 Hi, everybody. My name is Cecilia Munoz. I am a senior advisor at New America, and I could not be more excited about this conversation that you are joining with us today. We're going to take a little bit of a deep dive into homelessness, but we're going to take a deep dive into it through a particular lens, and that lens is the lens of public interest technology. So New America is part of a family of organizations and individuals who are kind of pioneering the development of this field of public interest tech. A very quick way and incomplete way to think about it is that public interest tech is to sort of technology professions, what public interest law is to the legal profession that doesn't fully do it justice but it's a quick way to think about it. The idea is that there are techniques that technologists use that can revolutionize problem solving, and particularly we can help revolutionize the way we solve our public problems. And I say this as a as a policymaker, I did spend eight years in the Obama administration and I have been involved in making civil rights and other kinds of policy over a career of 30 years. One of my observations which I made to my colleagues who you will meet in just a moment is that, and I say this lovingly as a policymaker, we are far too frequently guessing about what's going to work and what's going to have impact. And I could tell you story after story over the course of the work that I've done over the course of my career, including my working government, where we were doing outreach efforts without necessarily measuring whether what we were doing was actually having impact. We were designing policies without knowing for sure that they were actually going to reach the people that we intended to reach. And the idea here is that we can use the kind of what we think of as the techniques that technologists use as a way of being much more effective in solving our public problems and the example that we're going to talk you through today is the example of addressing homelessness and we have a really extraordinary panel of folks to have this conversation. So I'm going to introduce them to you very briefly, and then I'm going to get out of the way so that they can have the conversation that I think you will greatly enjoy. So we have Roseanne Hagerty, who's the President and CEO of Community Solutions and who is really one of the country's most innovative leaders on the issue of homelessness community solutions just one, the MacArthur Foundation's competition 100 and change, which is a very, very big deal. And we also have her colleague for us just on, who is the portfolio lead for data and technology at built for zero is a key initiative of Community Solutions and the one that's causing all of this excitement. We have Jennifer Jager, who is the Community Services Director for the city of Rockford, Illinois, and we're so grateful that you joined us today. And then we have my two colleagues, Tara McGinnis, who leads something called the new practice lab at New America, which is kind of revolutionizing how we approached helping the government deliver the services that it seeks to deliver to people and hopefully revolutionize how policy gets made using these techniques that we're talking about. And Hannah Shank, who co leads New America's project on public interest technology, and who is as passionate as I am and Tara is about this notion that we can make policy differently and implemented more effectively and reach people more effectively and that's the conversation that we're going to apply to the question of homelessness right now. So, I have a very easy job of moderator which is to introduce everybody and then get the heck out of the way while they engage in this conversation so Tara and Hannah I believe I am passing the proverbial microphone to you and I think Tara is starting. So on with the show. Thanks Cecilia and thanks everyone for for joining us we know it's been a long haul and we're excited to have so many people here engaged in this conversation. I was trying to describe what's the what's the word for when you get to be on a panel with some of your, your favorite heroes. That's that is how I feel right now I thought maybe, Rosanne I would love to just start with you and you, you have been decades in the work of trying to end homelessness, but maybe we could level set with how historically typically tackling homelessness has been addressed and talk a little bit more about how you moved away from what Cecilia has described as the educated guessing norm. So thank you for having my colleague or us and I and our wonderful community leader from Rockford Jen on the panel today, and also congratulations on just a timely and exciting and really beautifully written book that lays out the framework that frankly we've found to be the path to making progress toward functional zero and homelessness. So historically, and frankly, in many parts of the country still the way that communities have thought about an approached homelessness has been at a program level has been really with a, like a reactive to seemingly ending incomprehensible amorphous problem. And over the last almost 40 years, we have seen just a willingness on the part of government and philanthropies and citizens to now spend more than $12 billion the year. Frankly without the expectation of movement or success. The mythology that's grown up around the issue is that it's intractable that it is about either people who don't want help who are choosing a lifestyle or it's about an inadequate amount of affordable housing and that until that that problem is all, there's nothing to be done. And we really learned quite honestly through sort of starting frankly in the wrong place being developing programs like very good ones ourselves that that was an inadequate response to a problem that actually is not about just technical solutions but about really understanding what the full dynamics of a problem are and the framework that the book lays out in terms of design data and delivery. I feel as though we lived that and that the historically the challenge and currently is to move from this fragmented program by program, non accountable sort of anonymous sort of approach to the problem to one that is population based that deeply focused on real time by name data that's informed in terms of what's working by people experiencing