Case: Ending Homelessness, Empowering Families.
Motivated by a deep compassion for the homeless, Rosanne Haggerty began a journey in 1990 that would lead her to raise the bar on supported living and redefine expectations about what can be achieved in homelessness. In 2018, her organization declared the first city to be at “Functional Zero Homelessness”. More quietly, in 2008 she also seeded an experimental new approach to bottom-up community development in Brownsville, New York City, where parents took charge of co-creating a more just early childhood experience with government and social care providers.
This is the blog version of Cities and Social Entrepreneurs: A Playbook for Catalytic Change that I wrote in collaboration with Manmeet Mehta and David Lubell, published by Ashoka and Catalyst 2030.
Here is how it happened. A story in three Acts.
Act I — The Prince George
An ambitious project is exemplar of how Common Ground gave dignity, safety and support to people who have experienced poverty, homelessness, or HIV/AIDS, a home in a beautifully restored hotel, with a keen eye on data.
As you walk up to the Prince George Hotel, it is stunning. Absolutely stunning. Tucked away to the side of Times Square in Manhattan, the grand building is full of stories and mysteries. Walking in, you notice the kind of all-glass security gates used in fancy office buildings. But if you wait to observe, you will notice that this is no fancy office, hotel or apartment building. The Prince George Hotel offers supported living to formerly homeless or low-income individuals. Half of the tenants live with HIV/AIDS, a mental illness and/or a history of substance abuse.
Rosanne Haggerty was one of the driving forces behind the Prince George, buying it in 1995 with Common Ground (now Breaking Ground), an organization she co-founded in 1990. The kind of loving restoration was no indulgence, design is one of Rosanne’s many secret weapons.
She believes places shape people and vice-versa. As if to underline this point, her own office is austere, simple. According to her, the secret to housing this vulnerable community of homeless people is two-fold. First, was to not leave it at shelter, but bring in all the support in mental health, health and other support residents needed. The second is to manage the tiny percentage of people who, if not looked after, would ruin the whole for everyone.
It was a seven-year-long, $48 million journey from turning what in the 1980’s had declined into a dysfunctional homeless shelter housing 1,700 people until she could open the doors to 416 low-income and formerly homeless adults as well as people living with HIV/AIDS in 2002. The overwhelming beauty and detail that surprises the visitor is part of a plan to give dignity to people commonly stigmatized. But to succeed, the Prince George needed to be beyond beautiful. Partnerships with organizations like the Center for Urban Community Services help the building provide the whole package of activities critical to re-enter society: case management, training, crafts and art spaces, healthcare, job support and social care services that can help people build their lives. The idea is as simple as it is effective. Give people a stable, safe and supportive home, and they can focus on important things like finding a job. Financial partnerships unlocked half the funding in the form of low-interest loans from the city and the state. Furthermore, community oriented programs like a Community Advisory Board have helped build closer ties in the neighborhood to prevent problems and stigmatization. By 2010, Common Ground had created nearly 3,000 affordable homes like the units in the Prince George.
Act I — Take Aways
“Prototyping can happen at different speeds and scales. You should think carefully about what scale is appropriate to prototype your proposition. Don’t be afraid to be proportionate — a very big problem, like supported housing in NYC, may require a big prototype to demonstrate the parts coming together.”
“A physical space can be a powerful way for you to demonstrate what success can look like, and shift expectations on what is possible.”
“Don’t shy away from complexity even in a prototype if that is what is required to achieve success. If you require many partnerships, take your time to build them. Buying the Prince George helped Rosanne win stakeholders over through a tangible project.”
Act II — Functional Zero
A rigorous focus on data leads over 90 U.S. cities to join a community of practice that commits to the goal of effectively eliminating homelessness.
