Speaker 1: Pushkin. Why can't we feed the world? Is it possible
Speaker 1: to cure cancer? What will it take for governments and
Speaker 1: citizens to commit to act on climate change? Why haven't
Speaker 1: we solved the issue of equal pay for equal work?
Speaker 1: Why are so many people trapped in work that doesn't
Speaker 1: be in one of the world's richest countries. Yes, there's
Speaker 1: a lot to worry about these days, but there are
Speaker 1: so many people working on solutions. I may have Higgins
Speaker 1: and this is solvable interviews with the world's biggest thinkers
Speaker 1: who are working to solve the world's biggest problems. My
Speaker 1: solvable is to get one million women and girls to
Speaker 1: learn how to code by the year twenty twenty. My
Speaker 1: solvable is that refugees and displaced people should have poverty raids,
Speaker 1: inequality raids, lack of opportunity no greater than the rest
Speaker 1: of the population. My solvable is to take energy to
Speaker 1: where communities are. We are not going to solve poverty
Speaker 1: in the twenty first century if we don't solve energy poverty.
Speaker 1: I have a solvable too. It's sharing these solutions wherever
Speaker 1: and however I can. I'm a contributing writer for The
Speaker 1: New York Times and The host of the podcast Maybe
Speaker 1: in America, Immigration IRL and the climate justice podcast Mothers
Speaker 1: of Invention with Mary Robinson. I'm also a comedian and
Speaker 1: I've performed all over the world. Now I live in
Speaker 1: New York, where I write and podcasts about things I
Speaker 1: care about, and I do so with some levity and
Speaker 1: some hope because I think that's important. So does the
Speaker 1: Rockefeller Foundation. And that's why we're making this podcast together
Speaker 1: with Pushkin Industries, to introduce you to some of the
Speaker 1: incredible people who are making a real difference to millions
Speaker 1: of lives around the world. Get ready to be seriously inspired.
Speaker 1: In this our first episode, Malcolm Gladwell interviews Rosanne Haggarty.
Speaker 1: Rosanne is an internationally recognized leader in developing innovative strategies
Speaker 1: to end homelessness and to strengthen communities. She's the president
Speaker 1: and CEO of Community Solutions. That's an organization that helps
Speaker 1: people around the world find what works where they live
Speaker 1: to solve homelessness for every individual who needs that help.
Speaker 1: Now a bit of context, because it's hard to understand
Speaker 1: the scale of this problem without some numbers. More than
Speaker 1: half a million people in the United States experience homelessness
Speaker 1: on any given night, and nearly two hundred thousand of
Speaker 1: those people are unsheltered. That means they're on the streets
Speaker 1: without access to emergency shelters or transitional houses. But Rosanne
Speaker 1: says that tackling this at the individual level is a
Speaker 1: key to solving it for everyone. Her organization builds neighborhood
Speaker 1: partnerships to bring together local residents and institutions to actually
Speaker 1: change the conditions that produce homelessness. It's an approach Rosanne
Speaker 1: has developed over nearly forty years of working on the problem.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen eighty two, she spent a year after
Speaker 1: high school working in a homeless shelter right here in
Speaker 1: New York. And that's one experience that's really fueled her activism.
Speaker 1: As you'll hear, Rosanna Malcolm know each other. Back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, Malcolm wrote a New Yorker article
Speaker 1: called million Dollar Murray about why it may be easier
Speaker 1: to solve rather than just manage homelessness. That piece really
Speaker 1: rang true for Rosanne, and they catch up on development
Speaker 1: since then. All right, let's take a listen and i'll
Speaker 1: talk to you after. I think it's significant that in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, The problem of homelessness in New York
Speaker 1: City was of a very relatively small scale. It was growing,
Speaker 1: It was terrible for people experiencing it, but it was
Speaker 1: possible to believe as a young person that this was
Speaker 1: an entirely containable and solvable problem. No one had good
Speaker 1: information there, but the estimates were maybe three thousand people
Speaker 1: in a city of pushing eight million. My overwhelming impression
Speaker 1: was we're asking the wrong questions. I remember thinking there
Speaker 1: was this huge disconnect between what our ideas were the
Speaker 1: people kind of responsible for identifying or naming the problem,
Speaker 1: and what the young people or the women were saying.
