The USC School of Social Work hosted the first Western States Next Practices Round Table: The Art of Scaling Best Practices to End Homelessness, bringing together more than 150 government officials, organizational partners and providers to discuss current approaches to homelessness and what is needed to impact policies that will lead to change.

“Part of what this event was about was taking what we now know about approaches to end homelessness that work and how we can think more creatively to bring them to scale and get them out in the public,” said Ben Henwood, assistant professor in the USC School of Social Work and member of the school’s Homelessness, Housing, and Social Environment research cluster. “The effort is for finishing off this mission that no one thought was a real possibility 10 years ago, when people had plans to end homelessness but didn’t have a way to do it.”

Much of this effort can be attributed to Philip Mangano, who, in 2009, left his position as head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a position he held under the second Bush administration from 2002 to 2009. During his tenure with the federal government, Mangano advocated for ending chronic homelessness through housing and counseling, rather than a symptomatic focus of temporary shelter and meal solutions.

“We dare use the term ‘abolish’ when discussing homelessness because we have empirically seen those people—who we once thought could only be helped with soup or a blanket—recover, achieve stable housing and move forward in their lives,” said Mangano. “They are no longer ricocheting among various expensive behavioral and mental health services.

“Now, it not only makes sense morally and spiritually to reduce homelessness, but it also makes sense economically, which serves as a means to motivate political will,” Mangano said. “That will combined with data and research allows us to begin to actually talk seriously about and see the ending of homelessness around the country.”

Starting a discussion

 

After leaving his post, Mangano created the American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness, a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts and the head convener of the colloquium at USC. Mangano held the first colloquium in October 2013 at Harvard University. He wanted to bring this event to the West Coast, which is where Henwood stepped in.

 

“The meeting felt like a good match for our cluster,” said Henwood, who used a $5,000 team-building grant from the Southern California Center for Translational Science Institute to support the two-day colloquium. The grant was issued in 2013 to help establish partnerships and increase capacity to look at how supportive housing affects health outcomes for the homeless.

Topics of discussion touched on many issues related to current and future homeless populations, including the Affordable Care Act and how it relates to housing initiatives, such as Housing First. Housing First is a program that provides housing as a first step to create a more stable environment for other long-term health needs, such as mental health and substance abuse counseling.

“The Affordable Care Act has enormous repercussions for the homeless to access health care,” Mangano said. “The central question now is what are the opportunities, resources and policy decisions coming in the future and how can we scale what we know works. Social impact financing, insurance, and other employment and housing initiatives can be very helpful in that scale.”

Financing was a big point of interest for the attendees, said Henwood. Participants discussed newer strategies related to financing successful housing programs and how to acquire private money and investors to support them. Another major topic was looking at age trends in homelessness and what that means for future program needs and the advent of a new population of chronic homeless.

“A cohort of older adults, mostly baby boomers, made up the chronic homeless we saw in the ‘80s,” said Henwood. “These people have only gotten older and will soon no longer be with us. However, now we’ve identified that transitional-age youth are the likely new cohort of chronically homeless.”

Henwood suggests that lessons taken from the older cohort can be applied to prevent these transitional-age youth from becoming chronically homeless. The school’s Homelessness, Housing, and Social Environment research cluster is currently investigating issues of aging in homelessness and the role housing plays to support this population.

“The hope is to take what we know about housing interventions and apply them to youth. I think this point was a big eye opener for some people,” Henwood said.

The big picture

One of the biggest accomplishments at the colloquium was in response to a speech delivered by Marilyn Flynn, dean of the USC School of Social Work. Flynn discussed the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, a movement to set the future goals and trends in the field of social work and toward community engagement and support.

Mangano said the dean challenged participants to put the notion of housing in the frame of social work.

“We were touched by her authenticity and promotion of giving housing needs a deeper contemplation within the whole realm of social work concerning curriculum and practice. It’s an important avenue for those of us interested in the issue,” Mangano said.

Part of the AASWSW initiative is the acceptance of concept papers to guide the creation of the Grand Challenges. Henwood and Suzanne Wenzel, USC School of Social Work Research Council chair and director of the Homelessness, Housing, and Social Environment cluster, co-authored a concept paper with Mangano, his organization and other colleagues who attended the event.

“This paper probably would not have come together otherwise,” said Henwood. “It wasn’t really until this event and getting others’ perspectives that the concept took off. But imagine what it could mean in the field if the efforts outlined in this concept paper were picked up as part of the Grand Challenges.”

Moving forward

More colloquies are slated for the future to focus on more specific aspects of homelessness now that a foundation has been built between research on the East Coast and that on the West Coast. The next meeting will be at Harvard University aimed at the next and best practices for orienting research and policies toward the issues of homeless women. Mangano referenced more than 30 programs that help homeless women, but said these groups have never convened.

Another West Coast colloquium will be organized in the fall to address issues of mental illness in the homeless. Mangano hopes the information shared by Henwood at the first meeting will have helped to set the groundwork for a keynote presentation related to his research and that of the homeless cluster’s work with mental health issues.

Both Henwood and Mangano acknowledge a certain amount of skepticism about the viability of ending homelessness for the most severe cases. However, from their perspective, the viability is more apparent than ever before. In fact, between 2005 and 2009, a number of 10-year plans for 1000 communities to end homelessness were implemented in earnest, according to Mangano, and the data indicated a 39 percent decrease in chronic homelessness across the country. This data represents the first documented decrease in homelessness in the last 50 years.

“The past shows us that those who are doubtful and cynical about ending social injustices are the ones who are counter to history,” said Mangano. “The abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights activists all dared to change what seemed to be undoable, and despite criticism and resistance, their situations did change. To echo the words of Martin Luther King, ‘the long moral arc of history bends toward justice.’”

Henwood agrees, stating that the country is getting smaller with regard to these issues, with cities and communities communicating about their efforts and barriers to solutions.

“People are sharing their ideas now, and organizations are more open to talking to each other, which wasn’t the case in the past,” Henwood said. “Hopefully, the speed at which people figure things out will dictate how much the efforts will increase toward accomplishing the necessary tasks and goals.”