the problem. And that's deeply collaborative and iterative with respect to the delivery of of community wide solutions. So I could say more but I think that's been the shift and and where we're still stuck Tara, which is like lots of programs, not enough systems. Before we move on I just want to do a follow up Roseanne before we talk a little more about how what this really looked like on the ground in Rockford and say you use you've alluded to this in your first answer about people just sort of baked in marginal success and before we talk about data I think it's really important to say you guys set a truly audacious goal. Zero is what's okay and maybe just just a moment on that. Sure. Well, our built for zero network is really about that helping communities around the country, get to an end state, which is entirely achievable it's already being demonstrated called functional zero, where homelessness is rare overall and brief when it occurs, and that the energy of communities has really been shifted toward preventing homelessness and to quickly identifying new incidents of it, and resolving them effectively and quickly, and then learning from what happened and then just continually improving their local homelessness response systems. We have now of the 84 communities participating across the US. More than 50 have are showing statistically significant reductions in homelessness, and focused on initially two populations the chronically homeless and veterans. 14 communities, including Rockford, then you'll hear from Jen about this, that have ended chronic and or veteran homelessness and are really proving that this this way of working that's articulated in your book, this technology informed mindset instead of practices is what is needed to tackle and resolve really all the way through for everyone. Some of these complex human services challenges that we've kind of rung our hands about and, you know, kind of sort of given up on because, frankly, we had the wrong mindset, the wrong tools and the wrong sort of understanding of the nature of the problem. Jennifer, can you take us through what the state of homelessness was in Rockford and maybe just describe where Rockford is and what the what the state of homelessness was before this team came started working on the issue. Suzanne's word of reactive is pretty much the best description. We responded to complaints about homelessness but we didn't actually do much to end homelessness. We would get complaints from code enforcement or police or whomever you know there's a homeless camp here they're homeless people hassling people there. What can you do for us go on do it and we would go out and we would do short term solutions or we might get them in a programmer shelter but we weren't doing anything to solve the problem. And really, the one thing I credit community solutions with more than anything is giving us tools to solve the problem. We have gone so far in the last five, six years from just not knowing who the homeless were not knowing what their issues were just treating them quite honestly as public nuisances versus treating them as people and making that shift, made all the difference in our work. So where are we today. Well, we have ended veteran and chronic homelessness we have met the functional standard for those and have maintained it. We are hoping once community solutions issues are new standards for family and youth homelessness that we can quickly show that we've met the standard for ending family homelessness and shortly show the standard for ending youth homelessness. And we believe we seriously believe that we can attack single homelessness within the next year, and bring that to a functional zero status as well. And I just will add that so this the story that we're talking about today is took place in Rockford Illinois and if people don't know where Rockford is it's going to have to fall back and my, my old school Chicago blend knowledge but it's right on the, it's very close to the border. It is our service area is three counties in northern Illinois, just west of Chicago, comprising between the three counties almost 600,000 people. So where we are today. The one thing that I wanted to highlight that I think again is a result of our partnership and our work is, even over the past year with our coven friendly relationships with everybody. We have reduced homelessness in our community another 39%. And that's by sticking with the work we've learned and using data in new and exciting ways. It's truly inspiring. It's been fun to ride along the learnings from from community solutions original experience in Times Square to how the learnings manifested and showed up in other communities, maybe. And I'll jump in or as just to, to, while your methods are complex and involve really understanding humans. Really thinking about what the root problem is as I think we heard Jennifer described, you have a profoundly innovative use of data in your work and so I thought maybe in the built for zero context. Let's talk a little more about what a by name list is, and how you use it, and what value does it bring in the process of really ending homelessness as rockford and a number of other places have gotten to do. Absolutely. So when we say by name list, really what we mean is data that is as close to comprehensive real time and person specific on all the people experiencing homelessness in a particular geography. So put another way, I think, if I were to ask you who are the people experiencing homelessness today in rockford as an example, how many people are there and tell me some things about them. Enough information for me to be able to work with them to support their needs and quickly resolve their experience of homelessness. So we're talking about that data set. And the reality is that in a lot of communities. One of those three pillars around comprehensiveness so is everybody included timeliness of updates or person specific data. All three of those boxes are really crucial to check and there's a lot of work that undergirds it. And in a lot of communities. One of the things that we're trying to echo is that that data doesn't exist, and so it becomes much harder to use that information to drive improvement. And I'll just briefly say, I think, whenever we talk about data sets. I'm inclined to say data for what purpose. And so I think the cool