Background

For many communities the gap between transformative policy agendas and fully implemented solutions is politics. (1) However, historically, the housing and homelessness field has not deliberately engaged with these politics—instead focusing on policy. Our tactics until now have relied on faith in trusted federal institutions that were generally good partners in implementing these policy agendas once they were architected and aligned to best practices like housing first. This has led to an overreliance on ensuring access to institutions with existing power rather than focusing on building power and political will in jurisdictions across the country.

We also have evidence that when the policy agenda and the political will align at the local levels transformative action is possible. We have seen this most demonstratively in the work to end veteran homelessness. In this instance we had both the political will and power at the federal and local level (lead through the mayor’s challenge); as well as the necessary resources. Houston, TX is one of several examples across the country. And, importantly, we also had a surge of veterans in key political positions—demonstrating the value of the inclusion of those affected. We need to replicate this kind of work across communities and for every marginalized population.

The coronavirus pandemic provides a generational opportunity to radically redesign our approach to preventing and ending homelessness. We must act with urgency to create and begin execution of a long-term vision for transforming America, that responds to the magnitude of the crisis at hand and sets an architecture for a housing safety net that is built in collaboration with people who use it. Now is the time to radically reimagine the way the field conducts itself.

As the pandemic continues to unfold, we are seeing in real time the difference between state and local governments where the political will to approach coronavirus responses with racial and economic justice at the forefront versus those that don’t. The inclusion of people with lived experience of homelessness, the prioritization of marginalized communities, is proving difficult not just for national TA providers but also for local decision makers.

The energy we’ve spent to drive a federal housing first agenda and push the conversation around racial justice has not been in vain. But, it’s time for us to begin organizing and acting in ways that have the power to counter ongoing efforts to disempower, criminalize, and indenture people who have lost their housing. We want to build an effort that can effectively take on the complicated political challenges in communities across the country.

(1) As adrienne maree brown writes, “We were trying to impact the federal election…And what I saw clearly was that, at a local level, we—Americans—don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice… It was and is devastatingly clear to me that until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.”

Theory of Change

Our theory of change is simple: If we focus on building political power we can end homelessness. We understand political power to be fundamentally rooted in people. Our ability to galvanize people allows us to in turn motivate elected officials to pursue bold and decisive strategies to end homelessness. This was the case in Seattle and King County where the NIS team was able to lead a series of dramatic reforms through the deployment of an explicit organizing framework.

Hear community members speak in support of the legislation passed at the end of 2019:

In order to replicate that work in communities across the country we have identified three broad goals beneath that theory of change:

1. We need to build the political power of historically marginalized communities. A cursory review of the stated missions of the leading organizations in the field repeatedly refer to developing best practices/policies and advocating for them with the federal government. There is rarely mention of community education, organizing, base building, or state, county, or municipal government as key focal points or activities. In order to shift this reality we will need to develop ground-level political strategies for cities, counties, and states across the country. We know what it takes to prevent and end homelessness—now we need to build the will to get to get it done.

2. We need true inclusion of those most impacted. Transformative movements have always been made up of and lead by those most impacted. As was pointed out by leadership at a recent national meeting, because our sector is not made up of those most impacted, we are currently an outgrowth of the non-profit industrial complex—not a true movement. We need an infusion of transformative ideas and energy. We believe, because history has shown us, transformative ideas and energy will not come without the leadership from people who have experienced homelessness.

3. We need to maximize and consolidate the talent we have. Our best talent for this type of work is spread thin across a number of national organizations with competing priorities. Our political work often lacks coordination because organizational priorities are not aligned to execute on complicated field-wide tasks. We imagine pulling together a group of people who bring the skills, ideas, unwavering commitment and best training from these national organizations to help build a new way of leading the field.

Theory of Execution

Instead of forming a coalition to achieve these goals, we want to consolidate the necessary resources (both people and funds) to fill this void within one agency that can deploy them. Given its broad mandate for systems transformation and relative newness NIS can absorb both the influx of talent and work without existing rigid structures or mandates impeding the potential.

Immediate Action

The coronavirus pandemic has created a crisis for our housing and homelessness systems. As an unprecedented number of people are driven into unemployment by an economic contraction our social systems are on the precipice of an overwhelming surge. As more people experience financial hardship the homelessness sector will be called upon to do extraordinary work in order to both keep people housed and rapidly rehouse people who come to experience homelessness despite our efforts.