Speaker 1: These young people were looking for help with finding a
Speaker 1: place to live, finding a job, and my instructions as
Speaker 1: a volunteer was how to turn on the coffee and
Speaker 1: put away the cots in the morning. No one had
Speaker 1: given us any information about how to help people connect
Speaker 1: with the things they needed, and so it was that
Speaker 1: sense of disconnect and sort of the gap between what
Speaker 1: people experiencing the problem we're seeking and what we were
Speaker 1: set up to provide that I think really plunge me
Speaker 1: into this work permanently, that you know, there is a
Speaker 1: sense of we're coming about this in a way that
Speaker 1: doesn't match the nature of the problem. You talk to
Speaker 1: me about housing first, because as an outsider it is
Speaker 1: not obvious to us. If you ask me naively, I
Speaker 1: would have said the opposite. You need to get people,
Speaker 1: you know, their mental health issues, address their employment, dealt
Speaker 1: with their family life straightened out before you get them
Speaker 1: stabilized and housing. And you see, and this idea is
Speaker 1: the opposite of that housing first, right, Housing first has
Speaker 1: become a hugely important principle, but still not completely and
Speaker 1: fully adopted. But think of it, this is something we
Speaker 1: all know. How are we going to accomplish anything in
Speaker 1: our lives, hold a job, maintain stable relationships, manage our
Speaker 1: health that we don't have a stable place to live.
Speaker 1: And this notion of stable housing is just so basic.
Speaker 1: But in fact, for many years it became inverted, as
Speaker 1: you say, Malcolm, where you know, there's a sense that
Speaker 1: people needed to have insight into their mental illness, or
Speaker 1: needed to be clean and sober, or needed this needed
Speaker 1: that housing was conditional on behavior, and in fact people's
Speaker 1: other conditions they vastly improve, you know, once there's a
Speaker 1: stable environment for them to live in and to manage
Speaker 1: their other needs from and the fact that this still
Speaker 1: is contested is one of the things that really needs
Speaker 1: to be challenged everywhere. You'll still find places where like, well,
Speaker 1: let's study it one more time. But in fact it's
Speaker 1: something that we all know. Imagine our lives without a
Speaker 1: stable place to live. There's three things and you can
Speaker 1: add to this list. One is the housing fresh principle.
Speaker 1: Two is the question of the resources argument, and third
Speaker 1: is the question of tools. And I realize that tools
Speaker 1: is the new one, the really interesting one that you've
Speaker 1: gotten very involved in. But let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about this resources question, because the second great impediment to
Speaker 1: communities addressing their homelessness issue is the notion that it
Speaker 1: will bankrupt them. Well, the interesting thing, Malcolm, and you're
Speaker 1: actually a character in this story, is that communities are
Speaker 1: spending a fortune not solving the problem of homelessness. The
Speaker 1: costs are showing up typically and most profoundly in the
Speaker 1: healthcare system, but also in the criminal justice system. And
Speaker 1: when you look at across communities, the burden of this unresolved,
Speaker 1: solvable problem on communities is profound. Ask any librarian the country,
Speaker 1: any emt, any police officer, any court officer, our public workforce,
Speaker 1: teachers dealing with children who are living in shelters, the
Speaker 1: emergency room, nurses. You just go down the list of
Speaker 1: our public workforce and the degree to which their jobs
Speaker 1: are consumed trying to respond in a humane way to
Speaker 1: those in a situation that is itself solvable. So the
