog like this, I would very sincerely appreciate you sharing this with them.

My plan is to put out this newsletter every Monday, and my crazy, audacious goal continues to be consistently reaching 10,000+ civic leaders and homelessness change makers. 

Thanks so much for your support!!

Subscribe Here: https://www.howtosolvehomelessness.org/