Director of Homeward 2020 Discusses Homelessness in Fort Collins
Homeward 2020 is an organization that was built through the collaborative efforts of the City of Fort Collins, Colorado State University, and the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado. It began as a vision of UniverCity Connections. It works with a variety of different groups within the community to better understand homelessness, create ideas based off their finds, and implement local solutions to help solve homelessness.
Homeward 2020’s Director, Holly LeMasurier, is an individual who brings in over 20 years of experience with social justice and equity, community development, and human rights from a local and international perspective. Last Thursday, I got the opportunity to chat with LeMasurier to discuss Homeward 2020, her opinion on policies like the sit-lie ban, and if she believes ending homelessness is attainable for Fort Collins in the next few years.
Beyond the Oval: What made you choose Fort Collins and Homeward 2020?
Holly LeMasurier: I came to the area ten years ago because it was familiar, I had lived here in Loveland in high school and my husband is from Boulder, born and raised, so his parents are here, so we just wanted to be close to the family because we had a kid entering kindergarten so we settled in Fort Collins.
I chose Homeward 2020 because it’s really closely related to the work I’d done for 20 years now in social justice and community development and particularly with social policy kind of at a systemic level, so Homeward 2020 was a really good fit because of the work they do with kind of convening and catalyzing and particularly they are very aggressive and have a consistent interest in addressing homelessness. So I felt like it was a really good fit to continue to evolve as a leader and use the best of my skills and actually have an impact in Fort Collins.
What was one of your other favorite places to either work or one of the other organizations you loved to work with and why?
I loved my Peace Corps experience in Namibia in Southern Africa. For two and a half years, [I] lived in a community and worked with really grassroots organizations and a lot of it is listening to people impacted but also people really motivated to make change and I feel like I learned more than I have ever learned, particularly from that experience being alongside and with people and just supporting their work and amplifying their voices and the changes they wanted to see.
And then just being completely being immersed in another culture is a really great experience for everyone I think to have a worldview, to understand outside our Fort Collins bubble and gain global perspective. I think that was a really life changing experience I think I got far more focus and kind of really learned a lot about myself that helped me better understand the kind of work I really wanted to do.
Going back to the U.S., what are some of the biggest policies that Fort Collins/Colorado has that you believe works against people experiencing homelessness?
Our rapid change and growth means we have to pay very close attention to those that are not keeping up with change and progress in the community but have particular vulnerabilities that maybe demand a little unique attention and support in the community. I think access to flexible and affordable housing is something that people are really starting to hear is a systemic problem that isn’t just affecting people experiencing homelessness but it’s actually driving people to homelessness. But…housing matched with supportive services for people is what they need as they build up to self-sufficiency and more opportunities in the community.
How are you and Homeward 2020 personally affected by the Fort Collins sit-lie ban and the camping ban?
I think particularly I have always emphasized that I understand that we have laws and we have to enact them but what I feel frustrated by is that then it ties people up in a justice system rather than solution oriented system. So I’ve always said that any kind of outreach to the community that’s kind of marginalizing and not engaging in services actually requires a kind of paired approach with outreach workers that are skilled and have the capacity to better serve folks that may just need more contact and support to help them with whatever unique needs they may have. I think we are finding that more and more that these quality of life crimes are better solved with housing and supportive services rather than getting them wrapped up in a criminalizing and a justice oriented approach.
Do you think there are ways that groups in the justice system could actually help and benefit people experiencing homelessness?
I do, I think we are making some really incremental and positive moves in that direction. I think in particular integration and working alongside the justice system and saying, “Hey this is also impacting you and not just the individuals. And you can also better deliver your outcome and your services by better understanding this population and reaching out to the people that can better help you also reduce homelessness.” We hear the story about how the jails are full, but when people are housed, we can eliminate some of those perceived crimes that are impacting the individual and our community health and well being at large. I’ve always said that a housed and healthy community floats all our boats and creates an inclusive community where everyone can thrive and even at the most minimum just be safe and healthy.
During your time as director what are some of the biggest successes you’ve experienced?
I think the collaborative approach we’ve had trying to involve all sectors of the community, engage them and seeing themselves as being part of the solution and everyone is far better off. Then it’s not just a few agencies on the front lines managing homelessness.
I think particularly we have chosen to focus on chronic homelessness the last couple years because these are folks that are clearly not being effectively engaged or served. It has created a very laser focused lens on the gaps in our system. So we have two primary focuses: people experiencing long term homelessness and why that is and what we are missing with people that are frequent utilizers of our crisis response systems and how can we better move the needle on making changes to address folks with complex and chronic barriers.
And lastly, I think I have been working really hard on bonding the link between health and housing as solutions to homelessness rather than homelessness as the problem. I think that work is really catching on now with really great conversations, actual projects, and actually seeing really great results to help our community have a different experience with homelessness. And now we just need to bring the work we’ve been doing up on a bigger scale. When people get motivated with seeing these positive results and realizing we can do this and we can make this happen.
