BONUS: Homelessness Is Solvable (with Aras Jizan)

by mail Chimp. This season has been all about tech and how it can bring us together instead of tearing us apart. And I'm so excited to bring you one more story of people using technology to help us citizen. I'm your host, Barraitune Day Thurston and on this episode, we're gonna talk about homelessness and how one organization is using data to help communities across the US solve homelessness, not just manage it. This is a lifelong and personal

topic for me. Every week from most of my grade school years, I volunteered with my mother at a Washington, d c. Soup kitchen and meal van, mostly Martha's Table and mckinna's wagon. For those who know d C. They're both still in operation. Today, I observed, listened and talked to my neighbors who didn't have enough money for food and often housing. Sometimes it was exhilarating. I mean I got to ride around town in the back of a van handing out donuts to smiling, grateful people. What kids

wouldn't love that? Sometimes it was heartbreaking. Often I cried myself to sleep in anger and sadness at the number of folks we let go hungry and unhoused, wondering what else we could do about this. Today, the housing crisis feels more widespread and acute in many ways. Even if your own housing feels secured, you probably see encampments, read stories, or even struggle to pay your own rent and mortgage.

Today I live in California, which by some measures has the largest number of unhoused people of any state in the United States. That little kid in me, he's still there wondering what we can do about all this. Fortunately, this podcast episode is a step toward answering that question.

So check out my conversation with a. Rash Jason of Community Solutions, where they use data well defined goals and a sense of collective ownership to help those at the front lines of America's housing crisis solve homelessness by the end of this EPISOD. So here's my promise to you. You'll feel empowered, You'll have some more optimism. You'll see how technology can help and how you can help take responsibility for helping end homelessness where you live. Let's go.

My name is I asked Jason. I work at Community Solutions, where I head up our data and technology team, supporting communities to build and use technology and data stand homelessness. I'll give you a concrete example, and a lot of the communities that we work with, one of the first things we ask that they try and engage with is just getting their arms around the scope of the problem. How many people are homeless today where you live in

your community? And you'd be surprised how few communities baseline have the ability to meaningfully answer that question in a way that passes the sniff test with the folks, the boots on the ground right, or the key stakeholders in that community right. People will say that data is out of date, it's not comprehensive, it's missing a bunch of folks. It has all of these different problems. And so then what we've got actually is a really basic what I

think of as mixing bowl problem. A lot of different people have data on who's experiencing homelessness, but it's not in one mixing bowl, right, So it's not a shiny app. It's just figuring out how can we get the data from your database and your database and your database into our shared mixing bowl. And the work there then is

not about creating a sexy app that does that. It's about like building relationships and trust, making sure we're honoring privacy and consent, getting folks on the bus, figuring out the double data entry that's gonna need to happen, and who's going to volunteer to do that, all that good stuff, right,

And so that's less about the technology. The technology enables the ability for the partnership and collaboration to happen, but actually the special sauces the partnership and the relationships um and so I think that that idea feels like such a through line that the tech is an enabling factor, but it's not solving the problem. With the high level explanation of what community Solutions is doing to help us address this pretty broadly experienced and certainly at least witness

crisis of housing and lack of housing for people. So Community Solutions is powering a movement called Built for Zero, and that is a constellation of over nineties cities and counties. We call them communities that are working to use data and to tackle homelessness in a different way. And so there are sort of four key elements to the approach that we're sort of espoused and that we're working with

communities to support. The first one is sort of having a collective accountability for ending homelessness using a particular definition of what it means and homelessness let's The second piece is having a shared aim, ideally making that a quantifiable aim where we can have objective conversations about whether we're making progress, what does good look like, what is better look like? And what does ending homelessness mean? Right? Do we have a shared definition of that across all the

different folks at the table. The third piece of the puzzle is establishing sort of what I was talking about earlier, that mixing Bowler, that idea of quality real time data to inform decisions and also to tell us whether what we're doing is working, which I think is often a missing ingredient that I hear about when I talk to

folks about efforts in their community about ending homelessness. They're like, we're doing all of these things, and I can tell you about the activities, and then when we talk about the outcomes, it's a bit of a head scratcher, right.

So I think having one shared sort of yardstick that we're all using to use a sports metaphor, like we all agree with what yard line we're on, right, last piece, And I think this is important as well in a lot of places that we're doing meaningful work is being really intentional about targeted investments and tying those two reductions in homelessness and so having to dig into any of those four building blocks. But that's sort of our our playbook.

