Insights for Change is our series to pose questions and share short insights (our own and others’) for thinking creatively about faith and social change. They may be full-baked, half-baked, or just a pile of raw ingredients to play with. We hope they start conversation or inspire ideas. We invite you to add your own thoughts, experiences, and ideas to the mix.
Ending homelessness is not a pie-in-the-sky aspiration for the organization Community Solutions. They work to actually end it and have shown it’s possible. Fourteen communities across the U.S. have already reached “functional zero” homelessness—meaning it’s rare and brief—using the Community Solutions methodology. In this Ashoka interview, founder Roseanne Haggerty talks about the approach and methodology.
She notes that “we have to evolve past the world of random worthy efforts.” In other words, if we want to actually solve social problems, we need to first believe that they are solvable and then approach them systemically.
Haggerty tells the story of how as a young volunteer at a youth homeless shelter, she saw that “we have all the right intentions, but we have the wrong aim.” The shelter housed young people for 30 days, but as she says, none of these young people had 30-day problems. She realized that we need to focus on preventing and ending homelessness, not just helping homeless people survive.
One of the biggest barriers that communities face in addressing homelessness, according to Haggerty, is the “inevitability of the problem.” As her interviewer Sasha Haselmayer notes, power lies in communities taking ownership of problems, in “accepting that social injustices can be solved.” Haggerty points out that faith communities in particular are positioned “to speak up for another truth,” for the truth that injustice is not inevitable.
Community Solutions then backs up the claim of solvability with a methodology to in fact solve it. Haggerty says the reason homelessness seems so confounding to communities is that it doesn’t exist in one place. A number of agencies and organizations interact with people who are either currently homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, but each of those organizations often operates in isolation. The Community Solutions methodology instead brings them together around a shared aim with shared measures and shared information about the problem.
Haggerty lays out the five components that make the Community Solutions approach successful, a recipe that she notes could be applied to any other complex problem:
A shared aim
An integrated, nimble team
Comprehensive, accurate, real-time, shared data
Flexible resources to apply where the data shows they will have greatest effect
Benefits of a network so no one is innovating alone
Listen to the full interview to learn more about this effective approach.
Haggerty notes that faith communities have been “first responders to modern homelessness.” Let’s also be the system-builders that help end it.
Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash