Finding a way home: Hennepin County advocates discuss need to make plan to end homelessness an inclusive process

By Anna Pratt (March 12, 2008)

Originally published in The Spokesman-Recorder.

This story is part one of a multi-part series on the Heading Home Hennepin plan to end homelessness

While some government officials describe the 10-year Heading Home Hennepin plan (HHH) as a community-based initiative to end homelessness in Hennepin County and the City of Minneapolis, some other activists are critical of the 80-page plan, claiming its effectiveness is diffused by a lack of diversity in its implementation and leadership.

HHH, which calls for $150 million in its first three years (right now there’s a funding gap of $45 million to reach that target), is a major effort that began just over a year ago. It cites a number of goals that will prevent homelessness, create more affordable housing and link people to social services, among other things, according to the report. Annual benchmarks are in place to measure its progress in all of these areas.

Additionally, some immediate actions are underway, such as the start of a new street outreach pilot program to collaborate with the police department; a one-stop shop “opportunity center,” offering myriad social services; and improved access to jobs, the report states. Plus, a couple of new initiatives to help homeless youth and refugee families have sprung up.

Regardless, the populations that are living and dying on the streets, including many minorities, ex-offenders, youth and veterans, among others, need to be in a better position to influence related policy decisions, in addition to the delivery of social services, some homeless advocates and government officials agree.

One objective under the plan is to implement systemic improvements, which has a requirement to “enhance cultural competency across the system to ensure access to quality services for all groups,” the report states on page seven. Gail Dorfman, the Hennepin County Commissioner who is credited for bringing HHH to fruition, said via email that all along, people experiencing homelessness have been involved in the process.

“[The city and county] have been unique in recognizing the importance of hearing from people who are homeless, involving them in every aspect of the plan development and implementation,” she said.

However, it’s true that the majority of shelter and service providers, workgroup members and city/county staff are White and don’t necessarily reflect the attributes of the community most impacted by the plan, she said. Those experiencing homelessness are predominantly Black.

Ideally, employees in local government and community-based agencies that provide housing and homeless services would look like and speak the same language as many of the people they serve. Cultural competency, she says, is a key strategy to overcoming that hurdle.

That’s why one of the plan’s 38 workgroups, the Cultural Competency Committee, formed around the issue. The committee is hosting a public meeting on the topic and the plan at the Minnesota Pipeline event, Thursday, March 13, 6-8 pm at the Minneapolis Urban League.

Sandy Delos, grants and contracts manager/community liaison for the Salvation Army, and committee member, said via email that the group is “slowly sorting issues of exclusion in the current effort to end homelessness,” which is complex.

The challenge is to make it real, she said. That is, moving “beyond tokenism to full integration in research and policy processes,” as a way to empower people, while bearing in mind that “beneath it all flows the undertow of race. And we just don’t talk about that very well in this country.”

All in all, it is guaranteed to be an interesting process, she said.

Moving beyond managing homelessness

Heading Home Hennepin is the culmination of an intensive effort at the outset from nearly 70 community leaders who served on the Commission to End Homelessness. They represented a cross-section of the federal, state and local government, businesses, nonprofits, faith and philanthropic organizations as well as homeless and formerly homeless people, according to the report.

Workgroups and other focus groups have engaged even more people. Throughout the course of 100 days, the leaders produced a plan for eliminating homelessness over the next 10 years or by 2016, falling in line with scores of other municipalities that have undertaken similar initiatives.

HHH has six broad goals, 30 recommendations and over 50 action items. Cathy ten Broeke, city/county coordinator to end homelessness, said it gives new meaning to the broad-based effort to help homeless people. “Instead of just addressing homelessness, we need to figure out a plan to end homelessness, by looking at the system and what is causing it in the first place,” she said.

That means preventing it while also keeping people housed, she said. “That’s what it takes to truly end homelessness, rather than just managing it.”

Additionally, getting people off the streets and into stable living conditions not only improves their quality of life, but it is also a more cost-effective way to deal with the social problem. That is one reason that she believes the plan is happening, because social justice advocates all across the country have been able to provide studies that gave hard evidence, proving that the continuous cycling through shelters, hospitals, jails and more drains resources.

Work on this goes quite a ways back, said ten Broeke, who formerly worked in local homeless shelters. Over the years, many taskforces and advisory boards came together to address the problem, but HHH consolidated those kinds of efforts under a unified goal.

While HHH establishes an overarching plan and structure, “its success depends on those agencies that do this work every day,” ten Broeke said. “One of the most important things is to work together to come up with creative solutions to break down the silos. That makes a big difference. That is really happening.”

Breaking down cultural barriers

Laura Kadwell, director for the statewide plan, Heading Home Minnesota, that focuses on putting a stop to chronic homelessness, said “cultural competency” underlies every aspect of the city/county plan’s 80 pages. “Making sure services are appropriate and different for various cultures is a core value,” Kadwell said.

For starters, she said, it’s important to make connections in all areas of the larger community to build trust. Practically speaking, day-to-day needs can’t be met without having those relationships in place. For example, it should be noted that some groups of people don’t eat certain foods. Or in the case of Hmong families that tend to be big, housing units need to have spacious rooms to accommodate them, she said.

John Sather, a pastor for Here’s to Life Inner City, said urban churches need to play a visible role in HHH because “I am convinced that the urban neighborhood pastor and their congregants will have some of the best perspective on how to serve the poor and homeless,” he said.

Local ethnic churches, among others, are focused on neighborhoods. “They will do it with dignity and with long-term care in mind,” he said.

Shane Price, coordinator for the African American Men’s Project in Hennepin County, served on the Commission to End Homelessness. He praised the plan as a strong one that includes a lot of well thought-out goals, but he said sometimes the “implementation can get lost in translation,” especially if people continue to see the same faces they have seen over the past 20 years. “The outcomes will probably be the same too,” he said.

HHH represents “a huge opportunity to reach to people who have been systemically forgotten. It becomes necessary to have informed champions at every level…we’re talking about intricate detail. How do we make this intricate enough to be effective?”

For more information or to read the full report, go to http://heading homehennepin.org.