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How These Cities Ended Chronic Homelessness

Fast Company Mar 20, 2019
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
Click here for more.
How These Cities Ended Chronic Homelessness Giving Compass
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• In collaboration with nonprofit Community Solutions and the Tableau Foundation, three cities were able to end chronic homelessness using data visualization programs. 

• How can more partnerships between nonprofits, donors, and tech companies help address social problems? 

• Read about how tech companies are trying to inspire others to fight homelessness. 


In late February, the city of Abilene, Texas, made an announcement: It had ended local veteran homelessness. It was the first community in the state and the ninth in the country to reach that goal, as part of a national program called Built for Zero. Now, through the same program, Abilene is working to end chronic homelessness. While homelessness might often be seen as an intractable problem because of its complexity–or one that costs more to solve than communities can afford–the program is proving that is not the case.

“By ending homelessness, we mean getting to a place where it’s rare, brief, and it gets solved correctly and quickly when it does happen,” says Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, the nonprofit that leads the Built for Zero program. “That’s a completely achievable end state, we now see.” The nonprofit, which calls this goal “functional zero,” announced today that it is accelerating its work in 50 communities.


Learning and benchmarking are key steps towards becoming an impact giver. If you are interested in giving with impact on Impact Philanthropy take a look at these selections from Giving Compass.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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    Do Mother And Infant Home Visit Programs Work?

    The Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation-Strong Start (MIHOPE-Strong Start) is the largest random assignment study to date to examine the effectiveness of home visiting services on improving birth outcomes and infant and maternal health care use for expectant mothers. The study includes local home visiting programs that use one of two national evidence-based models that have been effective at improving birth outcomes: Healthy Families America (HFA) and NurseFamily Partnership (NFP). Sponsors of the study are the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS); the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF); and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). MDRC is conducting the study in partnership with James Bell Associates, Johns Hopkins University, Mathematica Policy Research, and New York University. This report presents an early examination of the baseline characteristics of families and local home visiting programs in the study. Specifically, the report presents descriptive information on 1,221 families for whom data are available, representing about 40 percent of the final sample, and discusses select characteristics of the local programs participating in the study. To provide context for understanding the types of families and local programs described, the report also details the process by which the study team recruited local programs for participation. A total of 67 local home visiting programs across 17 states are contributing to this analysis and will be included in the final report. The MIHOPE-Strong Start program recruitment team employed a structured process over two years to recruit 20 programs into the study. An additional 47 HFA and NFP programs in a companion study called the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE) are also included in the analysis. Families enrolled in the study tend to face a number of challenges, especially as expectant parents. The average participant, at the time of study entry, was young (half were under age 21), and one in two reported experiencing food insecurity in the past year. About 40 percent reported symptoms of depression or anxiety. Only 8 percent of the sample reported smoking during pregnancy, although 20 percent reported that smoking occurred in the home, which indicates potential fetal exposure to secondhand smoke. The local programs serving these families are putting a high priority on outcomes that are relevant for improving infant and maternal health, and they have the implementation system supports in place to carry out their service plans. Notable areas where local programs differed include intended caseload sizes; policies on screening for mental health, substance use, and intimate partner violence; and policies for providing education and support when problems are detected. These differences may affect actual services delivered, which is an issue that will be explored in the final report. This report lays the groundwork for the final report, which will examine how local program implementation processes predict actual service delivery, describe impacts of home visiting on family outcomes, and include results from cost analyses when possible. Read the source article at mdrc.org


One key to the process is data, and a visual dashboard that lets agencies track people experiencing homelessness in real time. In Abilene, with a population a little more than 120,000, for example, the city located every homeless veteran, gathered information about each individual situation, and stored this information in a “by-name list” that was continually updated.

“It basically just forced us to continuously look to change improvements to our system, and how to use real-time data to improve our performance,” says John Meier, the program manager for supportive services for veteran families for the West Central Texas Regional Foundation.

Community Solutions had previously worked with 186 cities in a campaign that got more than 100,000 homeless people into housing in less than four years. But it wanted to go further. “We got to a point where we helped communities house a lot more people and get better at housing people,” Haggerty says.

The nonprofit partnered with the Tableau Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Tableau Software, to use the company’s data visualization tools. Being able to easily track the data helped communities in the program shift “from incremental improvement to transformational results,” Haggerty says.

Communities in the program use a coordinated approach. Bergen County, New Jersey, with a population of nearly 1 million, was the first in the country to end chronic homelessness, reaching the goal in 2017. (Six months earlier, it had also ended veteran homelessness.)

Read the full article about ending chronic homelessness by Adele Peters at Fast Company 

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