thing about a by name list is that it inflect community work on two different levels at least. So I think about it as zoomed out, we're able to use that information to understand the impact that interventions are having and to be really agile in responding to that data. So if I know how many people are experiencing homelessness in rockford today. And I roll out a new initiative that's designed to bend the curve on a particular population of people experiencing homelessness, let's say families. Looking my data over the next three months, and it doesn't reflect the impact that I thought that that program or intervention was going to have. I can adjust without waiting three years or five years or 10 years. And I think that's been game changing in a lot of communities. Meanwhile that same information becomes really valuable for frontline staff who are doing care coordination case management, thinking about how to help individual people. So data sort of in the disaggregated form at the person level is helping to drive person to person care coordination and quality of care. Meanwhile, we can roll it up in the aggregate and look at it at the system or population level to try and understand and iterate the impact of our work. One of the things that we talk about in the book is that an RSS you just sort of alluded to that a lot of people have data, a lot of agencies have data, a lot of organizations have data, but having data is not enough. And so one of the things that that the team did was to achieve make sure that you had high quality, you had quality by name data. Jennifer, can you talk a little bit about how you, how you managed to achieve that. A lot of work and a lot of changes. So we managed to achieve that by first of all making sure that we knew every homeless person in our community extensive outreach, really important that we actually knew the population we were working with. We still to this day do continue outreach to try and identify newly homeless people. So knowing the population is step one in terms of, you know, who are they then actually being able to gather the appropriate data and categorize them through our coordinated entry system is our next step. So once somebody is encountered on the streets or come through the coordinated entry door, they become part of our living list. Okay, our living by name list contains fields that tell us what we need to know about them, including things like have they returned homelessness before. What sort of system barriers exist to permanent housing for this population. Are there disabilities in play. I mean, it's it's living data it's constantly being updated and kept current through a variety of methods. We use our HMIS system to bounce data off of we work with our shelter providers and permanent housing providers to constantly update and verify data. We have regular community meetings by homeless population to make sure that we are current and active and working with the right information. Most of all, one of the things that we've learned through the years is, you have to be willing to dig into the data test the data, and quite honestly throw it away if it's not doing you any good. You have to a subset or a data set that can actually teach you enough that you can make a change. And over the years we've made so many changes to how we gather data how we test data how we run pilot operations and how to end homelessness, all data driven. So if we're testing reasons for inflow we gather the data on that we check it we see what works what doesn't work what reduces inflow. It's a constant balance of data and field work and communication with the community. And eventually, if you do all of that often enough you get to a pretty solid set of data that you can hang your head on and work with continuously. And we still do field experiments absolutely. But our core data list is pretty solid now and we stay with core data consistently so we get longitudinal data that tells us things over years versus just the short bits of data we started working with when we began. And I think what feels really profound about what Jennifer described is that at the beginning of this process, they didn't have all the answers. And so it was really about incremental improvement and being iterative, rather than sort of a, here's our five year strategy to have immaculate data, and let's go execute right, and I think that's familiar to folks working outside of the homeless sector or the social services that we, we think best practice is to tackle complex problems in that way where there's lots of information you might not have at the beginning, and you have to bake in the flexibility to be able to adjust things on the go. And unfortunately, I think in the public sector sometimes work is structured in a different way and so I think this feels like a real success story around, not just the use of data technology, but also the ability to be flexible and nimble in the face of new information. So, I think Rockford is a great case study in that. Maybe for Jennifer and Roseanne. So, the remarkable thing is like, getting this March, which is collaborative involves humans to have not not immaculate data but good enough is actually like step one in the room. And so I love for you guys to jump in and say like once you have a real picture of what you're tackling either in, you know, in the very specific Rockford context or in any other cities, then what. Maybe I'll share a story that you actually pick up on in the book, as maybe like the before picture and Jennifer can further illustrate the after, and to get at this theme of educated guesses. We had been building housing in and around Times Square for years and a lot of it, but we're still walking past many of the same people who've been living on the street for years and kind of sort of frankly participating in this myth that these were people who were missing and didn't want help that it was their fault that they weren't living indoors. And it was the experience of one of these women in very fragile health. Yeah, ultimately a hospital social worker called me about this woman and like, can't you help her get into housing and it dawned on me like all of these years that I have been passing her I, you know, been asking did she like need food, did you need a blanket, did she, you know, did she need a ride to the shelter. I didn't even think being a