But then beyond that, I think really the overarching thing we're doing is bringing folks together to learn from each other in a lot of respects. Today, in America and across a lot of the world, homelessness is one of those sort of lagging areas where whether you live in a big city or a small town or a more rural jurisdiction. There's something about the sort of status quo in our country that isn't working, and it's visible and

it's tangible in a lot of different communities. That's a cult of action, yes, but it's also an opportunity because you're not the only one working on this issue where you are, and it's hard to see that often when you are boots on the ground, right you feel like I'm rolling this ball up the mountain and it's just me and my team. And so that opportunity to create the space where folks feel seen, they feel connected to others doing the work. They don't have to start from scratch.

There's a good chance of the problem you're facing somebody else is facing two and they've thought about it. Maybe they even have a place to start, right. I think there's so much value in that connective tissue. You're using so much language that isn't really about technology, you know, community connective tissue, not feeling alone, learning from each other. This sounds like, you know, trust exercises in summer camp and team building much more than about servers and a

p I S and you know, other more technical features. Absolutely, as do start to think about the operational weeds of what would it take for us in our city to have a shared aim and accountability and progress towards that aim. That's where you start to I think, think about, okay, some of what we need, write people at the table, shared definitions, some wonky metric in the weeds stuff. But then there's the enabling factors that I mentioned earlier, and

I think tech has a big role to play here. Right. It can either be a barrier if creating the linkages between these different systems requires fifteen steps and bending over backwards, then people aren't going to do it right. Or it can become an enabling factor, right, if it's really easy to sort of send all of you the relevant information to the relevant people. I think we all actually have

a lived experience here. I think many of us do of navigating healthcare, right, and if you think about the best experience that you've had, I think hopefully many of us do have. Like that one time I didn't have to refill all the forms from Scotch where like I gotta referral and my information like just seamlessly they had

it and they didn't meet. They just verified that I was me, and then they had all the information that they needed to allow them to meet my needs or for us to talk about my physical therapy or whatever it is that dream scenario. What what what enables that to happen? And why doesn't it happen more often? And I think as you start to unpack that and get into the weeds the answers sometimes not always, but sometimes

is tech working well or not working well? And so I think that's really part of it for us, is sort of figuring out what do we want to do? Asking that question first before assuming that tech is going to have the solution. But I think sometimes it has a role to play and what it does. I get excited, as you can tell I do. I can pick up on your excitement. I share some of it. And you mentioned that you're operating in these nine communities, which means

most places you aren't. Um I want to stay at the kind of the how this feels level for a place that's working with you and your method that's different in these number of ways? How does that look and feel differently from places that aren't. What? What's what are the things that stand out? Really good question? And for reference that communities that we work with, community is such a squishy term, right, um, but really what I mean by that is it's sort of folks who are self organized.

It often maps to a wonky federal jurisdiction. It's a quarter of the country, right, that's the shorthand. So yeah, wow, okay, okay, so it's not so rare. And what's what's different? I think in terms of the experience, what would what what would feel differently in one of those communities. I'll tell you from the perspective of somebody working in homeless services or homeless response, and then I'll tell you from the perspective,

hopefully of somebody who's experiencing a housing crisis. If your job is case manager and street outreach worker, a city official or county official who's in the Department of Housing and Homelessness, for example. I think two things that we really evangelize. For First, we view your homelessness as a systems problem. And what that means is that it's not about the individual people and um issues that they're having

or challenges. Yes, we need to know those things so that we can support those folks, but that we're pulling up and thinking about some top line metrics and and most importantly moving from a space of thinking about individual programs and projects, So like Burton Day, are you running a great homeless shelter? Awesome? What is the impact that's having on homelessness overall? In East l All the different question starts to activate you and being like, well, you

alone cannot answer that question. You could tell me how many of those beds are full, how long folks are staying, whether their dignity is being met? All really important questions to be answering. But I think the big paradigm shift here, and this isn't just specific to build for zero, I think it's happening across the country is moving to a space where we review homelessness as a problem we need to solve and not manage. And so if you need to solve homelessness and not just manage it, you've got

to start asking a different set of questions. And so that brings me to the second thing that I think is true in built for zero communities, which folks are either working to build a real time person level data system that could answer questions like are we making progress on ending homelessness for veterans, for folks over fifty five, for LGBT youth, right lots of different ways you could slice that data, but at the end of the day,

