This article is written by Tom Fox, Executive Coach, Signal House Coaching.

We’ve all experienced the moral dilemma of homelessness.

We pass someone living on the street and wonder, "what happened?" "What should I do?" “Certainly, others can help this person more effectively,” we might think.

Long thought to be a problem too impossible to solve, 78 communities in the United States have succeeded in ending homelessness among their veteran populations. The main driver behind this positive change has been the creativity, vision and strategic thinking of a group of passionate public servants.

Homelessness dropped from more than 75,000 in 2009 to 37,000 in 2019 — a decrease of more than 50 percent over 10 year

Examining some of the lessons learned from this experience can help public servants across the world use strategic thinking to more successfully launch ambitious initiatives to solve their communities' problems.

The problem

In 2009, the senior-most leaders of the US departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) established an ambitious goal to end homelessness among those who had retired from the US military. At the time, more than 75,000 veterans were homeless and the number of homeless was expected to increase due to unemployment, affordable housing, substance abuse, mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorders.

Of course, the starting point for solving any problem, regardless of size, starts with genuinely understanding the problem.

For many years, experts believed that the first step towards helping the homeless was to first focus on their employment and health needs before finding them stable housing. As a result, the hundreds of national and local organisations working to end homelessness were each trying to solve a part of the problem — some would focus on housing, others would focus on mental health, others would focus on substance abuse — but no one was looking at the big picture.

Experiments in cities like New York, however, proved that adopting a “housing first” approach allowed service providers opportunities to more effectively address their citizens’ mental health, physical health and employment concerns. Organisations no longer worked independently. Instead, they took a coordinated approach, meeting the veterans in their new homes to provide them will of the services needed.

Despite promising results, limited local resources constrained the impact of these programs.

Due to the limited resources in local government, it was clear that ending veteran’s homelessness across the US would require intervention by the federal government, and, more importantly, reimagining the policies and programs of large institutions that had been in place for years without achieving their desired results. Making matters even more challenging, the US federal government was often perceived by local governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as making their work harder (e.g., regulations, paperwork, processes), not easier.

While federal leaders were confident that they could marshal the resources required to scale and spread communities’ “housing first” programs, they first had to convince leaders in local governments and NGOs that they would work as genuine partners to utilise their shared strengths.

The takeaways

Here are a few of the strategies outlined in the agencies’ final case study you may be able to adopt and adapt to your own initiatives:

  • Train together if you want to make change together: As a starting point, the VA and HUD teams convened joint boot camps along with other US agencies, local governments and community providers to develop a shared understanding of each communities’ unique problems and available resources. Together, they would then map out a shared strategy, set of solutions, roles, responsibilities and outcomes, to more effectively serve the homeless veterans in their community. Organisations were no longer pursuing individual agendas, but a shared set of goals. At times, the boot camps would be facilitated strategic planning sessions, at other times they would complete shared training exercises as a way of determining how to work with one another more effectively.

  • Google-translate your terminology to speak the same language: Different levels of government and different sectors use different terms, acronyms and operating systems. To successfully foster collaboration, one of the key items for — or as a follow-up to — any initial boot camp is a glossary or dictionary of key terms each partner needs to know and understand. The Partnership for Public Service, examining work on veterans homelessness and other issues in California, just recently published a report titled The Golden State of Collaboration: Fostering Intergovernmental and Cross-Sector Partnership in California that even proposes a collaboration playbook with key terms, as well as shared tools and other resources designed to facilitate effective collaboration. While this may take some time to put together, doing so allows everyone involved to avoid getting stuck on minor differences and instead can focus on achieving their shared, strategic goals.

  • Maximise collaboration through staff dedicated to helping, not hindering, change: The VA and HUD staff dedicated interdisciplinary teams (i.e., program management staff, doctors, nurses and others) to helping overcome any barriers or hurdles encountered by the teams focused on ending veterans homelessness. Rather than being greeted by requirements for regulations or paperwork, local governments and NGOs were greeted by teams of US government leaders looking to clear the path toward successfully achieving the strategy they agreed upon during their boot camps. There’s even a US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) dedicated to coordinating action among agencies, as well as identifying and sharing best practices.

  • Communicate early and often: Nothing kills momentum like silence. Project management experts estimate that 75 to 90 percent of management is communication — formal and informal. To build off of the inevitable energy stemming from a boot camp, expect your dedicated team members to reach out across agencies, levels of government and sectors much of the time. Beyond any ongoing informal outreach, the dedicated team can plan for ongoing formal check-ins: regular electronic updates (e.g., email or Slack), video conferences, face-to-face meetings, and even networking events to keep everyone working on the same set of strategic goals and outcomes.

Taking these steps to deliver a set of more strategic, coordinated programs to benefit veterans, homelessness dropped from more than 75,000 in 2009 to 37,000 in 2019 — a decrease of more than 50 percent over 10 years.

For public servants wishing to tackle an ambitious initiative in their communities, consider taking the same data-driven approach to understanding a problem, define a compelling strategy for change with that understanding in mind, and then adopt techniques like those outlined above, to work more effectively across levels of government and sectors to deliver measurable results. — Tom Fox

(Picture credit: Unsplash)