Guest blog by Nancy Cross
There were several key learnings from the IPP course. First, one person does not have all the answers. I wanted to work on sheltering the unhoused because it seemed as if there were enough financial resources to provide shelter for the approximately 1500 unhoused people in the greater St. Louis area. The truth is that housing the unhoused is more complex than just providing a roof over someone’s head and a bed to sleep in. A roof and a bed are the easy part, solving the root cause of why someone is unhoused is much more complex. Through the IPP I learned that if you really want to solve a problem you have to continuously peel the onion and not assume that you have all the answers solely based on the information in front of you.
The second key learning is financial resources are useless if you don’t have the capacity to fix the problem. The City of St. Louis received a large sum of American Rescue Plan Act money (ARPA). The money can go a long way to providing wrap around services to unhoused people and permanent housing. However, many of the people we are trying to house have issues that are not easily resolved such as mental health and drug addiction issues. As we moved forward, we learned that the St. Louis area is limited on the number of beds needed for drug rehab programs and mental health beds. Without a solution for the lack of beds, we would not be able to fully implement permanent housing for the unhoused. There was also not enough money for us to fund the lack of beds without additional organizations being involved. As a result, we reached out to the behavioral community to discuss how we might work together to solve this problem. We don’t have a final solution, but we have a path and maybe this leads to a solution.
Third, keep an open mind. Where you start with a particular problem and potential solution may not be where the solution ends. The more people we engaged to learn about the unhoused, the more solutions were formed, explored and attempted, which lead to a clearer long-term goal. If we had stuck with the notion that we will provide enough shelter for the approximately 1500 unhoused people, the problem would never be solved. Through our discussions with various groups and being open to hear new ideas to solve this problem (permanent housing) we have moved to a real long-term solution rather than a band aid approach.
The implementation challenge that I worked on during IPP was to use the budget process as a method to implement the change from only sheltering the unhoused to providing funding for long-term permanent housing for the unhoused. We have made some inroads into changing the mindset of how the money is spent, but we have to continue emphasizing that we are moving from a sheltering model to a permanent housing model. Eventually we will fund less shelters and more permanent housing. This narrative has to be continuously reinforced with everyone we talk to about this issue.
Insights:
- Keep an open mind when new ideas are suggested. The more people we spoke with to understand the unhoused issue, the more our thinking moved from our initial position of sheltering only to creating long-term permanent housing.
- Delegation can be a powerful tool but it only works if you are willing to hold people accountable when they have been delegated parts of the work.
- Having a clear message of what you are trying to do and articulating the message consistently to all of the various stakeholders is important.
- Make clear asks of stakeholders of how they can help.
- Be open to hearing “no” from stakeholders and don’t let a “no” stop you from continuing to develop the relationship and how you might eventually get to a “yes”.
In the future, I intend to write out what I think is a solution to a particular problem and keep it to myself. Then prior to sharing what I think the solution should be, I will be asking many probing questions (based on what I have learned) in order to have a better fishbone diagram for the particular problem. I know the fishbone was a necessary process and each bone was opening more doors to potential solutions. However more outside input prior to making a fishbone, may have made the initial fishbone truer to reality thus providing me with the ability to move the project further faster.
I intend to continue to use the PDIA tool to reach a resolution on providing long-term permanent housing for the unhoused as well as for other future projects. The readings will continue to be good reference tools.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participants successfully completed this 6-month online learning course in December 2022. These are their learning journey stories.