Speaker 1: costs are spread all over the place, and yet communities,
Speaker 1: i think, seeing to build housing or to subsidize it,
Speaker 1: or to attach mental health resources, we can't afford to
Speaker 1: do this. You are paying these costs anyway and creating
Speaker 1: an environment of everyone losing, as well as trapping individuals
Speaker 1: and families in a state of limbo, which is so
Speaker 1: much more humanely and efficiently addressed with just dealing with
Speaker 1: getting them into a stable housing situation. So this proposition
Speaker 1: that homelessness is more expensive to ignore than it is
Speaker 1: to solve. Tell me why. That's what's hard about making
Speaker 1: that argument. Well, let me go back to the point
Speaker 1: of your being a character in the drama Malcolm You
Speaker 1: who wrote really a seminal piece in The New Yorker
Speaker 1: called Million Dollar Murray and explored through the life of
Speaker 1: this one sort of iconic figure in Reno Nevada, who
Speaker 1: was known to everyone, this individual who needed someone to
Speaker 1: basically take responsibility for seeing that his rent was paid
Speaker 1: and that he had some structure in his life and
Speaker 1: the counseling support he needed when he needed it, that
Speaker 1: he was actually doing well with just a basic structure
Speaker 1: of participating in a community program. For want of that
Speaker 1: kind of coordination and accountability, this poor man bounced in
Speaker 1: and out of the emergency room, rehab programs, the court system, jails,
Speaker 1: running up a bill of over a million dollars in
Speaker 1: municipal services over the period of time before his premature death.
Speaker 1: And so it's because no one sees the picture hole
Speaker 1: on home less, we're allowed to think that this is
Speaker 1: actually kind of a marginal or a low cost problem,
Speaker 1: or dwell in the myth that these are individuals who
Speaker 1: are making a choice to opt out of society or services,
Speaker 1: and in fact, what we've found is someone taking responsibility
Speaker 1: for seeing that each person who is in this overwhelmed
Speaker 1: state actually has a stable place to live in enough
Speaker 1: structure and support in their lives. Costs a fraction of
Speaker 1: what all of this diffuse misery and municipal burden actually
Speaker 1: ends up costing, but it's getting to that point where
Speaker 1: everyone is accounted for and everyone has a plan. And
Speaker 1: the thing that we have discovered in our work with
Speaker 1: many communities around the country now is that it's very
Speaker 1: possible to get there. That in no community, even communities
Speaker 1: that feel overwhelmed by homelessness, is the number of those
Speaker 1: experiencing homelessness more than a fraction of one percent of
Speaker 1: their population. This is a total last mile problem. And
Speaker 1: if we grab the picture whole and have that community
Speaker 1: level accountability, we find that there are many more assets,
Speaker 1: many more solutions than communities have imagined. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get a sense of the level of kind of baseline
Speaker 1: resistance to these arguments you're making. Are you saying that
Speaker 1: this is a tough sell? I'll say where the resistance
Speaker 1: typically comes from, that it's a leadership gap that that
Speaker 1: person who or a group of people who are well
Speaker 1: positioned to basically call it out, that you know, they
Speaker 1: are blocked from doing that for whatever reason they don't
Speaker 1: feel they have the political support. There are internal conflicts.
Speaker 1: I did not coin the phrase the homeless industrial complex,
Speaker 1: but as in so many areas of failure, frankly, in
Speaker 1: terms of our civic life. You are, as an organization
Speaker 1: or an agency rewarded for maintaining this at us quo.
