Over the past year I received five contacts (the latest one just today) from individuals/groups wanting to start a homeless shelter for families, and would I provide either technical assistance or share information.  Partly, I am flattered Safe Haven is considered a benchmark and recognized for our work and others want to emulate our success. But since I go to national conferences and read about trends, best practices, do the homework and review the research I always respond, “Not so fast.” I ask a series of questions: Do you know what population you want to serve? Why are you selecting this population? Do you know how you will serve them? Do you know who else is serving them? Do you know what you will do for your clients while they are in shelter and beyond? Do you know that shelter is a very expensive proposition? Do you know that although family homelessness is a lagging indicator, and we will see some increases, numbers have actually gone down? Do you know how to interpret the homelessness metrics (contested and complex data)? Have you talked to other homeless service providers in your area? Business and government leaders? Have they all agreed that there is a need for a shelter in your area? Have you considered investing funds in prevention and other housing options? Using churches and other faith community resources to shelter and serve homeless families and other innovative strategies? And do you have a source of funding (better yet, many sources of funding) that can be sustained over time?

In no case could any of these potential providers answer these questions. They wanted to help homeless individuals and families and felt called. But they only wanted to help in this way – and would not consider any more cost-effective ways to serve homeless families and could only respond to homelessness by thinking about shelters. Shelters do play an important role in helping those that fall through service gaps and have no other supports (e.g. personal, familial, and governmental) receive care and services. But why is our first response to homelessness, “let’s build more shelters!”?

Safe Haven is a well-established shelter that has a sustainable funding stream, trained staff, a track record of successful outcomes, demonstrated leadership around the issue of family homelessness, programs that provide rich services and educational opportunities and use evidence-based strategies and compassionate care.  The work we do is difficult and requires absolute commitment, and even well-established shelters like Safe Haven struggle to raise needed funds.

I challenge our community to consider other options to stem the tide of family homelessness. Prevention costs a fraction of what it costs to shelter a family. Rapid re-housing, as we learned from our own experience and from the national research presented at the conference, represents a new best practice that has proven to reduce family homelessness.  Again, this cost less than sheltering and can yield a better result. When families receive services in a home or apartment of their own, for those who are ready, they can learn better what they need to do to be successful. Rapid re-housing has a very high success rate in keeping families from returning to homelessness (8 to 9 out of 10 stay housed).  Coordinated entry is another best practice that moves us away from having multiple programs and multiple organizations to a systems change model.  Prevention, rapid re-housing, and coordinated entry are systems change models that are not only more cost-effective ways of serving homeless individuals and families, but they work.

So our community needs to ask do we want to only sustain the gaps in services or do we want to prevent the gaps in the first place and close those gaps we have more quickly? Do we have the community and political will to support systems change? When do we discuss improving those conditions that lead to family homelessness?

At the end of the conference I listened to one of the program officers from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (they have done great work in Seattle to reduce family homelessness) tell about how funders can’t support more organizations – but must align all funders to only fund best practices, outcomes and coordinated entry systems – away from individual programs toward systems change. There are communities where there has been the community and political will to actually reduce homelessness and it has worked. Not one of the solutions involved building more shelters.  While Safe Haven is expanding our space to serve more families in a measured way, our real goal is to expand our capacity to provide other options to meet the growing needs during a time when sustainability should be our guiding principle. This conversation should not be about property, but capacity.

What I learned from the conference encouraged me further to want to work across organizations to coordinate entry so that clients don’t waste their and our time, and we can get needed services to a family in need more quickly; to use best and promising practices (yes, along with love, compassion, and hope) with a well-trained staff so that we are not wasting time and funds on things that don’t work. I’d rather prevent homelessness than extend it. I’d rather get a family in their own housing as soon as is practical rather than have them live in a shelter longer than absolutely necessary. I want to advocate for families to have the opportunities and resources they need to be stable and housed – and independent.