In 2011, Rosanne founded Community Solutions to lead the 100,000 Homes campaign. Despite its success, none of the participating cities ended homelessness. Rosanne and her team identified four underlying problems to sustainable progress. First, no single actor was accountable for ending homelessness. Second, funders evaluate success on individual programs, not collective impact to reduce homelessness. Third, flawed data collected only annually, that was off by as much as 75%. Fourth, a broken housing system in which newly built stock didn’t deliver outcomes. To address these problems, they launched an initiative in 2015, Built for Zero, to learn what it takes to not just house more people but drive overall homelessness to ‘functional zero’, a state where homelessness remains rare and brief for a population. By 2023, 105 cities participated in Built for Zero. Of these, sixty-one achieved quality real-time data, forty-three achieved measurable reduction in homelessness, and fourteen communities achieved functional zero, which means ending veteran and/or chronic homelessness.
Rosanne once again found that the secret to success starts with real-time data. Her campaign helps communities document every person experiencing homelessness by name, on at least a monthly basis. They apply a universal triage method, similar to an emergency room, to these cases to get all stakeholders around the table to agree on actions. Testing these actions at small scale helps find interventions that work. Successful communities bring all key stakeholders from housing authorities, local government, the veterans’ administration, social-, faith- and community organizations together on a weekly basis to review and respond quickly to each new case. Their expectation is no longer to manage the ‘homeless population’, but to solve a variety of individual cases.
At first, data is collected on a monthly basis, then weekly, then every day to increase responsiveness. Proven savings in health and criminal justice costs motivate city leaders to sustain the program. Community Solutions develops partnerships with cities through research and communications, getting their evidence and messages into the places where early adopters might learn about Built for Zero.
As to who can take the lead, Rosanne found that setting new expectations in a community can come from a lot of places, not just the government. Business leaders, faith groups, the broader public sector workforce. It is critical to not see Built for Zero as a quick fix, but a change to the system that will keep the community on top of the issue. In 2020, Community Solutions was awarded a $100 Million Grant from the MacArthur Foundation to help 75 communities reach functional zero by 2026.
Act II — Take Aways
“Data and evidence can be important to focus the attention of complex groups of stakeholders. Community Solutions provides a sophisticated case of creating a holistic culture of data and evidence and builds communities of practice around it.”
“Be mindful of the role of trust, even if data and evidence rule. Rosanne and her team built an exceptional reputation of quality, success, ethics, and empathy over decades that makes it easier for funders and partners to buy into their science-based practices.”
“Keep reframing your problem on your journey to change. After building facilities, Rosanne discovered new opportunities, more focused opportunities to intervene. She also became agnostic as to what exactly a solution has to look like, letting each community discover what works.”
Act III — An Experiment in Brownsville
What happens when a struggling New York City neighborhood is given the time and resources to shape its destiny? 13 years in, parents are the experts when it comes to reinventing the early childhood experience in Brownsville.
Brownsville is a neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. It was known to be among the toughest places to live and an urban planner’s nightmare: Too much public housing, leaving room for little else. It also suffered from poorer quality public services than other parts of New York City. In 2008, Rosanne wondered how what worked in the Prince George Hotel could be applied to a community of 58,000 people who had been left behind for too long. At the time, Brownsville had the highest infant mortality rate in New York, the highest high school drop out rate, the highest murder rate and was among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. The New York City government seemed to have overlooked the neighborhood for decades and was slow to act. Community Solutions got the ball rolling by incubating the Brownsville Partnership, in the hope that others would come onboard.
Rosanne’s vision was for Brownsville to become a stable neighborhood, safe and supportive for people to build better lives. Like with the Prince George, it would have to include not just better housing, but better public services. But where to start in a neighborhood with so many problems, so much violence, so much neglect? Brownsville is different from the Prince George in important ways. Unlike a building with tenants, it is a neighborhood, with no contracts or gates. And working with 58,000 people going about their lives is a different ballgame from working with 416 people who live in supported housing. And unlike the Prince George, the hundreds of services the community receives, from schools to health, welfare to street cleaning, housing to policing come from different New York City agencies. Brownsville is alive. In her mind, the way to get involved with Brownsville is to involve its people, to put them in charge.
The Brownsville Partnership started out by hiring residents with deep connections in the community to become community organizers and had them trained by world-class experts. It was critical to hire locally, to develop the skills and the muscle for the Brownsville Partnership to be led and run by the people of Brownsville.