housing provider that my job was to help her get into housing. You know that that's how much the myth of kind of the educated guesses that people are kind of opting out and you know, being resistant to making steps had permeated I think that's what you know kind of is a barrier to many people even working in the field even imagining their way into where miss, you know, understanding the problem and we aren't actually asking the right questions we aren't asking the right people what's going on we're just guessing at things. And it was that that kind of wake up call come from you know actually hearing directly from someone who was trapped in the situation that caused us to start getting like why, why do we have like 11 organizations, all out here offering, you know, rides to shelters and food and blankets. When no one is actually getting underneath why people are still homeless and you know what they have are identifying as what they need to get out of this crisis, and when we started pulling organizations in our community together to say, let's get on this together. Initially, though, is just deep skepticism there's like, Well, the problem isn't that big, you know, they're at the 3040 people. Well, we finally decided the first part of agreement to your point there was, let's try to get a shared reality a shared truth of even the dimensions of the issue. And so instead of going out nine to five Monday through Friday, we got everyone to go out like between midnight and four, or you know, and we found there were 479 people. Yeah. And so we were guessing even at the dimensions of the problem guessing at who had the information guessing at what was going on, and to contrast that with what happens in Rockward and maybe to turn it over to Jennifer. So, yeah, we still by the way go out at midnight and look for homeless people on a pretty regular basis at least weekly. One of the, the things that we committed to fairly early on was that we have a sign that hangs in our office that says what a homeless person needs as a house. Okay, because, yes, do they need medical treatment did they need, perhaps mental health care do they need, you know, food water, whatever, yeah, they probably do, but none of that is sustainable, living on the street, I can give you a blanket okay but when your camp gets destroyed tomorrow. So does your blanket so does your ID so does your medication. I can you know provide you food. That's great but it's not a long term solution, I can work on all those other issues if I can get you how to know where you are and link you to the right services. So when we started approaching everything we did as a housing first model, it made a significant difference in our success the first question we always ask anybody when we walk up to them isn't, you know, other than hi I'm so and so what your name is. Hey, would you like a place to live. Right. And originally when we did that we got a lot of yeah I've heard that before, sort of thing. And we had to build up a reputation with the homeless so that they would recognize when we came out and we really wanted to house them. We really wanted to house them. The thing here that I think is really important based on what Roseanne said is, we don't allow in our community conversations or internal staff discussions to identify a homeless persons characteristics as a barrier to housing. We only allow system barriers in our discussion. We don't, nobody's allowed to say something like we can't house them because he's drunk all the time, sort of thing. Now we've housed plenty of people who have alcohol problems. We can house another one. We must focus on what is it about our community and our housing structure and our landlords and our other systems that is keeping that person on the street. How do we overcome that system barrier, so that person can be housed and start working on those issues that they're ready and willing to take on. We don't ask people to commit to anything when we house them other than, you know, try and stay housed and we'll help support you the best that we can. I think it's really important that you identify the fact that housing barriers are system barriers are not people barriers nobody wants to sleep on the street. One thing that is just jumping out to me is how I mean then this is partially why we loved the story and wanted to write about it but that that's true across the board when you are looking at social problems or even just the, you know, thinking about the vaccine rollout and the people who haven't been able to get vaccinated who there was this big story about them not being vaccine hesitant that they actually there are barriers. And it's that it's really not, you know, it's to put it in tech terms like it's never false is never with the user. Whatever the user did something wrong. It's that the system hasn't, they're not there are barriers that haven't been overcome. So I love that way of looking at things. I was being on zoom I've like I've lost track of. I'm just gonna ask. Roseanne one of the things that you you mentioned and Jennifer you've also mentioned this is the level of community engagement and public engagement. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about how you involved the public. And you know that there were rock stat meetings, maybe you could talk a little bit about that. I think Jennifer, yeah. So our mayor at the time that we started working with community solutions. loved data, very data driven guy. And he instituted something in our community called rocks that which was every city department had to report on a monthly basis or progress on key items. And one of our key items was homelessness. So every month had to get up in public it was open to the public it was broadcast I mean it couldn't be any more public if it tried and put the information out there about where we're failing where we're succeeding and answer questions from elected officials and members of the public. About why things were working or not working that level of public scrutiny and public support really makes a difference. It takes issues like homelessness out of the shadows. And put some on the front page, and let's the community participate in that conversation about, is this a community problem that can be solved. Or, you know, is this something that, you know, community just is hiding from sort of thing. We. We get hit