We are already seeing that the fundamental transformations necessary at the policy level are facing implementation challenges at the local level. A group of leaders from across the housing and homelessness sector have been in conversation and agree that creating a vehicle to assist in the political component of local-level transformation is could be housed at NIS.

Additionally, this group has identified some preliminary activities to pursue:

• Coronavirus Pandemic Equitable Transformation Hub. As the nation continues to respond to the coronavirus pandemic communities and systems are rapidly defaulting to inequitable and unjust response patterns because equitable practices are not yet deeply ingrained in the work. While we can plainly see in the data that the virus is hitting communities of color, poor people, people experiencing homelessness, and those who are incarcerated particularly hard we are lagging in the generation of responses for those communities. The Coronavirus Pandemic Transformation Hub would focus explicitly on providing support to the political and technical assistance leaders across the country who need to be able to rapidly integrate justice frameworks into their immediate disaster responses and develop the actual tools to support their deployment. Importantly this hub can continue to support these leaders both in immediate efforts to contain spread and in rehousing and recovery.
• Activate people not just institutions. Currently our work relies heavily on access to specific institutions with power rather than galvanizing people. A switch to a politically based strategy recognizes that our tactics must fundamentally change. Our movement needs to deploy relational and organizing frameworks to begin to change the course of American history on housing and homelessness.2 We will identify key jurisdictions and work to actively connect with and recruit organizers from within communities who can assist in building the local willpower to advance a housing agenda.
• Strengthen and Unify Our Advocacy. Together we can design and implement an equity- centered policy platform to end homelessness that addresses local, state, and federal needs. The first federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness, Opening Doors provided a preliminary roadmap to success. We intend to develop explicit state-by-state strategies, partnerships with states and cities to advance those strategies, and legislative advocacy to ensure that all levels of government understand the urgency and scope of the crisis at hand.
• Position the Movement. The coronavirus is once again demonstrating that our work has historically existed within an echo chamber. We don’t have ongoing relationships with advocates for equity and transformation in public health (a particularly relevant example currently), mental health, or justice reform. In order to meet the challenges ahead we must be partnered more closely with our sister movements. We need to be positioned to do the same, no issue stands alone. To accomplish this, we intend to work with other national organizations to begin a series of “call-in” events that include conference calls, round-tables, and convenings to connect with the leadership of other movements and begin to work to strengthen our collaborative capacity.
• Move Power: People with power are often reluctant or ill-equipped to move or transfer their power because of structural processes. Our team can design the blueprint for power structures that include people with lived experience and the roadmaps to support communities in moving power to people with lived experience. From there, we can support communities in implementing those structures and processes, learn from each other, and lead the field forward.
• Connect, Streamline, and Strengthen Youth and Adult Systems: Currently siloed, our efforts to address youth and adult needs must to be streamlined and strengthened. The Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) bore far more lessons learned than we could’ve anticipated with its start, but we must keep building on those lessons and designing more flexible, informed systems based on what we have learned.

To learn more about the 100-Day Plan for the NIS Center to End Homelessness please visit this link and enter the password “100days”.

First 100 Days

A timeline of the first 100 days can be accessed by clicking here.

Long Term Transformation

In order to see long-term change in communities and across the nation our movements will have to take a substantially more integrated approach to transformation. Our national systems are deeply siloed with interagency working groups between different secretariats consistently attempting to grapple with the delineations of authority and responsibility embedded in the appropriations process. However, at the local level these lines are substantively more blurred with significant differences from jurisdiction to jurisdiction over where certain systems live and operate.3 In order to pull off effective systems transformation efforts we need to be able to be able to coordinate across these silos and move, hand-in- hand towards a shared vision of the future.4

In order to do make that possible the NIS team is proposing to expand the model of the Center on Homelessness to stand up corresponding hubs that deploy similar local organizing and transformation frameworks but aligned around different subject matter expertise. The proposed initial expansions are a Center on Economic Justice and a Center on Transformative Justice. The NIS team is prioritizing these areas as local communities increasingly look to reimagine the ways capital could flow through communities and to create non-carceral solutions to forms of harm. Both of these issue areas have significant interrelationships with housing and homelessness. Coordinating activities across these spaces and driving an explicitly anti-racist agenda in all of them could play a pivotal role in fundamentally transforming society as we understand