L
o
a
d
i
n
g
.
.
.

Systems Planning & Performance

We lead the field in designing and implementing system-level responses to homelessness using powerful analytics and leveraging community strengths. Strong programs, passionate advocates, and committed providers alone are not enough to create measurable and visible reductions in the number of people who are unhoused. To be successful, communities must align programs, services, and initiatives in an intentionally designed response system that can marshal the resources to successfully shelter and house more people in need.

Planning Strategy

We support and assist communities to achieve system transformation. We:

  • engage and inform community leadership about what it means to have a homelessness response system
  • conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis to assess current efforts, including lifting up the perspectives of those the system is designed to serve
  • identify key strategies that will help the community move toward a more effective response
  • facilitate planning processes that support stakeholders to reach agreement on the most impactful, strategic and actionable steps needed to move forward, and
  • develop specific implementation plans that lay the groundwork for action

We help stakeholders from all sectors understand the importance of their role in the system and how their individual efforts contribute to the overall systematic solution to homelessness.

Analytic Power

A key feature of our system planning work is the Systemwide Analytics and Projection (SWAP) suite of tools. The SWAP uses a community’s local data to develop a picture of current performance throughout the system and to model the likely impacts of system shifts. Communities use this information to target improvement efforts, scale up what’s working, and plan the use of future resources. The results allow elected officials and community leadership to calibrate the need for crisis response, including emergency shelter beds, with the need for housing solutions. The result of this balancing is to move as many people as possible inside, to shelter and housing, with the resources available and identify real gaps that can be addressed.