HUD’s Continuum of Care Strategy
The chief vehicle of the Federal Government’s effort to end homelessness is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care (CoC) Program, which “promotes a community-wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness.”
HUD’s Continuum of Care strategy requires every community to have a planning body that coordinates housing and services funding for homeless families and individuals and to designate a lead agency to serve as this body’s backbone organization.
Collective Impact
Understanding HUD’s strategy necessitates a deep understanding of the concept of Collective Impact, introduced by John Kania (pictured) and Mark Warner. Kania and Warner define collective impact as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.”
It is important to remember that collective impact is not just a fancy word for collaboration. As Kania and Warner stress, “The social sector is filled with examples of partnerships, networks, and other types of joint efforts.”
The core idea of collective impact is the recognition that, “large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations…” That recognition alone is not enough, though. “A core group of community leaders” must then decide to “abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective (systemic) approach… that focuses on the relationships between organizations and the progress toward shared objectives.”
Shared Measurement and Accountability
It is vital for participating organizations to be able to ensure mutual accountability “and learn from each other’s successes and failures.” To do that effectively they must develop “a shared measurement system, and track “results consistently on a short list of indicators” to ensure “all efforts remain aligned.”
HUD’s helps communities accomplish this by mandating that every community have a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a community wide database, which tracks results on seven key data points essential to ending homelessness.
The Necessity of a Backbone Organization
Kania and Warner caution that “the expectation that collaboration can occur without a supporting infrastructure is one of the most frequent reasons why it fails.” A collective impact effort requires a backbone organization that has subject matter expertise related to the specific social problem, “the skills and resources to assemble and coordinate the specific elements necessary for collective action to succeed,” and the ability to handle “the myriad logistical and administrative details needed for the initiative to function smoothly.”
The Key Role of Funders
It is important to stress that no community can end homelessness using HUD dollars alone. This is where Kania and Warner’s point about the role of funders is instructive: “Funders can play an important role in getting organizations to act in concert.” Instead of, “fueling hundreds of strategies,” funders can choose to align with the Continuum of Care’s collective impact effort, ask organizations to align with it too, and condition any future support on organizations joining the Continuum of Care’s collective impact effort.
This thought piece accompanies the first video of our new Learning Series: Understanding Homelessness: Understanding Your Continuum of Care. Don’t miss it!
Additional Resources:
Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations in Collective Impact: Part 1
