Haggerty says that having a target number to hit has been a huge catalyst. “Having a collective, measurable, time bound goal has been like a booster rocket,” she says. “Change is never easy, yet all of us act much more crisply, collaboratively and creatively in a crisis. We create an experience of urgency to liberate people from bureaucracy.”
The main obstacle to reaching an endgame on homelessness, Haggerty explains, is that no one organization or agency has complete visibility into the overall system. While most organizations have what they consider reasonable rules, they don’t often see that other organizations have their own, different rules. For a homeless person to comply with the rules of each agency whose cooperation is needed to secure an affordable home, effective health or mental healthcare, income benefits or a job - all the elements of a stable life - is a daunting, if not impossible, task.
In the end, the system as a whole defeats the purpose of delivering assistance to those who need it most and are least able to navigate a complex array of bureaucratic rules.
“Most people working in any kind of human service environment have all good intentions and fairly significant resources and accomplish far less than they could,” Haggerty says. “Most people don’t consider the entirety of a vulnerable person’s situation or collaborate regularly with other organizations that have complementary resources or skills. It’s a culture issue. Most people working in human services don’t learn habits of collaboration. You have a lot of well-intentioned, single-focused approaches, yet people’s lives are complex."
Community Solutions works to integrate the breadth of resources and skills that exist within communities so that “they add up to more than the sum of all the parts.” Housing the homeless has meant building collaborations across siloed organizations to realize a collective goal.
Solving complex problems begins with listening, observing, and mapping the existing assets of a community. The initial step is to get everyone in the same place, to remove blame and put the onus on everyone to shift a little.