what is true. It's got to know who's experiencing homelessness today or this month at least, right, And how is that number trending over time? And what are some of the inflow and outflow criteria right? So, how many folks are newly experiencing homelessness, how many folks move from homelessness into safe and stable housing last months? These kind of questions or to become your bread and butter if you're in the business of asking are we solving homelessness? And

how would we know? Right? And so that idea of shifting the scoreboard, looking at a different set of information to give us meaning about progress that we're making. I think from the perspective of a person working on ending homelessness or working in homeless services, my hope is that's

a big mindset shift. And even that idea of foregrounding ending homelessness as the mission, even if my role day to day is serving the fifteen people in front of my caseload as a case manager, yes, absolutely, let's make sure that we're doing that in a way that is as sort of evidence informed and trauma informed and preserving people's dignity and yes, all of that, and I've got to see myself as part of a bigger project, right,

And I think that that's a big mindset shift. And then the perspective of the person who is on the house, who's experiencing homelessness, what is that like in in a built for zero area? So I think the direction we want to be moving is one where we are first and foremost making sure that homelessness is rare, brief and

non recurring or one time. That's sort of the and that is a a a sort of through line that the you know, the federal government has said, like, that's the goal, okay, but then in practice, what does that mean? The hope is that folks first feel seen as a person. We sometimes use this term about our idea of what that data in the community might look like, and we use a term called a by name list or by name data. And that doesn't mean that we think you

should ignore privacy and share people's personal information, you know, everywhere. No. So the idea is, though, is that if I'm telling you today in my community, this is how many people are experiencing homelessness, I sure had better be able to

tell you more about them. I had better be able to know who they are, what their needs are, and so that I can start to right size my services and my resources to the people who are actually speriencing homelessness, because I think if you're doing planning and advocacy and resource creation without really having your arms around the problem,

you're missing half of the puzzle, so to speak. And so then you know, you could start to measure things like is the number of days on average that somebody is experiencing homelessness from touching the system until being able to move into their own apartment? What's the baseline and

what direction is that moving? And for that person who's experiencing homelessness, the hope would be that number is trending in a fewer days, right, and that the deer experience of the system is one that's responsive, and that they have some line of sight into some of the top line accountability measures, which I think is part of the tricks here is often I think conversations about how is our work to end homelessness going exclude the folks who are closest to the problem, right, And so I know

that in some past conversations you've talked to folks about, you know, sort human centered design or making sure that we're not you know, I think about some of the example that you gave in our recent podcast where you're talking about work in Detroit and sort of returning citizens and who's in the room informing decisions about system design.

I mean, that's a big thing. That's sort of a core tenet of what we believe is you've got to start to engage the folks closest to the problems, whether that's frontline staff or folks formerly experiencing homelessness or even currently experiencing homelessness, in reimagining how those systems are configured so that you can reach that shared goal. So is

that the case with with community solutions? You've got people on the front lines of service delivery and people who are experiencing homelessness helping you design this this new approach of shared accountability and person level data and real time tracking and feedback that that has been collaboratively developed or did you just whip this up, you know, on a whiteboard by yourself. Such a good question. So I'll give

you a really concrete recent example. We are currently operating in a world where there's no shared national definition in the US for what it would mean for a community to end all homelessness. How do we define that? Yeah, what does success look like? What are we trying to do here? What does success look like? Benga um And so, rather than us saying we're pretty smart, we've got some

folks who have been doing this work for decades. Let's just sit in a lab and figure that out, we did exactly what you described, which is, we engaged folks across communities who are currently experiencing homelessness or formerly experiencing homelessness. We made sure to engage folks who are frontline staff

working in homeless services. We engaged folks who are system leaders who are ultimately like sort of viewed as the accountable authority for making sure homeless services are going smoothly in those communities. And then we also engaged folks at the federal level whose job is sort of policy setting and resource management. Tried to synthesize all of those diverging points of view to come up with how we should

define that shared end. And that, I think is is the spirit of a lot of the work that we're doing is saying yes, we have some of the answers, or we have a hunch with some of the answers might be. But we need to actually center some of the folks who are closer to the work. And that's what's really powerful about getting to work at scale, right, because if I'm working with folks across the quarter of the country, there's a good chance that I can sort of pull up and see the themes that are true

across l A but also rural Ohio. Right, And so then what is the through line? How do we start to create things that are working across context? You know, that's part of what the fun of my job and what our team considered. And this is the moment where you heighten your attention to pay attention to our advertisers. I'm relatively new to Los Angeles still, and our municipal government set up it's very confusing to my my East