Certainly we can shift the conversation away from creating more and more agencies, recreating the wheel and further stretching limited funding to using more effectively what we already have. We can do this by connecting, coordinating, and aligning care, intake, services, resources and processes. It is my hope that we can truly reduce family homelessness. From what I learned from my peers around the country that are succeeding in this vision, these are the things they are doing. Let’s learn from them. And each other.

Lipscomb University, HCA Foundation, and the Center for Nonprofit Management modeled collaboration by bringing together their resources and knowledge to encourage nonprofits to pursue new models of community building. We will be working together for the next six months as they provide valuable consultative services to refine and strengthen our model. Whether we win the grand prize, this is a significant achievement to be recognized as having both the capacity to compete, but also that we proposed a project that was deemed worthy of further development. Our two organizations are committed to continuing this collaboration regardless of the final outcome. We know what we proposed represents an important advance for our clients.

Nashville OIC provides adult education, a GED program, soft skills classes, employment readiness and placement, and career and support services to the unemployed and under-employed. Their motto is to help those who help themselves. Our strategic plan for the next year has identified a need to extend employment services to the adults in our families to help them improve their job outlook by providing more resources to help not only find employment, but to find better employment. The joining of our programs to serve the population of homeless families with improved and proven strategies for the adults of these families to better their job outlook is critical. Safe Haven Family Shelter and Nashville OIC want the same thing: to improve the lives of the underserved and those in poverty by providing them with greater opportunities and education. We are grateful for Lipscomb University, the HCA Foundation and the Center for Nonprofit Management for recognizing that our work is better off when we join forces with others in the community for a common cause.

For more info about the Collaboration College, click here.

The ICPH will be releasing a new report, “A New Path: An Immediate Plan to Reduce Family Homeless.” The plan proposes using the family shelter as a tool for parents with limited education and work experience. This contradicts other recent trends such as “Housing First” – which is still lauded as a solution – but for families with more assets and resources. The conference also presented models from around the country with those services that are effective, innovative, and cost-effective so that we could all share in that knowledge. Shelters, for all the movement away from them over the past decade, are actually important community centers for homeless and poor families that need a “one-stop shop” of services.

ICPH President Dr. Ralph da Costa Nunez, in his keynote, traced the history of family homelessness – a phenomenon that really began to be noticed in the 1980s. Regardless of where one is on the political spectrum, policy has impacted the numbers of homeless individuals and families in our nation. Whether one believes that government programs impede individual motivation and competition or that they level the playing field by providing access to basic resources and opportunities for the poor, it is the polarization of the conversation – the extremes on either end – that have made finding solutions and strategies to reducing family poverty and homelessness nearly impossible. So until that day that our communities and nation can come together to find consensus around what we need to do to help those in poverty (pull oneself up by the bootstraps vs first one needs a pair of boots), The ICPH believes that family shelters play a key role in helping families access resources by providing educational opportunities and services in one location while also providing housing and other basic necessities.

While at the conference, I connected with an ICPH staffer that while a student at Vanderbilt volunteered with SHFS. She claimed that her experience at SHFS was wonderful: “It is not a shelter; but a home. No one does what you do in such a personal way.” While I left the conference not feeling as optimistic that family homelessness would end in 10-20 years (we still need to aim to reduce our numbers) as I did before, I did feel encouraged that the shelter and services that SHFS provides to the community are much needed, right-sized, and our flexible and customized approaches (shelter, transitional, housing first, and hopefully, soon, prevention) are the right strategies for our time.

“Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God’s children, now is the time for city hall to take a position for that which is just and honest.” 

Today our nation and community celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Many of us have the day off to enjoy as a holiday; some of us are using this day as a day of service and volunteerism (“a day on; not a day off”). Most of us remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s contribution to our nation from his “I Have a Dream” speech – one of the most important speeches in American history – a fiery and spiritual appeal to end racism and injustice. However, some of us do not remember that when he was killed, he was supporting a strike of municipal sanitation workers, standing up for the principle that every working American should be able to earn enough to live a decent life.

