Does the Homeless Service Sector Have a Strategy?
I recently posed a relatively simple question on Linkedin — in a sentence, what is our sector-wide strategy for ending homelessness?
I got a lot of thoughtful responses, and here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
- There is no sector-wide strategy. That’s sad to admit, but I think it’s an accurate assessment.
2. We have a lot of different plans, but is it necessarily true that a plan is a strategy? If I follow a map that leads to the wrong destination, does it matter how well I navigate it?
3. It feels like “Housing First” used to be a unifying strategy but maybe not anymore? There’s probably something very valuable to unpack here around what happens when we take a specific intervention (i.e., a methodology for helping people experiencing chronic homelessness get into and maintain permanent supportive housing), we expand it to a philosophy without quality controls, and then that term gets co-opted against us (see next).
4. To whatever extent our strategy requires buy-in from elected officials, we don’t really have it. Federally, homelessness is not a priority. At state and local levels, the trend is increasingly shifting to enforcement and criminalization.
5. Ensuring we have sufficient funding and resources seems like a key, unifying goal.
6. Being sufficiently resourced means concurrent investment. There are a number of key programmatic components to homeless systems of care — effective prevention, effective shelter, etc. We need all of these things at the same time.
7. There’s an ongoing tension over what we’re actually responsible for. Should we be focusing our efforts on the best possible “emergency” response to our nation’s housing crisis (i.e., ending people’s literal homelessness as quickly as possible) and/or should we be focusing on addressing the underlying socioeconomic issues creating that emergency in the first place (e.g., the cost of housing)?
Finally, no one said this, but I would imagine many thought it — I certainly did, and it gave me pause before asking anything at all. With all of the craziness currently happening at the federal level, how could we possibly think strategically right now?
While these latest pressures are real and extreme, after 15 years of working to end homelessness, I don’t know about you, but I am completely tired of always being on the defensive. It is exhausting and is likely one of the many factors fueling burnout in our sector.
There are always going to be macro forces outside of our control — recessions, political shifts, public health crises, environmental catastrophes, etc.
The chaos of these moments is not an excuse for the lack of a bedrock strategy and approach that can weather these storms, and just as importantly, a vision and framework that proactively creates and/or takes advantage of new opportunities, because they are always there too.
