Collaboration

I am on my way home from spending a couple of days in beautiful sunny San Diego, California. I was speaking at the Region IX Health Care for the Homeless Conference.  The conference is an extension of the ongoing homelessness advocacy work of the National HCH Council - an absolutely fantastic organization based out of Nashville, TN.

I enjoy speaking at these conferences. There are such amazing people working in homelessness services delivery and attending the conferences is a great place to reconnect with old friends and inspiring thought leaders and change agents. The people who work in homeless health clinics, supportive housing programs and mental health and substance use treatment programs around the country are some of the most amazing people I have ever met.

I spoke at this conference with my esteemed colleague Steven Samra. Steven and I talked about our work on a new model of outreach we are calling "Housing-Focused Outreach" (HFO). Steven and I (along with the amazing intellectual Kenneth Kraybill) have been incubating the ideas of HFO for a few years. Our ideas are not unique. They are born from the work of Dr. Sam Tsemberis and the 100,000 Homes Project. Our ideas are also born from our years of experience in serving people experiencing homelessness and the work we have all been doing over the past two years in visiting supportive housing programs around the U.S.

Our talk is about shifting the paradigm of services delviery and considering the ways that a new model can be developed and operationalized to agency level activities. You could really sum up our talk into a couple of pithy statements: (1) in order to truly end chronic homelessness, we [homeless service providers and advocates] need to lead with housing and build effective bridges to supportive services; and (2) the only way to assure adequate access to housing and supportive services is to build bridges of collaboration with a number of organizations and resources. We talk about the fact that most communities around the country have the "pieces" to put together a really effective model to end chronic homelessness. The issue, however, is that these pieces are fractured and disjointed. Our main predicate for the HFO model is training service providers to be experts in building partnerships.

What is most striking to me whenever I give this talk, is the fact that people are struck by how little collaboration actually occurs in services delivery. I hear over and over again at talks like this - "oh that [collaborating with partner agencies] won't work . . . we are all fighting for the same pot of money and we can't really collaborate or we will loose our agency level effectiveness."

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand the "no money, no mission" paradigm. I also know that without collaboration and resource sharing - true, lasting change is not possible. I am not sure how we can get more people invested in the idea that collaboration is one of greatest underutilized tools. I know that it will take some serious ego slaying and a strong commitment to service.

At the end of our talk today I had an opportunity to speak with a service provider. He told me about her efforts to get organizations to build a coalition in his community. He told me about the 6-months it took him to schedule the first meeting of the various homelessness services agencies in his area. He told me that he had not given up hope that the coalition will pay off with great dividends. I complimented him on his efforts and reassured him that his efforts would indeed pay-off. I told him that he may never know how much of an impact his efforts will have - but, I told him, if his efforts led to ending the experience of chronic homelessness for one person . . . his efforts were very worthwhile.