Build a system across the CoC and City (HRD) to coordinate and provide the homelessness and housing resources across Detroit and Wayne County necessary to achieve the community’s vision, grounded in accountability, and led by people with lived experience of homelessness.
Eleanor Bradford from the Detroit Advisors Group speaks with Amy the CoC Board Chair on the importance of building a system that works together.
A system can be defined as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”(1) Donella Meadows, a pioneer of systems thinking, asserted that to achieve something, a system must consist of:
- Elements: the individual parts of a system which tend to be more visible and easier to recognize
- Interconnections: relationships that hold the elements of a system together or describe how elements work together to achieve the systems function/purpose
- Purpose/Function: can be determined based on the system’s behavior
The main finding of community engagement and the systems audit is that there is not currently a functioning homeless response system in Detroit.
There are clear and easily identifiable elements such as the CoC Board and membership; HAND, the collaborative applicant for the CoC; Housing Revitalization and Development (HDR), the local agency administering federal funds such as Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG); the Coordinated Assessment Model (CAM); and the various providers of housing and services. However, there are not clearly defined relationships that hold these elements together and point them towards the end purpose of preventing and ending homelessness.
Any assortment of things, no matter how similar, without interconnection or shared function and purpose is not a system. This reality has resulted in continued struggles to prevent and end homelessness despite various system improvement efforts in Detroit’s response to homelessness.
Throughout stakeholder interviews and the community workshop, community members identified the lack of a system in Detroit. Some of the most common themes included:(2)
- A lack of vision for preventing and ending homelessness and a lack of stated and shared goals beyond those specific to veterans and families;
- Confusion around who is responsible for leading the homeless response between the CoC Board, HAND, and HRD;
- A lack of accountability to people being served by homeless services, including no clear way to hold individual providers, CAM, HRD, or the CoC accountable for inequitable service provision, discrimination, or low-quality service;
- A lack of accountability across the different elements working to serve people experiencing homelessness, including to and from providers, funders, and administrators (CoC and HRD);
- Disenfranchised stakeholders—including the people being served, provider agencies, and the community at large—due to a lack of structure for community engagement in setting and tracking priorities; and
- A disconnect between homeless services, poverty alleviation initiatives, homelessness prevention efforts, housing stability services, affordable housing needs and development, and homeownership supports.
Detroit’s critical and foundational step in system transformation is to design a homeless response system rooted in racial equity and justice that can hold interconnections between the CoC and HRD to facilitate a singular function: preventing and ending homelessness.
Create a governance structure that reaches across HRD and the CoC, charged with:
- Implementing the community’s vision for preventing and ending homelessness;
- Leading a participatory community process to set the goals and strategies needed to enact the adopted community vision; and
- Making joint decisions on public funding priorities for the homeless response and engaging with private funders to fill resource gaps and offer flexible solutions.
Detroit is in need of a governance structure across the CoC (board, general membership, and HAND) and HRD that can 1) enact the vision created by the community, 2) bring the community together to design system-level goals and strategies that can help to reach the community vision, and 3) make more strategic, joint decisions across the various homeless dedicated resources managed by the CoC and HRD.
The first steps in creating a governance structure should include:
- A formal commitment such as an MOU or letter of intent, between the CoC and the City of Detroit to co-lead a community design process grounded in the adopted vision described in the Vision Statement with the intent to engage other systems and community partners throughout the process
- Dedicated funds from the CoC and HRD for a staff person to coordinate the participatory community design process and equitable compensation for the engagement of people with lived experience of homelessness, including the established Detroit Advisors Group
- Establishing a design table that includes a diverse set of stakeholders, including people with lived experience, service providers from every staff level, administrative leaders, and elected officials
Equitable decision making across the design process that moves decision making power to those closest to the issue, particularly people who have experienced homelessness and unsafe housing instability, frontline workers, and Black, Brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQ members of the community.
Strategy in Action
The City of Seattle and King County government, alongside the Continuum of Care, recently went through a redesign process to bring together local government, the CoC, providers, and people with lived experiences under one governance entity. This effort resulted in the creation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. An Interlocal Agreement serves as a main governing document and outlines the way in which governmental entities (executive and legislative branches), providers, and people with lived experiences will work together alongside the CoC board to make joint decisions and strategies for the system moving forward.
In Houston, the Mayor’s Office led a special initiative to redesign the existing Continuum of Care to better align across the collaborative applicant, the CoC board, City and County government, providers, and people with lived experiences. This effort resulted in a new governing board, designed to ensure representation of critical government and non-governmental stakeholders, more strategic decision making, and a more engaged community.
Shift power to center those with lived expertise and those at the front lines of the local homelessness response in all critical decision-making.