Coast mind. You got the city and the county and l A counties like eight individual municipalities, and it feels like a game of you know, people pointing across the table at each other in a in a hot potato of not it, And so where does the buck stop? How do you interact with different levels of jurisdiction around

this problem. So something that's true across the country is that majority of homeless services funding, maybe not a majority everywhere, but a lot of it comes from the federal government. And the way that the federal government pushes that money out is through uh sort of this big hut program called the Continuum of Care Program c OC and and these are these warm key jurisdictions. It's not quite a

county or a city. Often it's kind of a squiggly line and it looks like a gerrymander, right, But every part of the country is part of one of these continuums of care. And what that means is that there's already some pre existing governance architecture. Now not saying it works well, but there's something there. You're not starting with

a clean canvas that presents some challenges to right. So for example, in Los Angeles, it's messy, right, there's the city and the county, and there's sort of thinking about also, you know, you've got all these municipalities, like you said, you've got Long Beach, you've got Glendale. So in a

lot of parts of the country that is true. You've got these overlapping jurisdictions and bodies, and and ultimately, I think a lot of our work is saying, let's get the folks to the table, start with a broad, expansive set of stakeholders, and see if we can't find that shared accountability and shared in those first two building blocks. What's really interesting to me at least in thinking about somebody who wants to be involved in local politics or or two to be attuned to like what's happening on

the ground in a city that you live in. And so we did this this sort of recent support of this Meninos survey of mayors, and so they went out and they surveyed a bunch of mayors across the country, big cities, small cities, and they sort of asked them about their attitudes a bunch of a bunch of different things. Over of them said they didn't currently have any sort of way to know if homelessness is turning in the right direction in their city. They didn't tie success on

homelessness to reductions and homelessness. And so for me, that the alarm bells go off right. And again, I think what we hope will be different in taking this sort of different built for zero approach, and it's not just us. Other folks are hopefully doing this too. Is to say, if we are focusing on homelessness as a solvable problem. Step one, let's define what that means ending homelessness. I've got some ideas about that. Federal government has some ideas

about that. Great, let's get that shared aim. Step two, let's what's the scoreboard? Where do I go to see how we are doing in l A on ending homelessness? And I think we've all gotten in the last two years a crash course in what this might look like on COVID dashboards. Right, I know where I live now. I'm not gonna say it's perfect, but I know somewhere I can go to understand the state of COVID cases

of hospital utilization rates. That's that's really great. That's a really great because I've used those myself as I've traveled and like I'm I going into a hot zone. You know, can I afford to to twist an ankle? And then this part of the country is now a bad time to go hiking, you know, based on the icy U capacity or will I will I will I be able

to get a bed pretty easily? Should something terrible happen, and it really depending on the wave of COVID we're in, It's affected my choices, and I felt like I've been able to make an informed choice. And I think what you're describing with this idea of a dashboard and you know, shared aim and then shared progress reports is not just useful for the service providers and government officials and those experiencing homelessness, but all of us to know how we're doing.

Because here's my dashboard. I see tense cities, right I have. I have an anecdotal visual dashboard. I see headlines as I scroll through various feeds and news reports. I hear about police actions and things being closed down, and have a general feeling that housing is harder to come by. I have some personal stories, but mostly that are slightly

distant removing. I just I could walk away from that feeling like everything is just getting worse, you know, everywhere, all the time, and that that might that might not be the case. It probably isn't the case. So that that dashboard, that shared progress report, it feels like that can also help the public broadly understand how we're doing and vote accordingly and fun things accordingly or change how they're voting and what they're funding because we know the outcomes.

And so then something as simple as what you described, which is like bar chart of how many people are holmemlest today and what direction that is trending over time, right, which is not like a revelatory you know, it sounds very simple or really complex algorithm, right, Like, really, what we're talking about here is descriptive statistics, like just tell me what is happening, show me, make it visible to me. That's I think a little bit of my view of

where we start. And then you start to unpack it, right, and to ask some more interesting and sophisticated questions. So I'll just name I think a thing that you need to do as soon as you build that dashboard is to be able to start to stratify it by at least race and ethnicity. And the reason why is that we have national data that shows us that even when you account for poverty rates, black and Native Americans are massively open represented and homelessness. I think there's some working

theories of the why there. But again, you're solving homelessness, how do we know that we're doing that in a way that's equitable that's not leaving anyone behind. And you know, there's so many other ways that you might want to look at that data, right by zip code or or sort of neighborhood. You might want to look at that data based on age or other demographic criteria. You might want to look at where folks were before they experience homelessness.

