Guest blog by Mike Backman, Alicia Bermes, Dawn Borgardt, Jenny Haruyama, Kim Haughn, Stacy Jepson, Marni Kuyl, Sia Lindstrom
When our team first began our journey to tackle homelessness, we were looking through a fisheye lens. The problem we wanted to tackle was broad, it involved a large area – all of Beaverton – and it encompassed helping all unhoused residents while also appeasing the community who didn’t want them in their city. Fast forward to the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative…next thing we knew, we found ourselves looking into the fish’s eyes and focusing on its bones to help us narrow our focus and problem that we needed to tackle. We started off with a goal of ending homelessness in Beaverton and, through the iterative PDIA process, we took the critically important step of narrowing it. Our final problem statement was focused and powerful in its simplicity: To tackle chronic street homelessness in central Beaverton – because everyone deserves to be safe and housed.
We were off to a rocky start trying to figure out the root causes of homelessness and how that could help lead us on a path to problem solving. After many iterations of the fishbone diagram that we were tasked with pulling together on a very short timeline, our “fish” evolved from a minnow to one beefy salmon. Each team member contributed their perspective on reasons why people find themselves living on the streets and fending for their lives day after day. Coming up with causes was not a simple process but the subject matter expertise at our team’s table brought together a narrative that painted a much larger picture of what was happening and why. By parsing out our problem’s causes bone by bone and adding sub-bones that we felt contributed to each larger cause, we were able to determine entry points to begin tackling our wicked problem. This exercise had us narrow to manageable areas that would allow us to move forward on our journey.
We further narrowed our focus to the Beaverton Public Library, where we had a growing number of unhoused individuals camping in front of the building each night. We rounded up critical stakeholders to help address this issue from a micro-level to properly assist these individuals versus shepherding them along to another unsheltered location. After a few road bumps here and there, we learned more about the existing systems in place to help our homeless community members, including their challenges. That didn’t slow us down though! It was an opportunity to harness the momentum of our leaders on the team who could help make change happen. Through collaborative efforts across several agencies and our non-profit outreach provider, we were able to reduce the number of people camping in front of the library to half what we had just months prior. Our goal is to transition people to alternate housing and then monitor to make sure they don’t end up back on the street months later.
During the work in front of the library and the Bloomberg Harvard program, we had many collaborative wins. We experienced enhanced coordination between our non-profit homeless outreach group and Beaverton Police’s bike team that is assigned to engage with our unhoused population. This partnership is instrumental and invaluable as it is the true boots-on-the-ground work that plays a key role in helping our homeless population. In addition to this positive outcome, the direct connections made during this program also helped us stand up an emergency shelter in seven hours during a record snowfall event with frigid temps. That was an accomplishment that confirmed the value of collaboration and shared values to help our communities we serve. A few more achievements included extending the opening of our current winter shelter that will now remain open until the year-round shelter opens in 2024. And we are in the process of pulling together mobile local coordinated command centers that will involve more specific and in-depth outreach with our homeless community members as part of transitioning them into a shelter or transitional housing.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight that, during this Bloomberg Harvard program, our state’s governor declared an emergency due to homelessness which has helped catapult ideas and actions at a faster than expected rate with funding that will help make progress happen. The timing of her declaration combined with this program couldn’t have been better.
What did we learn through this program and our process of tackling chronic street homelessness in central Beaverton?
- The power of our team’s construction! We have amazing leadership at the table who have great influence and authority in making things happen. We also each bring diverse perspectives to the table through lived experiences. And we never hesitate to step up when it comes to contributing or facilitating, while showing grace toward those who are overwhelmed with competing priorities or dealing with life’s sucker punches.
- Stakeholder engagement is key to adding more hands to help in the process. Just the simplicity of informing others about our work has sparked interest from stakeholders who may otherwise sit back and wait for others to do the lifting.
- Iteration is important. It may seem exhausting or as though we are chasing our tail when we iterate over and over. But the task of iterating helps us better understand the path we need to traverse while accepting small risks or even setbacks along the way. We quickly learned that we can’t wait for perfection! The idea is that by leaning into our less-than-perfect iterations, we “fail forward” so the small failures that we experience help us learn and improve our next iteration.
The skills we learned through this program will help guide us in the future, so we won’t be immediately overwhelmed with a challenging and complex task such as tackling homelessness. How we tackle chronic street homelessness in central Beaverton may not generate the same blueprint that will work in another part of town or city, but we can take the problem-solving skills we acquired to help us move through the process successfully.
We also came to appreciate the strength of the team, the importance of its construction with members who bring diverse perspectives and skillsets, and the need to create a space of support and psychological safety. This mix allowed us to get creative in our problem-solving and take chances on new ideas that we might not have explored otherwise.
Our team is now equipped with many new tools in our toolkit that we can use when we encounter problems or challenges that are overwhelming or may even seem unsolvable. From understanding the importance of clearly defining the problem, to breaking things down to manageable bite-sized chunks, and then to ensuring the stool has three legs – authorization, ability, and acceptance – we can come at a situation through a different lens that can turn the unthinkable into something doable.
Our advice to you?
- Understand that any wicked problem cannot be solved with a few ideas or steps.
- You can come up with a band-aid quick-fix approach if you so choose, but if you want a problem to be solved correctly, successfully, and sustainably, it’s all about construction, deconstruction, reconstruction and iterating your way through it.
- Celebrate the small wins – it’s a momentum builder.
- View your struggles or what may seem like failures or setbacks as learning opportunities. We will never have all the answers.
- Don’t forget to constantly seek out people who can help – as the old saying goes, more hands make for lighter work.
- Lastly, take things one day at a time and celebrate the small wins along the way. It’s through those small wins that you’ll build a sustainable and successful approach to complex and potentially overwhelming problems like chronic street homelessness.
This is part of a blog series written by city leaders who participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative cross-boundary collaboration track during 2023.