People experiencing homelessness have little to no decision-making power with Detroit’s Continuum of Care (CoC) or HRD structures. While there are two seats dedicated to people with lived experience on the CoC Board, the positions have been described as tokenizing and disenfranchised. A considerable amount of power is held within the CoC Executive Committee, which does not have a reserved position for a person with lived experience. HRD, which manages a substantial portfolio of homeless services contracts and funding, currently has no documented structures in place to include people with lived experience of homelessness or housing instability in decision-making processes.
Providers, particularly employees who are at the frontline of services and often have experienced housing instability or homelessness themselves, also have no clear way to help design solutions or set priorities. There are provider committees within the CoC to coordinate and strategize but there are unclear connections between these committees and the decision-making process of both the CoC board and HRD, exacerbating the disconnect between providers’ expertise and administrators’ priorities. Building a more equitable system requires shifting power from a small set of funders and administrative leaders who are not representative of people experiencing homelessness in Detroit(3), towards those that have experienced the system, are working within the system, and are more representative of the communities being served, particularly the Black and Queer community. During the design of the new governance structure, it will be critical to enact strategies that not only require representation but true decision-making authority.
Most people at the table are white cis people who don’t have to think about any of this after work, it’s a different type of work when you live in it.
Detroit Advisor
Strategy in Action
The Suburban Minneapolis Area Continuum of Care—consisting of 5 counties surrounding Minneapolis-St. Paul—created a Director’s Council, a group of people with lived expertise from each of the counties represented to help redesign the coordinated entry system for the CoC. As the Council is established, they are also advising on CoC governance to help power and decision-making authority closer to people who have experience receiving services within the system. The Director’s Council approves all nominees running for CoC Board spots.
The King County Regional Homeless Authority built in a requirement for people with lived experience at every level of the governance, including the governing committee, implementation board, and advisory committee. The Lived Experience Coalition has representative positions on the governing committee and implementation board, which is more than any representative entity involved in governance.
Create an ombudsman office within the governance structure to ensure accountability to those engaging with homeless services
There is currently no singular place for people navigating homeless services in Detroit to bring complaints, feedback, grievances, or ideas for improvement. This contributes greatly to the lack of accountability across service settings. An ombudsman’s(4) office can serve as a central intake for welcoming and responding to people accessing homeless services, leading to greater accountability and a higher functioning system. In most models, the ombudsman’s office receives concerns and complaints from individuals navigating a system, then gathers more information with the individual, investigates the complaint, and resolves the complaint.
In Detroit, most feedback processes discourage individuals from filing grievances. In a service setting that honors individuals’ dignity and right to self-determination, feedback is both encouraged and responded to. The experience of people navigating homelessness response systems around the country have long been de-prioritized as a metric of success. A robust grievance system is key to changing that legacy.
It is easy to treat people like furniture and overlook them when there is no accountability and no one is calling this shit out.
Community advocate
Strategy in Action
New York City’s Department of Social Services formed an Office of Ombudsman for the Department of Homeless Services to directly respond to complaints from people experiencing homelessness, to offer mediation services across the system, and help navigate individuals through system issues directly impacting their homelessness.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority is required to create an ombudsman position that not only responds to complaints but actively gathers feedback from people navigating homeless services and from people working within the system. The office is required to report directly to the board to help ensure accountability.
Streamline relationships across systems and align those partnerships to the participatory community process, goals, and strategies needed to pursue the adopted community vision.
There are few clear pathways between homeless services and affordable housing and homeownership programs in Detroit, leaving residents experiencing homelessness or housing instability little to no direct and supported access to affordable housing units or homeownership opportunities. It will be critical for the CoC and HRD to engage affordable housing developers and operators, lenders, advocates, and public and private sector leaders to achieve the vision that was defined by the community: housing stability that is bolstered by affordable housing development that helps Detroiters recover generational wealth.
More detailed strategies on connecting with affordable housing and homeownership can be found in Action 2.
Detroit has struggled with making meaningful and sustainable connections to other social, health, educational and economic support systems as well. These partnerships are critical to the well-being and housing stability of many of the people experiencing homelessness in Detroit. There have been two recent partnerships to build from: one with the K-12 education system and one with Detroit at Work.
While developing a new governance structure, it is important to learn from current education and workforce partnerships and build in the ability for other systems to engage with the homeless response system. System partners must be at the table during the design phase in order to set mutually beneficial goals at the system level, rooted in data, and monitored across the two systems.
System partnerships with the homeless response system often fail because partnering systems are not clear on their role, how the partnerships will benefit the work of their system, or the ways in which they can track progress. It will be critical to address these factors during the design phase and further strategies of system level partnerships are provided in Action 6.