for by data on both sides community solutions. And our mayor at the same time and it sort of came together in a perfect marriage. So eventually our public reporting became our community solutions data, which was the best of both worlds for us. I really think that getting that community support and having that community support makes all the difference in the world. Our mayor would talk about our progress he would talk about rocker being a housing first community. He would highlight the work we were doing, and even past being the mayor as he's moved on to private enterprises he still is in touch and supporting the work we do. I think engaging the community becomes critically important in the work you do because it gives you a level of public accountability that you don't get any other way. It also gets you on the same page as a community where Roseanne was talking about the blanket thing. It made me laugh because over the years we've had people do things like oh let's hold the fundraiser we can do the homeless sleeping bags and I would bang my head on my desk and say, please don't give them sleeping bags we want to give them a home. Right, you know let's not divert resources to non housing supports, let's get them housed and support them the best we can. I think that's an important community conversation and sometimes it's uncomfortable to say to the people who are well intentioned. Please, don't do this because what we really need you to do is help the community work towards ending homelessness. I just add that I think this notion that Jen described so fully as public accountability really is at the heart of what we see the communities that are making the most rapid progress are incorporating into their work that they are very clear and transparent to as they provide an audience as they can gather about you know where they are in the journey, what the barriers are they're encountering. They're bringing in other partners in the community, the faith community business leaders, landlords that just basically breaking down and making it very visible about where the community is and how, how much of the journey they have already accomplished toward functional zero and what remains. And that really that public accountability that transparency completely changes the way that we see it makes it possible for communities to make better decisions and to invest in the next step that will have the highest impact, based on what the data is saying and they have that I'd say support for making changes because more people are actually seeing reality and the progress in the same way. I think it's really interesting in Jennifer's remarks to note like the goal was into bed or a blanket the end goal was zero which involves a house, but I think some of the some of the things I've learned from your work and really all panelists should feel to jump in here. Is that the interim steps, maybe not a house like maybe the interim step is a doctor's appointment or a bus ticket and, and so like, I'd love to solicit in Rockford and beyond what the data told you or us like led you to different things that may not be the things experts think folks need. What were interventions that worked and, and in some cases I can imagine intervention for the first person on your list, not the same as the intervention that's needed on the last person on your list. So yeah you're right every, you know, every person is different right so everybody's needs are different. Yes, you're right we did find that. Sometimes it wasn't that people didn't want to get from a to b it was simply they missed the facilitating point in between that could be bus tickets to in the case we're working veterans they couldn't get out to the VA stuff because it was way out in the middle there. So how are they going to work with the VA to get the things they need to get settled to get housed to get income to get employment to get, you know all the sports of VA could provide. And sometimes it was, it was other things sometimes it's something as simple as I need a short term place to stay we use hotel placements very often as bridge housing. But I can work on this or resolve this or do this we've, we've done so many things that we consider just small steps, because it helps that person take the next big step. And that's really critical sometimes the small steps are proof points. So we placed somebody in a hotel for a while just convince them we were serious about housing, got him inside they've been out outdoors for, I don't know 1415 years really wanted to be able to sit in a room and watch a baseball game. Well, that's what we gave them. Okay, so now we have a relationship with you now will you walk with us down this path to permanent housing. I think it's really important that those small things you can provide are part of a large puzzle that gets you to that end goal. I don't think randomly providing stuff. You know, I don't know if somebody off the street, but I think if you look at a person based on what you know about them, based on your relationship that you've created with the dad on your by name list and you say, you know, if we did this this and this, I bet you that person could get into this housing. Right. And sometimes that's addressing past eviction records or criminal records or whatever it might be. But it always should be with that endpoint in mind. The bus ticket gets you here which gets you this which gets you that which gets you housed. And for us that's how we have to think about those small pieces we cannot think of them as. Here's a bus ticket here's a blanket here's whatever we'll see you. We never ever want to say we'll see you to any of our people unless we want to see you housed. Right, we don't want to see you on the street again when we come out next time we want to see fewer people on the street. So that's that's kind of how we think of those small steps. I just wanted to add something that all of us probably have experienced is in our own lives is going to receive some kind of healthcare and having to answer a bunch of basic questions again from scratch. And I think increasingly, hopefully, folks are experiencing getting healthcare in a sort of more integrated space where maybe you go in for some labs, and that data is connected to your sort of record in the hospital or in the healthcare center or in the doctor's office. And I think so much of