Starting in Direct Service  

I joined the movement to end homelessness in the summer of 2010 as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the City of San Jose. In those early years, I organized resource fairs, did street outreach, worked as a case manager, and eventually designed and supervised programming. 

My plan was to stay in direct services, but in 2016, I made an unexpected pivot into government. This happened at the same time I was coming to terms with a difficult truth. I was watching people get jobs and move into housing almost every day. It appeared that we were solving homelessness. However, at a community and system-level, the overall numbers kept getting worse. 

I didn’t understand what was happening and felt powerless.

 Shifting to Local Government 

I wanted to learn and better understand what was driving this crisis. Fortunately, the City I started working for was on board. They let me: 

✔ Write a newsletter unpacking the underlying issues driving homelessness

✔ Convene and lead community workshops and educational opportunities

✔ Go on field trips, attend conferences, and host national thought leaders  

These efforts and the resulting insights resonated. Within a few years, Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL), a local government professional association of over 4,800 members from all 50 states, named me the “Top Influencer in Local Government” for my work breaking down, communicating, and educating about homelessness, while also mobilizing community engagement around solutions.

Sharing All the Lessons Learned

I have learned so much over the years from so many different amazing leaders, organizations, and communities, and my primary focus now is creating, synthesizing, and sharing insights, tools, and frameworks to empower community transformation. This work has included:

✔  Writing a book.

✔  Creating earlier versions of this website.

✔  Developing an online training course for civic leaders.

✔  Teaching a "systems thinking" and strategy class at UC Berkeley

By investing in the resources on this website, you are providing me with the time and space to continue researching, developing, and iterating new and improved tools for our movement. 

If you are a Change Maker who does not have the financial means to access these resources, please reach out. I never want to create barriers to proven solutions.

Proven resources:

 PDF 

So You Want to Solve Homelessness? Start Here

“This book is required reading for everyone that has homelessness on their radar from city residents who see the overt increase in unsheltered, to city staff and elected officials tasked with finding housing solutions. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the problem, provides data driven real world solutions based in part on the author's experience, while encouraging a systems framework for effectiveness. It is easy to read and engaging; I was on page 50 before realizing I hadn't put the book down for a moment. The authors friendly and humble tone are appreciated as well. The illustrations throughout helped underscore important concepts so they resonated visually." You can download the ebook here. You can also access print and audio versions on Amazon. 

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The Systems Map

Despite our best efforts to advance a simple explanation of what’s driving The Modern Homelessness Crisis, the hard truth is that there is no singular cause. Instead, modern homelessness is best understood as a portfolio of interconnected and reinforcing challenges that are making it more likely for individual crises to result in episodes of homelessness, especially in our most affluent urban areas. This map, which you can customize with your own branding, helps visualize how all of the issues and challenges fit together.

 POWERPOINT PRESENTATION 

How We Got Here

This presentation helps you answer the fundamental question of "how did we get here?", what are the major issues driving modern homelessness? In addition to data on and pictures from past eras of homelessness in the United States, this presentation provides an easy to understand breakdown on the current data methodologies for measuring homelessness, and it concludes with a highly customizable section with infographics where you can easily provide data on local numbers and context.  

POWERPOINT PRESENTATION 

Why We’re Stuck

Modern homelessness is ultimately a symptom of other broken systems - the cost of rental housing, declining real wages, the racial wealth gap, broken behavioral health systems, and eroding social capital and family structures. In a fundamental way, the homelessness service sector does not control any of these issues. Instead, the only thing we really control is the nature and structure of our response. This presentation unpacks those dynamics and can be customized to highlight local context. 

 POWERPOINT PRESENTATION 

The STEPS Framework

This is the big one. Over the past few years I have refined this framework to help individual service providers, cities, counties, and some of the biggest Continuums of Care in the country to assess current efforts, drive strategic planning and implementation, support change management conversations, and create new approaches to community engagement. In addition to the STEPS framework itself, this download includes a variety of options for customization. 

 COMBINED POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS 

How We Got Here + Why We’re Stuck
+ The STEPS Framework

My go-to approach is to present all three of these presentations at the same time. First, I start with "how we got here," unpacking the dynamics that are making it more likely for personal crises to result in episodes of homelessness. This includes details on how homelessness is playing out locally. Next, I like to show how our sector's default response - decentralization and fragmentation - has been making it harder to help people. Again, I like to use local examples and news headlines. Finally, I close with the STEPS framework, providing hope and inspiration for how different communities have used this tool to drive change. Buy all three at the same time and save.