Community organizing is much more than a meeting. It is a process of listening, building trust, learning, ideation and holding partners accountable. Done well, the residents of Brownsville would become knowledgeable and empowered to shape their destiny and hold New York City agencies accountable.
A critical milestone for the community was to have a vision, and actual plan where they wanted to go. In 2017 they published just that, the Brownsville Plan, and submitted it to the city. In its 160-year history, Brownsville residents had never expressed their ideas for the future. In fact, the greatest harm to the neighborhood was inflicted in the 1970’s by planners in city hall, designing great schemes for Brownsville, instead of with Brownsville. This kind of community organizing was new to Rosanne’s work. It took a long time, several years, but she saw it as a critical foundation to build on.
In parallel, Community Solutions began to measure what was going on. They knew that New York City delivered poorer public services in Brownsville, but they now needed the data around which they could demand improvements. This was hard and slow work as agencies dragged their feet to release information. But good data had led to success in the Prince George and Built for Zero, leading to specific conversations about people, their needs, what needed to be done to support them.
The Brownsville Plan was also about re-imagining Brownsville.
One of the priorities was to change the early childhood experience. The community wanted to provide a healthier, supportive and safe environment for children and families. Local people and services worked together with experts, becoming experts themselves. Together, they created United for Brownsville in 2018. Funded by Robin Hood, a non-profit that fights poverty, United for Brownsville is a partnership between Community Solutions and SCO, a large non-profit that provides family services. Together, they focus on early childhood development, on the social-emotional learning and language skills of 0–3 year old kids, to set them up for equity in education and life.
Kassa Belay and David Harrington are the co-directors of what is called the ‘backbone’ of United for Brownsville. They point out that United for Brownsville is unusual in that it is led by both parents and service providers. 21 family members are organized in a Family Advisory Board. Their lived experiences make them experts, and United for Brownsville pays them for their expertise. 40+ providers of social, education and health services for infants and toddlers are organized into a Provider Action Team. The backbone team facilitates the collaborations among families and providers. This set-up is designed specifically to address the racial inequities that marked the provision and uptake of city services in Brownsville.
One example is Early Intervention, a city offering of free services to children 0–36 months old with developmental delays. Parents of Black and Hispanic Children in Brownsville were accessing these services at much lower rates (-30%) than other parts of the city. The Family Advisory Board, reaching back into communities, reported the barriers families experience in accessing Early Intervention services. Many were not technical, but to do with a lack of trust in the evaluation process. They developed and implemented the idea of instituting an independent Early Intervention Ambassador to help navigate the Early Intervention system. Aileen Gonzales, was recruited by the family representatives as a trusted facilitator on their behalf, but also liaising with city agencies and service providers.
Just like in the Prince George Hotel and the Functional Zero campaign, data is taking a central role in United for Brownsville. After years of cultivating trust and enabling the community to find its voice and experiment with interventions, Kassa and David are deeply impressed by the sophistication with which the community is working with Early Intervention referral data, the only data set the city’s social services have made available to United for Brownsville to-date. In 2020 and 2021, referrals of Black and Hispanic children were practically on par with the rest of the city.
United for Brownsville started as a hypothesis and experiment to let a community take charge. Despite its marked differences to the Prince George and Built for Zero programs, it relies on detailed and personal data around which to test and improve interventions that work. But unlike the intentional goals set by the homelessness programs, it is the families of Brownsville that determine what their vision of success looks like. After an intentionally slow start, it now moves at the ever-increasing speed of trust and capability of its members.
Act III — Take Aways
“Create space for bold experiments like United for Brownsville that are both inspired by your practices (e.g. data and evidence) but also explore more open-ended issues like community organizing that may seem hard to implement at scale.”
“If you believe that your residents are experts in their own lives, treat them like experts. Consider paying them for their time, handing them real decision-making powers, and trusting them to set the pace and direction of the work to change systems.”
“Know when going slow will get everyone to the right place, faster. Be mindful, and make sure everyone shares the simple truth: there is no shortcut to community organizing and empowerment. United for Brownsville shows what the process can look like, how long it may take, but also the impactful outcomes it can achieve.”