I suspect that Dr. King would be surprised to find that since the 1980s (when the issue of homelessness as a social phenomenon began) homeless shelters and programs have had to spring up to also serve homeless families. So we as a community and nation have fallen short in fulfilling his vision. The division between rich and poor is greater now than ever before and some of our nation’s families struggle to live a decent, self-sufficient life.

In February 2007, the acclaimed actor, Danny Glover, came to Nashville to fight for the Living Wage Campaign. Along with forums and appearances at Vanderbilt University and The Scarritt Bennett Center, he came to Safe Haven Family Shelter with those Vanderbilt employees asking for a living wage to visit with families struggling with this same issue. SHFS has long been an advocate for solutions to family homelessness. We serve the whole person and the whole family. We work with community partners and resources to provide needed services and opportunities; we advocate for change. But it is undeniable that families are homeless, in large part, because of persistent poverty. We can clothe, house and feed families. We can provide education and training, support, love, empowerment and hope. That is what we do every day, and most of the families that come through our doors do make it.

Yet we know, too, that until we address the underlying causes of family homelessness – family dissolution, family violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of living wage jobs, mental and physical health issues and chronic poverty – we will not fulfill our vision to reduce and eventually eliminate family homelessness in Middle Tennessee. Other American cities have done so. It takes community will; it takes Dr. King’s vision enacted by us all.

So as we paint walls, clean closets, and organize pantries – all noble and important pursuits–let us not forget the real work of Dr. King’s dream.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. . . ‘The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. -Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 1967

As we celebrate the close of 2011 and look toward our work in 2012, we are grateful for your generous contributions and tireless support. We want to say thank you to our thousands of volunteers  and hundreds of faith communities that provide services, meals, creativity, love and inspiration; the many corporations, foundations and businesses that provide funding and support; our many nonprofit partners that allow us to better solve the problem of family homelessness and extend our quality services; the board of directors that provide true leadership and governance and the staff of Safe Haven Family Shelter for their daily steadfast commitment to excellence and compassionate care.

In 2012 you will see our continued commitment to sustainable growth, best practices, transparency and accountability, innovation, compassionate care, and service to our beloved community.

Thank you, ALL, for another exceptional year!!!

The day the video was filmed at CNM – an interview with me to discuss the reasons we were among only two finalists in this category – staff was having a difficult day. One of those days where one feels the long hard work of creating teams, trust, healthy communication unravels. I arrived at the filming frustrated and feeling perhaps we didn’t deserve this honor.

Not today at least.

I told David, the videographer and director, that I was not at my best and it had been a tough day. It was his compassion, someone I knew for a long time and worked with on several different projects, which brought back my confidence and inspired me to remember the reason we were there. That I was there.

Compassionate Care.

It requires that we forgive ourselves for not being perfect. For not being the perfect leader, the perfect executive director, the perfect staff. To realize that clients, the families we serve, will at times frustrate and confound us and challenge us to care because that is our job and our calling and that they deserved nothing less. We all deserve nothing less. I forgave myself (it took a little while longer to forgive the offending staff! and some time to process some difficult challenges) during the filmed interview. What mattered most was that we were all, to the person, committed to trying to learn, trying to be our best self (51% – an inside joke with staff!), to challenge each other to listen, to care, to forgive, to support.

We are a diverse staff coming from different backgrounds – which is part of our great strength. But this does takes more work. We have to listen harder, understand more, forgive more, and come together frequently as a team, as colleagues, and people who care passionately about our mission to think, reflect, learn, do – and, yes, pray. On most days, we make it work. On most days, we bring our best selves to our jobs and our relationships with others at Safe Haven. Even when we are tired, worked too long hours, dealt with a few outrageous challenges, we show up at work wanting to make a difference and create an environment where families can heal and sometimes, we need that, too.