this idea of shifting towards this my name data is about having the ability to say, let's check in holistically on a person and think about the way that that bus ticket or doctor appointment is connected to the bigger effort to resolve their experience of homelessness. And it's really hard to do that without both that sort of human system that underlies it of just people coming together and having data sharing and conversations about a person. And obviously like all of the small administrative components around data entry and privacy and regulations. So there's a sort of vast network of moving parts that enable the type of work that Jennifer is describing. So we have all experienced sort of both sides of it I think of sort of this fractured ecosystem where your information doesn't travel between these different people. So nobody's got their eye on the big picture of sort of your wellness or health versus the flip side of the coin where it feels more integrated and I think that that is a game changer in communities working to solve a complex problem like homelessness. So here I am back again. We are fielding many many many questions coming in out of this wonderful conversation from our participants. So I want to start to bring those into the conversation and the first question, which is, is my fault that is being asked is what the heck is this book that people are talking about, because I failed to mention it at the beginning. I want to refer to the public it is co written by Tara McGinnis and Hannah shank and it essentially talks about using these kinds of strategies to solve public problems and the built for zero story the community solution story is among the stories that they tell about how to use these techniques to solve public problems. For those of you who are following in the chat you will find a link to the book. But I want to get jump right in and get to questions. Kim asks, is the technology used in rockford available to gather data. Our major issue is just trying to figure out what we were dealing with feels like we're working in the dark. Yes, the technology we use is Google. I mean, it is really I mean we bounce it off our hrs list but everything built around Google. That's where our by name lists lives. We used to do the Google tools to share information to to keep things updated. This is all very public data source stuff. So and is there an entry way for I mean I'm really noticing in the in the chat in the questions, people from different communities of different sizes, trying to grapple with how they might apply these techniques to the problem of homelessness in their communities for San is there an on ramp. Sure, and our ask can dig into this more fully on the data side as well. But communities can join built for zero we are looking to increase to no more than 110 communities were at 84 right now in a community. To define it really follows a federal Department of Housing Urban Development geographies called a continuum of care that can be a city a county or cluster of counties, depending on what has been elected locally. But communities elect to join it's very much the coalition of the willing. And what is necessary is that some of the key actors have come together already to make a joint commitment and that would be the coalition of not for profits the mayor county executive housing authority to be a, and then our team works with you to actually get you on the path to zero. And that's what this this learning network and this method is all about. And so you can absolutely check our website, community solutions dot org, see if your community is participating in built for zero. And there is a certainly a path on to the built for zero platform for communities that are ready to make this commitment but what you're signing up for is a racially equitable and to homelessness, you know and very much about this rigorous data driven approach that people experiencing the problem. But if you are not feeling you're up for built for zero, we do have a data tools and occasional webinars that and it will be doing more of this that are asking to explain to basically give communities a flavor for how to get started and even thinking about creating the kind of baseline shared data that is so critical to making progress. Sure, I'll just say turns in point I think this is maybe a little bit more about a way of working and an approach to the problem, then it is a sort of silver bullet tech platform or solution so I mean as Jennifer said I think that folks can be scrappy and figure out whether it's a online spreadsheet or some other tool, right, we're sort of taking the baseline status quo systems that we have, and working around them often or building on top of them supplementing them. So I think that, to me at least, once a community commits to working in this particular way, there are lots of different avenues to be able to implement and get there. And I think we've got a bit of a playbook as Rosanna alluded to around some approaches that have worked and, you know, whether it's communities joining built for zero to access some of that information and coaching and peer learning, or just tapping into some of the off the shelf sort of resources or case studies like Rockford's incredible success. I think there's a lot of on ramps or ways to get engaged and make some of the shift around approach. Once folks have set the intention to do so. So, we have a question actually more than one question coming in. This one is from Tim that came into the chat about scale. Can you address scale please in Rockford how many chronically homeless will move to a non homeless status. And can you share thoughts about scalability for for really large communities and really large homeless populations. So I'm going to start this but then I'm going to toss it over to the community solution experts. We started, we thought when we started this process we had about 45 chronically homeless people in our community we actually ended up housing about 156 chronically homeless people in our initial and to functional zero we obviously continue if we encounter them to house them within our 30 day window which is our rule. So scaling up. I do believe that when we started this, our continuum was two counties we picked up a third one as part of our continuum of care practice we've moved the same models out to that community. There are some