Speaker 1: So there's resistance for reasons of leadership, inertia, fear about
Speaker 1: you know, what will happen to my organization or my
Speaker 1: job at the agency. And there's also just in larger cities,
Speaker 1: still this myth of the overwhelming nature of the problem,
Speaker 1: and that's the way the problem is reported, typically bad
Speaker 1: getting worse. We've done media scans to look at you know,
Speaker 1: where are the solutions stories on homelessness, and I would
Speaker 1: say community solutions and the communities we're working with who
Speaker 1: are seeing these profound shifts. We have a job to
Speaker 1: do on communications that I think is part of what
Speaker 1: needs to happen next. That there are these communities that
Speaker 1: are now solving the problem, have ended chronic or veteran homelessness,
Speaker 1: are seeing steady month over month reductions, but we are
Speaker 1: still in a world that is convinced that this is
Speaker 1: not a solved problem despite the evidence, but with no
Speaker 1: clear endgame. Let's talk a little about these tools that
Speaker 1: allow you to see the problem. That's what you're talking about, right,
Speaker 1: You need to be able to see this problem. How
Speaker 1: does one go about visualizing in real time the problem
Speaker 1: of homelessness in a given community. What we have found
Speaker 1: is the real breakthrough moment, and we learn this with
Speaker 1: our communities. We've been working this problem a long time now,
Speaker 1: and it was realizing that you need by name, real
Speaker 1: time information on who's experiencing homelessness in a community and how. Now,
Speaker 1: homelessness we've come to see is like saying we've got
Speaker 1: a sickness issue in our community. It tells you nothing.
Speaker 1: You need to know exactly how and what. Was there
Speaker 1: a family break up issue last night and that needs
Speaker 1: some quick intervention in repair? Or is there a chronict
Speaker 1: mental health problem and you've been on the street for
Speaker 1: thirty years, Totally different conditions that require different groups of
Speaker 1: people to collaborate and respond, and often organizations that have
Speaker 1: not a whole lot to do with homelessness. You know,
Speaker 1: it's domestic violence agency, it's it's medicaid. You know that
Speaker 1: these other failures show up in homelessness, and if no
Speaker 1: one's asking the right questions, then the problem just compounds.
Speaker 1: And so the first step we discovered is helping communities
Speaker 1: develop quality data that means you basically need to know
Speaker 1: with a very high degree of reliability. Are you accounting
Speaker 1: for everyone? And so that means that you need to
Speaker 1: have in the room all of the outreach teams, the
Speaker 1: soup kitchens, the shelters. Everyone in a community who is
Speaker 1: touching the problem needs to basically share information on who
Speaker 1: they're working with and get signed releases from those individuals
Speaker 1: and families so that they can be helped to get
Speaker 1: out of the situation or avoid it altogether. Getting to
Speaker 1: a point where you know in real time what's actually
Speaker 1: happening and how the problem is moving and changing, because
Speaker 1: that very highly specific information will allow you to see
Speaker 1: where you're housing placement rate needs to be increased, where
Speaker 1: you have problems with certain agencies, or certain conditions or
Speaker 1: certain events in your communities that are creating incidents of homelessness.
Speaker 1: And in that context of having the full picture and
Speaker 1: being able to see the shifts, communities can be trained
Speaker 1: and have been trained to use quality improvement human centered design.
Speaker 1: How you facilitate meetings across different sectors, basically, how you
Speaker 1: keep coming back to that shared goal of are we
Speaker 1: reducing and getting closer to zero. Let's walk through a
Speaker 1: hypothetical example. I am the mayor of a city of
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty thousand in Ohio, I have a
Speaker 1: homelessness problem. I'll call you up. Question number one. If
Speaker 1: I have none of these systems in place, do I
Speaker 1: know how many homeless people I have? Probably not. You
Speaker 1: probably are relying on your annual point in time count
Speaker 1: that is mandated by HUD, and that's at best an estimate.
Speaker 1: We have found it's wildly off on a general basis.
Speaker 1: When you can off by two hundred wow. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: like you really don't know what's going on, but you
Speaker 1: have that snap off just because this population is so
Speaker 1: transitory and hard to find, and well, there are various
Speaker 1: methodologies that HUD will accept as an acceptable way of
Speaker 1: getting to an estimate. So there's great variability in that.
Speaker 1: And then there's a coverage issue. Typically communities don't have
Speaker 1: in one night the ability to really understand fully what's
Speaker 1: going on. And then, as you point out, there's the variability.