We did not win that night, but as the finalist, we received great coverage and a $5,000 gift. Not all staff could make it to the ceremony dinner either – one of my staff was at the hospital until midnight sitting with a client as they waited for care. No one knew among the 500+ guests at the Renaissance Hotel that staff had just averted a crisis at the shelter – formed a team that came together and dropped everything to help a very troubled family get through one of our most challenging days we’ve had this year and yet kept everyone safe, calm, and to begin the healing process once again. And that night, even without a win, I did know why we were there.

Many families are no longer able to afford rent now. They live in cars and struggle to find security and normalcy. They struggle to keep up hope. While this might be an extreme condition, this is a reality for many families in this predicament, and Safe Haven serves many families with a similar profile.

As I watched this piece on my TV one Sunday night, I was flooded with many thoughts, feelings, and impressions.

The work we do—that I am honored to do—at Safe Haven Family Shelter provides support and sustenance for these families in our community so that they can achieve long-term sustainability. We provide solutions for the families we serve through a variety of resources, strategies, and interventions. But the need is so great at this moment—we are only serving a small portion of these families. While we as an organization will expand to serve more families through many different ways, simply building more and more shelters will not solve this multifaceted problem. The problem is systemic  (and, yes, personal, political, social, moral, spiritual, economic – in a word, complex)– and that is the realization that I dreamed about—all night—that night.

What is that we are called to do in this very moment to meet this need? Do we have the community will to reduce family homelessness, instead of just reacting to it?

Dear Safe Haven Friends,

As we enter the holiday season, what does “home” mean to you? For 21 homeless families with children, Safe Haven Family Shelter is their home for the holidays this year.  The only shelter-to-housing program in Middle Tennessee that accepts the entire homeless family, Safe Haven provides much more than just a place to stay. Families receive financial education, therapy, debt reduction, essential academic and developmental tools for their children, and- most of all- the opportunity, to once again, secure a place to call home.

Thanks to your generous contributions and tireless support, we served 61 homeless families with children in 2011 and provided 955 family therapy sessions and 293 in-school therapy sessions. For the children, who acutely experience the physical and developmental trauma from homelessness, we provided essential in-school and play therapy, new educational toys, school uniforms, tutoring, medical care and other enrichment opportunities. This summer marked the first year that we were able to send 25 children to summer camp. With your help, we improved the emotional and academic well-being of 130 homeless children in the last 12 months.

We are also pleased to report that 86% of the families we served this year successfully secured housing and employment. This is one of the highest success rates in the country. One of our families was recently selected for a Habitat for Humanity build. Another parent reduced debt, received a promotion at work and is moving into a better apartment. These are just two of the many success stories at Safe Haven. Your generosity and service were instrumental in helping our families achieve this success.

Although our programs are effective, national statistics indicate that family homelessness continues to increase. We must answer the call to help more families in 2012. We receive more than 100 unduplicated requests for assistance each month from families with children who are homeless or on the verge of homelessness. Last year alone, there were 1,600 homeless children in the Metro Nashville Metro school system. These daunting facts underscore the importance of our mission and the urgency to meet more needs.

As we all think about being “home for the holidays,” will you help ensure that our families continue to have not only shelter but a home to call their own? Your gift is extremely important to Safe Haven as we impact families now while building a firm foundation for continued services to homeless families in our community.

Your gift of $500, $250 or $100 can make all the difference in ensuring that homeless children and their families have a home  this holiday and throughout the year. Individuals and groups can also join the Guardian Angel program to support  a Safe Haven Family for 2 weeks, 45 days,  90 days  or 12 months.  Join us in our efforts to make a positive impact on the lives of our families by making a gift today. Thank you so much for your help! For more information or assistance in making a gift, please contact Rachael Wilkins at rwilkins@safehaven.orgor 615.256.8195.

Gratefully,

Joyce Lavery

Executive Director

 P.S. Please click here for additional holiday giving programs.