very big communities that are working with community solutions like Chicago and seeing great progress so it's, you know, depending on what size and scalability you can be a smaller community of you know 20,000 people or you can be millions I think it's focusing and following the tools and the coaching that's provided so I'm going to toss it over community solutions on that. And Rosanne before you dive in on this question I want to add a second question, which I think relates to this question of scale, which is can you also this comes from Maureen can you describe the housing markets where you're working. Are there actually apartments and this is someone you work the community that Maureen lives in has rooms going for $900 plus utilities so is this possible on a scale with both a lot of people who are experiencing homelessness in markets that are really expensive. Now great questions and important ones I think that's often what we encounter in terms of can this work here, but we're working with a number of large cities and very big complex geographies that extend past individual cities for instance, Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona like four million people across a big urban region and Jacksonville Florida and BC and Charlotte North Carolina and the Metro Denver area so this is working in very large cities as well what we can and we're seeing some of these cities have achieved more than 30% reductions just in the last 18 months alone. And so what we're observing is that it takes longer, the more people to get around to coordinate with more people to get around that table, you have to be, I think, more more innovative, perhaps and how you carve out your geography and to account for everyone and the outreach coverage issues, you know, are more challenging, but it's as Aras said it's a methodology it's a mindset and it can flex to communities of any size. The housing market issues are absolutely, you know, kind of a different order of magnitude, depending on where you move in the country. We, interestingly, in the communities that have reached functional zero for veteran or chronic. But 93% of the housing that they were able to access for those individuals was existing housing it didn't involve bringing new housing online. And so there's a significant part of this issue. And this is one of these challenges of educated guesses. Yeah, there's a significant part of the issue that can be resolved through coordination, not all of it and certainly in higher cost markets, and in cities with very very low vacancy rates. You will have to add housing supply, but a surprising degree of progress can be made through actually understanding the problem, comprehensively utilizing and optimizing the resources you have. And actually through that process, identifying with some real certainty, what part of the problem is actually new supply. Most communities are making an educated guest that we can't do a darn thing until we have all the affordable housing we need. And so that's a myth that we really want to challenge and the evidence is communities can make substantial progress even in high cost housing markets without adding new supply. So many questions pouring in. All right, I'm going to pull one from Angie, who lives in Seattle. She says our city is long had all the buzzwords and intentions of housing first and harm reduction with so many services and programs, but we are so lost in thick politics and the severe codependence of stopping the sweeps in quotes, the right to be homeless, which staunchly prioritizes individual rights. How do we shift the zeitgeist to accept an actual data oriented community wide approach. I think the book makes a very persuasive case for a discipline of work in these complex politically charged spaces that you know I'd say the frame has to be accountability for a result that really is defined by the people experiencing the problem. The, the whole path of really starting with what the user needs and building a system that responds to that that is informed in real time by what's actually happening with data that is gathered in a way that is trusted by all the participants and then with this keen attention to whether we're getting the results that we want and we're prepared to change it up until we do. I think that's the path Cecilia, it's not that you have to get to kind of maybe political agreement about the right lens to look through, but there really needs to be some agreement that we are, we've got to show up for the people experiencing and let them define what success looks like and as Jen said so eloquently it's like having a home. It's not, you know, some other set of considerations that that should trump that. I think related to this and this is a question I'm going to sort of combining questions so forgive me if I don't give everybody full credit for their pieces of the questions. But you've had part of the conversation is included talking about peer groups and partners and the kind of outreach that's required I think that seems related to kind of changing the gap the zeitgeist. So Sean asks, can you tell us more about the peer groups you mentioned, how would you recommend that a jurisdiction go about joining one. So peer groups I think we're often thinking about communities that have one or more characteristics in common. So that could be something about the geography, the size of the community, maybe something specific to the region that they're in. But I think that so often when we're talking about complex problem solving in a particular place. People feel like they're on an island. Right. And the reality is that something like homelessness is a problem that touches almost every community across the country. And so there's a good chance that if you are experiencing a problem in your local community, somebody else has experienced that problem and maybe even come up with a solution that you could pick up and adapt to your local context. And so a lot of our work is about helping people not feel like they have to recreate the wheel, or when there is a new problem that nobody has solved for yet. How do we try and bring together a bunch of different people who are looking at the same thing from a bunch of different angles to get sort of some of that best collaborative thinking. And I think there's obviously an evidence base that shows when you get a diverse