Speaker 1: Just what's happening on you one day is not what's
Speaker 1: happening across the course of a year. As someone has said,
Speaker 1: you know, a snapshot is the wrong method. You need
Speaker 1: a video to understand what's going on with with homelessness.
Speaker 1: As a mayor, you're probably the best information you've got
Speaker 1: is wildly wrong plus or minus. And then the second thing,
Speaker 1: that point in time count tells you nothing that's actionable.
Speaker 1: It doesn't tell you who in that population you think
Speaker 1: you have that is experiencing homelessness actually has a one
Speaker 1: night problem versus a thirty year problem, And so you
Speaker 1: have no idea like who's going to correct the problem themselves,
Speaker 1: which is the principal way people escape homelessness by the
Speaker 1: way they sort it out, versus who we're going to
Speaker 1: need to actively intervene to help and kind of get
Speaker 1: everybody around the same table in order to accomplish that.
Speaker 1: Here's the people that you need to bring to the
Speaker 1: first meeting. You need the coalition of not for profits
Speaker 1: that's receiving money from HUT. You need the head of
Speaker 1: your housing authority, and you need your local VA Medical
Speaker 1: center director. Get those folks in a room, and that's
Speaker 1: the starting point. They're the core team, and it's that
Speaker 1: group that has to commit to solving the same problem.
Speaker 1: Like we're all here to actually get to an end state,
Speaker 1: which is zero, which is that we don't have chronic homelessness.
Speaker 1: When you say collect data on these people talking about
Speaker 1: that means so you need to know one's name, you
Speaker 1: need to have a medical history, a background, you profile
Speaker 1: of me correct. Most communities are using a common assessment
Speaker 1: tool now I think they're about two hundred a least
Speaker 1: two undred community who were using an assessment tool that
Speaker 1: basically gets your identity, but also self reported medical conditions
Speaker 1: that correlate with what we know about premature death. Homelessness
Speaker 1: is a more lethal condition than most cancers, frankly, and
Speaker 1: also some of the critical information that can allow a
Speaker 1: community to help match you with resources that can enable
Speaker 1: you to escape homelessness, like do you have a history
Speaker 1: of being in the foster care system? Are you over
Speaker 1: the age of sixty or sixty five and therefore qualify
Speaker 1: for senior housing programs? For instance? Are you are you
Speaker 1: someone who's a veteran. That information already surfaces for communities
Speaker 1: more than what they had to go on in terms
Speaker 1: of the range of housing resources they already have access
Speaker 1: to that maybe are not fully deployed or efficiently matched
Speaker 1: to people who would qualify for them. And so it's
Speaker 1: that basic information like a LinkedIn page for the that's
Speaker 1: a good way of thinking of it for homeless population.
Speaker 1: So you say to me, Malcolm, you've got to know
Speaker 1: the names and backgrounds of your homeless population, and then
Speaker 1: you have to create this kind of video as opposed
Speaker 1: to a snapshot. What do I learn from my video?
Speaker 1: How much movement is there in this video that you're creating.
Speaker 1: What you will see in communities that have this quality
Speaker 1: by name data is every month, at the very least
Speaker 1: often every week or every day. You'll see how many
Speaker 1: individuals are moving out of homelessness. Who has been directly
Speaker 1: assisted housed in a variety of ways, first months, run
Speaker 1: security deposit, or we've reconnected you with family, or we've
Speaker 1: matched you to a housing resource. How many people have
Speaker 1: been housed, How many people that you have had in
Speaker 1: your system since you first had that quality data established,
Speaker 1: who have just gone off the radar, they remain on
Speaker 1: what we call an inactive list, but accounts for the
Speaker 1: first time for this phenomenon that all of us who've
Speaker 1: been doing this work have always understood that most people
Speaker 1: who experience homelessness resolve it themselves, and so at least
Speaker 1: by moving people to you're still aware of them, but
Speaker 1: you're not like holding a voucher for them. You're not
Speaker 1: like jamming up a waiting list, thinking where are they.
