- Rosanne Haggerty, Executive Director, Community Solutions (Founder and former Executive Director of Common Ground)
Rosanne Haggerty founded Common Ground in 1990 to create permanent and transitional housing for people who were homeless. Under her leadership, the organization built roughly 3,000 units of supportive housing in New York City and the surrounding region. With the Community Solutions office located in a housing project in Times Square, Haggerty passed homeless people every day on her way to work. She was puzzled by why they remained homeless. Upon investigating, she realized that no one had "the job of figuring out what's going on here and getting these people into housing."
Haggerty shared this concern with colleagues. She faced a pivotal choice about how to move forward—continue to run good programs or look at the larger issue of how to end homelessness. This choice was really about two different mindsets and potentially redefining the purpose of her organization.
Haggerty's colleagues agreed to focus on actually ending homelessness. This entailed assuming responsibility for the larger issue and learning about what they needed to do to be successful. It also meant collaborating with outreach service providers to redefine goals and processes. Starting in her own backyard, Midtown Manhattan, Haggerty spent the next 18 months trying this approach and discovered that while a majority of providers liked the idea, they either felt blocked because of incentives that promoted the status quo—or simply lacked personal motivation. Many organizations had various government contracts requiring them to define success as outputs, such as the number of contacts providers made with homeless people, rather than actually getting people housed.
That was when Haggerty realized, "Looks like we're just going to need to do it ourselves."
The initiative was based on the Housing First philosophy with the goal of providing permanent housing. Gradually Margiotta and her team learned to focus on those with the longest history of being homeless. Most people, it turned out, were not homeless for long and were able to secure housing on their own. The team became more targeted and saw progress when they focused on helping the people in Times Square with the longest histories of being homeless, the chronically homeless.
Two significant innovations came
out of the Street to Home Initiative:
Margiotta and her team spent weeks canvassing
Times Square in the pre-dawn hours to engage each homeless person to get to
know their names, faces, homeless history, and vulnerability factors—creating a Homeless Registry. The Vulnerability Index (VI) was the assessment tool
that Common Ground developed to collect this information and took 10-15 minutes
to administer. It provided a scoring
algorithm to identify the people most at risk and create priority lists for
permanent housing.
Street to Home practically eliminated homelessness in Times Square from 2003 to 2008 and helped inspire New York City to overhaul its homeless outreach program.
Before (2003): 50 Homeless People
After (2008): 1 Homeless Person
Local leaders in Los Angeles noticed the success of Street to Home and reached out for assistance. Common Ground charged employee Beth Sandor with establishing a local office and “trying to figure out how we could add value to the work around ending homelessness in Los Angeles.”
By 2007, Sandor and local stakeholders put together Project 50, a pilot program to house the 50 people living on Skid Row in Los Angeles who were at the greatest risk of dying on the streets. She and Margiotta trained volunteers and then helped them conduct the first Registry Week, spending nine days canvassing Skid Row before dawn and using the VI Index to create a homeless registry. Project 50 exceeded its goal, housing 67 of the most vulnerable individuals identified.
Soon homeless advocates in other parts of the country approached Community Solutions to invite Margiotta and Sandor to help conduct Registry Weeks in their communities. In the beginning, these were innovators on the cutting edge who were looking for the next successful tool or approach to solve the biggest problems around homelessness. Sandor described them as “like-minded people who were interested in solving problems differently. They wound up being the early-adopters who helped create national momentum around the Housing First approach.”
It was during this time, in 2008, that Margiotta and Haggerty learned more about the 100,000 Lives Campaign that had been created by Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).2 As the two began to ponder doing something similar, Haggerty thought about the communities reaching out for help: "We had a network of early adopters and innovators we had begun to build with whom we could plausibly look across the table and say we could do this—and we have a starting point...the people in this room."
- Rosanne Haggerty, Executive Director, Community Solutions (Founder and former Executive Director of Common Ground)