set of people in a room. It's definitely going to come up with a better solution than if it's just one person in one community taking a crack at something. So a lot of what we're doing is bringing folks together, based on some characteristics around what part of the journey of ending homelessness they're at. So are they working to get some quality data around the problem to get their arms around it, or they're working to them the curve. How many people are experiencing homelessness for that specific population where in the country are they what are some of the barriers they're facing. So once we've sort of identified some of those things can be cohort folks, and try and allow them to test ideas together, and hopefully start with some shovel ready solutions rather than feeling like they've got to recreate the wheel. But Jennifer can speak to some of the first person experience on being on the other side. So the one thing I do want to say is once you join this whole process with community solutions. You'll never feel alone in addressing homelessness again. Through their support or through the conversations with the communities that you link up with and work with the conversation there are always going on. We have a group of communities we work with on a pretty regular basis. They don't necessarily look like us or they're not near us. But we've all started addressing similar issues and so we need those conversations to say, this didn't work for me did this work for you what are you seeing. It's really important that your peers can serve as a sounding board and helpful problem suffered because if a success they want to share with you. It helps facilitate the speed of the work. If everything is moving together with peer groups. I want to go back, Rosanne to something that you said when you were describing the work overall you described it as addressing homelessness but with a strong lens and focused on racial inequity. We have a question from john from the chat which says given the central role that long standing racial inequity and housing and other systems like employment or law enforcement health has played in driving who becomes homeless in our society. Can you talk about the role of advancing racial equity that it plays in the work preventing homelessness. Absolutely and it's a key question homelessness in our country is disproportionately experienced by black and Native Americans. It's shockingly disproportionately. And as, as the questioner mentions this homelessness is in so many ways, the place where other system failures with, and that all of these other racialized systems are reflected in who's experiencing homelessness in our country. We have through built for zero launched after just extensive consultation with our community leaders with people lived experience of homelessness, people of color, especially black and Native Americans instituted a racial equity framework so that communities can aggregate their data at every critical step from, you know, identification of people experiencing homelessness to access to resources to the speed and the experience of dignity and respect that is felt as they go through the process. This is part of what getting to functional zero looks like a racially equitable experience of this, this journey forward. And it is also I'll say, another reason why very high quality data is needed. You cannot be accountable for achieving racial equity if you cannot actually track the experience in the relative experience of people of color through these the process of, of community housing. And so it is at the core of what communities participating in built for zero sign up for and are working toward. And the questioner is correct. You know the future will be about getting upstream of these issues and looking at how to shift those systems. So we see the best route is through the work of ending homelessness, which more and more has to pull collaboration from those upstream systems into the work. Thank you. So we are coming up on the end of our time there are maybe three times as many questions from our participants as we've been able to answer so I apologize for that is a really, really engaged audience and a lot of really excellent questions. I think we can group them as much as possible. There are questions about whether or not this event is recorded the answer to that is yes, and within 48 hours this recording will be posted to new america's website to our events page, so which is at new america.org slash events if I'm not mistaken. Let's just say again encourage you to take a to check out the book power to the public written by Tara and Hannah, which tells the community solutions built for zero story among other really inspiring stories about how to use these techniques to solve the kinds of problems that we think of as intractable problems. There is a link to the book also in the chat and note that President Barack Obama called the book worth a read for anybody who cares about making change happen. We're very proud of that. There is also a link in the chat to a survey that we're hoping you will take. So please, please click on the link and take the survey for us we will value that information greatly it is just been posted again in the chat for you to help us out with. Yeah, let me just thank again our extraordinary panelists Roseanne and Ross and Jennifer, not just for participating today but for the extraordinary work you do in the world. This is the Jennifer the stories from from Rockford about that really teach us that this is possible right you can get to zero is incredibly inspiring I don't know if you've been able to watch the chat but people who are I think have been very inspired both by the work that you're doing and of course by the support and the extraordinary vision of built for zero and community solutions so Roseanne and Ross thank you so much for the work that you do. And Tara and Hannah, thank you also not just for participating in the panel and for writing this extraordinary book but for lifting up stories that are inherently hopeful that we are people who solve problems. It's a it's incredibly important to be sophisticated and thoughtful about how we do that so thank you all. Thanks to all of our participants for joining us and we will close out this panel and the hopes of having more discussions on these important topics soon. Thanks everybody.