Homelessness is one of the most difficult issues that local government leaders are asked to confront. The decisions involved affect people experiencing housing instability, the communities around them, and the public employees and responders who work with them every day. It is also an issue that can weigh heavily on the leaders responsible for choosing between sometimes-imperfect options, especially when needs are urgent and resources are limited.
Responding to homelessness requires both compassion and organizational clarity: Who is responsible for coordinating the response? Do staff have the capacity and authority to carry out that responsibility? How do individual programs contribute to the community’s goals?
Susan Price, an MRG consultant who has designed and operated homelessness systems within local government, emphasizes the importance of working within each community’s unique circumstances.
“You’re fine-tuning the system locally, and every system looks different,” Susan explains. “Finding success and effectiveness requires a localized response, and incremental progress is what gets us there.”
That work includes examining the organization responsible for carrying the response forward. In this article, we’ll explore how organizational assessments, clear staff roles, and practical planning can help your agency strengthen its homelessness response capacity.
Understand Where the Work Gets Stuck
A useful starting point is understanding how the agency’s homelessness response functions today, including:
- How are decisions made?
- How do departments coordinate with service providers?
- Where does work stall, and what prevents staff from moving it forward?
An organizational assessment can examine these questions together, helping leaders identify gaps between their expectations and the organization’s ability to meet them. For example, an agency may have established a priority without assigning responsibility for implementation, or added coordination duties to a position without adjusting an employee’s existing workload.
Susan’s experience also emphasizes the importance of examining who participates in the response. “When I look at a situation, I look at who is not at the table, and how we can bridge gaps,” she says.
Looking beyond the agency’s internal structure can help leaders understand where outside expertise or a different partnership could strengthen the work.
Give Staff Clear Roles and Realistic Workloads
Homelessness response requires clarity about what government will do directly and what it will accomplish through others. Nonprofits and community groups can expand government’s capacity while bridging gaps in what an agency can provide and are often better situated for outreach as they’ve usually established longer term relationships with those experiencing chronic homelessness. Making public-private-nonprofit partnerships work in the community isn’t automatic though – it requires staff time and clear responsibilities. Someone must manage relationships, coordinate across departments, oversee agreements, and bring unresolved decisions to leadership.
Agencies must know whether those duties are clearly assigned and realistically supported both internally and externally. Do job responsibilities reflect the work employees are actually performing? Does the person coordinating the response have access to the people who can make necessary decisions? Is continuity dependent on one employee’s knowledge and relationships?
Ensuring adequate staffing and role clarity help turn big challenges into work that people can manage and sustain.
Build a Plan the Organization Can Carry Out
Strategic planning provides an opportunity to connect community goals with operational choices. A useful plan establishes priorities, assigns responsibility, and gives leaders a way to review progress and adjust course, if needed.
It also needs to reflect changing resources. As Susan notes, “Funding for homeless services is also a patchwork. A system has to be scalable. It has to scale up or down based on funding. One of the trickiest parts of the work is patching those things together to create continuity among programs and sustainability in the system’s response.”
That makes implementation and governance essential parts of planning. Leaders need to understand which commitments their organization can support, how decisions will be made with partners, and what will happen when circumstances change. Reviewing those arrangements initially but also regularly allows the response to evolve while maintaining continuity for staff, providers, and people seeking services.
MRG brings homelessness systems expertise together with organizational assessment, staffing and role clarity, and strategic planning support. These services can help agencies understand their current capacity and make practical decisions about what comes next.
If your agency is examining how to organize and sustain its homelessness response, contact MRG to discuss where additional support could help.
Cathy Capriola is a trusted advisor, executive coach, and facilitator with over 30 years of leadership experience in local government. As Vice President of Strategy and Practice Manager for Coaching, Training, and Leadership Development at MRG, she leads a portfolio of services that support executives, management teams, and entire organizations in becoming more aligned, resilient, and effective.
Susan Price is a highly respected public sector executive with more than 25 years of leadership experience helping local governments, counties, regional agencies, and community partners address some of the most complex challenges facing California communities. Her expertise spans homelessness response systems, housing and community development, public health, regional collaboration, strategic planning, organizational leadership, and cross-sector partnership development.