From breaking ground on a community-changing redevelopment to celebrating our Built for Zero communities (with spirit!), 2018 has been an eventful year.
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We have extraordinary news to share: there are now 11 examples of Built for Zero communities having ended chronic or veteran homelessness and 36 places making measurable reductions.
Until now, few would have believed this to be possible. For more than a generation, homelessness has been regarded as an intractable problem.
Yet the more than 70 communities in our Built for Zero network are proving otherwise.
In the Built for Zero Collaborative, we've identified a handful of communities that we believe are in the 'Last Mile' of ending homelessness for a target population. Bakersfield, California, is one of our Last Mile communities, which has quickly and successfully implemented a multi-pronged strategy aimed at ending chronic homelessness within the next four months.
U.S. Army Veteran Marcus Cobb lived without a home for more than a decade.
This Q&A with Aras Jizan was originally published in Community Solutions' 2017 Annual Report.
Aras works on the Built for Zero Data Team where he designs, customizes, and implements data tools and analytic frameworks that help communities end chronic and veteran homelessness.
What is data analytics?
At a basic level, it’s collecting and looking at information systematically in order to make better decisions.
Homelessness is a constantly shifting problem. In order to effectively solve for it, communities need accurate and up-to-date data on the issue.
That's why Built for Zero communities create real-time, person-specific data sets of the people experiencing homelessness in their region. This information is graphed in custom dashboards, powered by Tableau, a data visualization software. These dashboards make it easier for local teams to analyze their data and use it to inform their decision-making.
What does it take to bring investment back to a community?
In 2008, Rana Awdish was a healthy physician about to complete her fellowship in critical care, and she was pregnant with her first child. Then, everything changed: an undetected tumor in her liver burst, causing her organs to fail, and suddenly she was fighting for her life in the very hospital where she worked.
This experience as a patient had a profound impact on Awdish, as she realized the unintentional harm that can be caused by interactions with healthcare providers.
Patrisse Cullors, activist, author, and the Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter, delivered a powerful keynote address at the Built for Zero Conference and Learning Session in Detroit earlier this summer.
Cullors’ talk corresponded to one of the tracks of the conference: taking action on structural racism.
The City of New York’s Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) announced last week that Community Solutions and our partners have been selected to create a transformational mixed-use project on long vacant sites along Livonia Avenue in Brownsville.