The Housing First Initiative has been pretty successful in placing homeless people in houses and having over 90 percent of them remain housed after six months of living there. But what have been some of the biggest struggles or setbacks this initiative has faced since being launched?
It is definitely strongly evidence based hands down. We don’t question the approach anymore. I think it’s more actually operationalizing it. The biggest barrier is access to housing units. It’s just very competitive and challenging in Fort Collins. Particularly, if you have any kind of barriers in your history to prevent you from acquiring housing. To combat this, we are really working on and getting some success on landlord engagement.
So the concept is that we don’t necessarily need to keep building new places where we designate for people experiencing homelessness but our real goal is to reintegrate people into our community in existing housing stock. So working with landlords to help them understand that they are also part of the solution and when we do transition some of our folks, that they will get the support that they need in housing. What they really need to understand is that they will get their rent paid just like any other tenant. Some landlords deny access for some people because they are concerned about their properties, or they have preferential treatment for people that may be more stable or higher incomes, or there are parents that can sign off on leases, but we need to help the landlords understand that them denying access is part of the systemic barriers that keep people homeless.
How will the expansion of Fort Collins with new apartment buildings impact the Housing First Initiative as far as moving people into houses and apartments that are already existing?
That is one of the things that is sometimes frustrating, seeing new homes going up all over Fort Collins. I think one of our new policy efforts is going to be to either dedicate some of these [homes]to folks who need to transition from homelessness but also making them deeply affordable. We certainly have adequate opportunity for people who have stable incomes to access housing but we actually need to make some internal adjustments. We have several tactics if they’re built to help people transition. The key piece is the support for when people do reintegrate and hopefully live in scattered sites throughout the community to make sure they don’t continue their isolation. If they do have any kind of health care needs or social integration needs that we are paying attention to those. That is just kind of a social version of kind of solving homelessness.
How do you plan to use the techniques or plans that cities who have ended homelessness have to help end homelessness in Fort Collins?
We really know what to do, we know how to do this. The plans typically have several prongs of approach. One is you’re preventing homelessness in the first place. Another is if people do become homeless, that we have some kind of coordinated way to intake people into the system, know more about them individually and what they may need to more rapidly transition. We call those a housing focused exit approach, but those plans tend to have a more coordinated intake and assessment.
Then we try to create three streams of folks and use a coordinated entry to create clearer paths to help support people more quickly on their transition out of homelessness. One stream is more situational or episodic. Their situation may be solved pretty quickly with some emergency funds, maybe an employment placement, and an affordable housing search for them. On the other end are people that have higher barriers and needs and very complex layers of issues that we need to address, that also requires a very unique and specific path and solutions for them, usually including healthcare and subsidized housing. And then there’s a really big middle ground of folks that after a year or two of support and some ongoing light touches to check in just to see how they are doing.
Do you have any tips for everyday people on how they can help homeless people?
I think a better understanding of ongoing, historical social justice and equity and understanding more about how homelessness is almost like a canary in the coalmine or a signal that shows us that a lot of our other systems are failing: healthcare, housing, justice system, our economic sectors. A lot of these what would’ve been our safety nets for communities are failing. Also share the message that it’s not just an individual failure or inadequacy of a person, but rather a housing and healthcare problem that we need to fix together to just have more sustainable and better community life. So still knowing we want the ultimate goal, which is to make homelessness rare, short-lived, and nonrecurring, but one of the more universal and palatable messages is that supportive housing helps everyone in the community and it tends to be more widely embraced as an approach. So we are kind of transitioning to that because this big ominous complex challenge of homelessness is actually really solvable when you translate it into an approach that people can better sink their teeth into and have very distinct services for.
With all these plans that all the organizations have in place, do you think ending homelessness in Fort Collins is attainable in the next few years?
I do. I am on a pretty focused campaign to get some aligned resources for several years because one of the challenges we face with homelessness is because it is so complex…it takes robust resourcing across the entire continuum of solutions so people aren’t dropping off cliffs at random spots in the process. The biggest solution in the multiyear resource alignment obviously includes funding but also housing and clinical support and healthcare on board. It takes a lot of agreement across a few sectors to stay focused on the solution but it is absolutely attainable in Fort Collins.
We are actually going to create a very tactical, strategic plan as the year moves into 2020 that is very specific of what we need in different areas to achieve the goal of ending homelessness. One of the things I love, and am frustrated by, is that I’ve worked in a lot of communities that have much more deeper and larger poverty levels and barriers and aren’t as prosperous as a whole, like communities that aren’t as economically thriving and I think one of the goals is to say we are a prosperous community with lots of resources and innovative nonprofits.
For more information, you can visit Homeward 2020’s website here.