Speaker 1: The assumption becomes they have self resolved, but they come
Speaker 1: back and they don't lose their place if something else
Speaker 1: has happened, and so on. You have outflow information to
Speaker 1: show how you're performing in ratcheting up your housing placements
Speaker 1: and the effectiveness of your matching system. And then on
Speaker 1: the inflow side, you're looking at who is new into
Speaker 1: homelessness this month or this week, who has returned to homelessness,
Speaker 1: who we assisted in the past, and who have we
Speaker 1: seen come back from that inactive list. I want to
Speaker 1: go some for examples. Let's do some very specific so
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you a for example and tell
Speaker 1: me whether it's realistic. You come to me and you say, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: in your city, we've looked at your movie and we've
Speaker 1: discovered huge percentage of your homeless population is disabled bets.
Speaker 1: That is a great example to unpack, for instance, throughout
Speaker 1: the country. And it's been a commitment of the VA
Speaker 1: since two and ten to end veteran homelessness. There are
Speaker 1: sufficient resources allocated to house every remaining veteran who's experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 1: The number is just under forty thousand based on the
Speaker 1: best estimates. The problem has been finding and connecting those
Speaker 1: individuals or heads of families two housing resources, and so
Speaker 1: immediately you see you need this kind of collective, accountable
Speaker 1: structure in order to get the job done. So if
Speaker 1: there are veterans remaining homeless in a community, that's not
Speaker 1: a problem of resources. It's a problem of do you
Speaker 1: have landlords who are unwilling to accept the VA support
Speaker 1: of housing vouchers? Do you have programs that are inadvertently
Speaker 1: keeping veterans homeless because they are operating a shelter and
Speaker 1: they're not plugged into the housing resources. What this data
Speaker 1: will surface is why are we not connecting the dots
Speaker 1: in more effective ways? Because what I really am describing
Speaker 1: I think that's happened in communities MALACOLM is a cultural
Speaker 1: shift where once you say like this is actually a
Speaker 1: solvable problem, and it's on us, the people who are
Speaker 1: awareness of the resources, including where are the private landlords,
Speaker 1: who are the different organizations have resources. It's up to
Speaker 1: us to coordinate and be accountable for a result, not
Speaker 1: up to people who are overwhelmed and been turned away
Speaker 1: from programs because they're not eligible, and it's left on
Speaker 1: these overwhelmed people somehow to navigate the system. Once that flips,
Speaker 1: you begin to realize that it's many different problems and
Speaker 1: many different resources can come into play to solve them,
Speaker 1: and that in no one community is the number so
Speaker 1: overwhelming that once you see the problem clearly, are you
Speaker 1: unable to solve it. Give me a good, really specific
Speaker 1: thing you might learn from creating this movie of your
Speaker 1: homelessness problem, and how that might inform my job as mayor.
Speaker 1: Let me lift up a community like Bergen County, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: or Rockford, Illinois, or like Montgomery County, Maryland, or Gulf
Speaker 1: Coast Mississippi, places that have all ended chronic or veteran
Speaker 1: homelessness or not, and I think the mayor of those
Speaker 1: communities would see, after significant numbers of their municipal work,
Speaker 1: people working in homelessness have learned how to work as
Speaker 1: a team, have grasped the fact that this is a
Speaker 1: population level problem that we have to be all in on,
Speaker 1: and have learned frankly twenty first century problem solving skills
Speaker 1: like using data for problem solving, not for judgment, and
Speaker 1: quality improvement. That mayor will see that there is this enlivened,
Speaker 1: empowered municipal workforce that is able to problem solve not
Speaker 1: just homelessness, but the problems that contribute to homelessness. Because
Speaker 1: it's all of this same thing of fragmentation. They're going
Speaker 1: to see that they're spending money in ways that makes
Speaker 1: sense for the whole community. They're not randomly developing housing
Speaker 1: policies or homeless policies and throwing money against the wall
Speaker 1: and hoping something actually works out. That they are embracing
Speaker 1: with members of their community, this spirit of accountability for
Speaker 1: taking off hard problems that can't be solved with a
Speaker 1: single program or you know, an app, but require people
Speaker 1: to really think and work differently in teams, using real
Speaker 1: information to drive their understanding of problems as opposed to
Speaker 1: ideological views. That those are communities that are actually positioned
Speaker 1: to thrive in many ways, and that homelessness we've come
Speaker 1: to see after so many years, you know, and personally
Speaker 1: working on this issue, it is really the symptom. It's
Speaker 1: not the problem, it's the symptom of this fragmentation, the
Speaker 1: breakdown that is so overwhelming to so many communities on
Speaker 1: so many fronts. Organizing people around taking on and really
Speaker 1: committing to ending this most visible form of poverty is
Speaker 1: a way you can actually make your city work better.
Speaker 1: It's a lovely phrase the Jesuits used called descending into
Speaker 1: the particular. Descend into the particular on two of these
Speaker 1: cities and tell me how their homeless problems are different,
Speaker 1: because presumably what you learn is that every city's homeless
Speaker 1: problem is different. Well, I'll pick a blue and a
Speaker 1: red community has that, because that's unfortunately, you know, the
Speaker 1: way we sometimes think we're divided. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: everywhere people are just hungry to learn how to solve
Speaker 1: problems in their communities. So let's start with Bergen County,
Speaker 1: just outside New York City, across the George Washington Bridge,
Speaker 1: really more or less the same high cost housing market,
Speaker 1: so largely urban and suburban county. Their homelessness issues were
Speaker 1: certainly more pronounced in the poor urban centers there they
Speaker 1: have with the full on support of the county executive.
Speaker 1: Just one of the great leaders in the field, a
Speaker 1: woman named Julia Orlando, who interestingly was trained in an
Speaker 1: emergency management before she went into this field. And so
Speaker 1: they aggregated in one place. All of the players quickly
Speaker 1: realized that day was the key to this knowing who
Speaker 1: actually was homeless, rather than developing policy based on kind
Speaker 1: of theories and bad estimates. They were the first community
Speaker 1: to end chronic homelessness. They have now also ended veteran homelessness.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Julia and her team do,
Speaker 1: I mean, they are like, why is anyone even now homeless?
Speaker 1: Six months in the county. They have just changed what's normative.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that they do, which I
Speaker 1: think is so powerful, is they have a public meeting
Speaker 1: I believe it's every month somewhere in the county where
Speaker 1: they go over their progress, what they've learned about homelessness,
Speaker 1: who the remaining challenges are. They've kind of made it
Speaker 1: a community project, so it's not simply like the people
Speaker 1: who are working formally in the sector. This is I
Speaker 1: think also a case of a community figuring out a
Speaker 1: way to move its resources around very unnimbly. Once they
Speaker 1: realized the problem was somewhat different than they originally believed.
Speaker 1: Putting more money was the problem different than they believe.
Speaker 1: I think they believed that there was sort of an
Speaker 1: endless flow, and then they realized, actually, it's a more
Speaker 1: containable problem and that they saw. Having that highly specific
Speaker 1: data allowed them to start seeing problems emerging, for instance,
Speaker 1: older adults who are becoming homeless and coming into seek services,
Speaker 1: so they're able to adjust how they were targeting their
Speaker 1: resources to put more resources into older services in the
Speaker 1: community and to create specific services there. But that's one
Speaker 1: example of kind of having this line of sight into
Speaker 1: something that's emerging and that you need to get ahead of,
Speaker 1: very much a public health kind of view of a problem.
Speaker 1: Now in Bergen County, Wild Julia has done this I
Speaker 1: think masterful job of just making landlords and active citizens
Speaker 1: and libraries and local police departments aware of what's happening
Speaker 1: and roles that they can play and really consolidate kind
Speaker 1: of the work habits of the organizations, both the government
Speaker 1: organizations and the not for profits who receive resources. In
Speaker 1: Gulf Coast is like a ninety mile area along the
Speaker 1: Gulf Coast of Mississippi, like Biloxi and Past Christian and
Speaker 1: you know, the smaller like largely rural and wooded areas
Speaker 1: with these dots of small cities up to like eighty thousand.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's the largest city they have in
Speaker 1: an area with almost no state resources going into housing
Speaker 1: or human services. They have mobilized veterans organizations, their faith community.
Speaker 1: They've created outreach teams out of these church groups with
Speaker 1: vans and like knowing everyone by name. They were one
Speaker 1: of the first communities to end veteran homelessness because they
Speaker 1: were able to mobilize the very long tradition of military
Speaker 1: service and patriotism in the region and say like, this
Speaker 1: is about us, It's not about these individuals are homeless.
Speaker 1: What kind of a community are we and really tap
Speaker 1: in too there with their small businesses and people participating
Speaker 1: in like Landlord stepping up the sense of we needed
Speaker 1: each other and we needed help from everyone else. After
Speaker 1: Rita and Krina wiped out many of those cities, and
Speaker 1: so in this area where there is very little in
Speaker 1: the way of kind of a formal government supported safety net,
Speaker 1: very different geography, and kind of a different mindset about
Speaker 1: in terms of their outcomes and the way they have
Speaker 1: resourcefully deployed local assets. Very similar to Bergen County, yet
Speaker 1: in a very different area. Brought to bear once you
Speaker 1: descend into the particular, it allows you to craft strategies
Speaker 1: that are appropriate for your community. Correct, and that it's
Speaker 1: an ongoing thing. It's not like you get there once
Speaker 1: and high five it. Having systems in place and having
Speaker 1: relationships in place, and having the tools in place that
Speaker 1: allow communities to solve this problem, keep it solved, and
Speaker 1: begin moving more and more upstream to like where are
Speaker 1: the fault lines that create vulnerability for people that put
Speaker 1: them in a situation where they would lose their home? Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. This has been wonderful. This solvable
Speaker 1: was so thought provoking for me, like about how and
Speaker 1: where people get their statistics from, and then how and
Speaker 1: where they use that information. It seems like Rosanne's years
Speaker 1: spent working with people who are homeless and then building
Speaker 1: up community relationships gave her some really priceless insights. In fact,
Speaker 1: we asked Rosanne for a few suggestions about what we
Speaker 1: can do to make this problem a little more solvable.
Speaker 1: We'll do this with many of our guests, so here
Speaker 1: are her recommendations. First, create a new expectation in your community.
Speaker 1: You can visit our built for zero dot org website
Speaker 1: to see whether your community is part of the built
Speaker 1: for zero movement in the United States and if not,
Speaker 1: why not. Second, you could support telling a new story
Speaker 1: in your community, that it challenge this idea that this
Speaker 1: isn't a solvable problem. That perception and that mindset disconnect
Speaker 1: is really one of the great barriers. Now, then the
Speaker 1: idea of once your community has its number, just demand
Speaker 1: that that number be going in the right direction, or
Speaker 1: that your community, your leadership, and those working on homelessness
Speaker 1: are accounting for why they're not making progress and what
Speaker 1: other steps are needed that citizens can support. But it's
Speaker 1: this community level accountability and expectation of progress that is
Speaker 1: the most important thing that individuals can contribute to that
Speaker 1: new cultural norm. And as Rosan says, it's about changing
Speaker 1: our mindsets. You know, it's not a hopeless situation and
Speaker 1: we need to believe that in order to make it work.
Speaker 1: And remember, get involved and ask questions of your representatives.
Speaker 1: Speaking of which I loved how Malcolm role played. Being
Speaker 1: Married into Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: the Rockefeller Foundation, with production by Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mia LaBelle, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and
Speaker 1: the Great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carlie Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn
Speaker 1: more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org,
Speaker 1: slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it. T