There's some thing very anonymous about, you know, our national experience of homelessness. I can remember, as a New Yorker for twelve years the annual homeless census that would happen, and so I'm just like, Okay, I know what a census is. And they're they're sending people out with essentially clipboards to like count faces and shopping cards and head count as reported, it's very impersonal, almost dehumanizingly so where it's just this anonymous pile of people with no personality

to it. And you've used the phrase in your website, you know, repeats this person level data. Tell me how you're what you're collecting in terms of personal data, why you think it's valuable, and how it helps you approach the problem more effectively than what we've historically been doing around data. Absolutely, so I think I have also participated in that homeless census or point in time count. I think it's when you think about halflow is there's a

no loaf. So if the data that we're using UM for apples to apples measure is that census, I'll take it. If the alternative is not a But like you said, it is dehumanizing, and I think that it also isn't actionable, right because I don't necessarily have the information about those folks to be able to understand their needs and so on. So we are not sort of collecting that level of data because we're not trying to be the national homeless

database data warehouse. But what we are doing is supporting local teams to make sure they have that integrated data source at home and that they can push aggregated data to us that's tied to that person level data, so that they could do the version of run me a report that gets me that homeless census equivalent or at least the way there on any given Tuesday. That's the sort of test or goal that I sort of have

folks orient around. And so then you start to ask who would need to be at the table for us to feel confident that we knew all the people who are service connected, and then crucially, how would we know about the folks who aren't yet service connected? And often that means street outreach, that means setting up a two on one hotline. Depending on where you are, it looks different.

It's not going to be bulletproof. But again just saying like, what is the direction that we can head into where we're getting closer to comprehensive, real time person level data. And then on the person level side, I think there's this question too of what information do you really need about folks to be able to understand what their housing needs are? Right? And I think depending on program eligibility and design, those pieces of information vary. Some of it

is a sensitive information. And so then we do want to design data systems that do retain sort of privacy controls and maintain people's right to anonymity. You know, we know that there's overlap between you know, runaway homeless youth for example, folks who are survivors of demandstic violence. So I don't want to take lately the idea of privacy.

And I think we all live right now at a time where we know so much of our personal data is made accessible right um, so we want to safeguard some of that and at the same time we can't be paralyzed. I think our team has a point of view on how you can coach or support a team to not have to start from scratch and to start to do some of those things like all right, what's the structured exercise do you do to figure out who

needs to be at the table? How would we print out or use a sort of r G I S map to look at our continuous care or our community's footprint and talk about where are we doing street outreach? I gotta pause you. You threw out a term and some letters next to each other that I am confident most people don't understand, and arc G I S map break that down for me? Happy to just a virtual

geospatial maps. So basically think about Google Maps as a really helpful touch point, right, but Google Maps with sort of a boundary around our community and then the ability to sort of drill down and talk about, all right, do we have some foe to go and actually canvas walk the blocks right to see who's experiencing homelessness, to talk to them, not just to sort of count their faces like you were saying but to actually build some relationships,

understand people's needs and so on. And I think especially in places, um where it's a mix of urban and sort of more suburban or rural together, what you'll often find is folks are really attuned to walk in the downtown blocks and nobody's going over there to that residential neighborhood that's mostly people of color or lower income folks, right, um, and so what about the folks camping over there? How

will they get service connected? Right? How will how will we know them by name so to speak, or allow the system to feel on the hook for resolving their experience of homelessness. Because again I think if we've if we're creating this beautiful dashboard or a place that you and I are going to know, how are we doing

on homelessness? A big risk is that if you're missing a slice of the pie, we start to pat ourselves on the back for making gains that don't benefit South lay, that don't benefit you know, folks on the other side of the river in d C. So to speak, Like, those things I think for me really stand out as so earlier you can start to think about those things and make sure folks from those neighborhoods and communities are

at the table. The more reliable the data is going to be, the more confidence we can have in that as our understanding of our shared score board towards Saurday. There's a lot of money in trying to solve some of these big societal problems, like you know, unhoused folks, and in every arena where there is a lot of money, there can be a lot of competition, even in including the nonprofit sector, and that can lead people to not play well with others, to want to keep things proprietary,

to hoard information or resources or connections their rolodecks. Do you encounter that level of isolationism competition as you work across so many existing silos. There's some, but I think it it sort of depends on how you frame it and how you activate folks. For a long time, I think the status quo in the homeless response sector was that we thought about program and project level metrics. Right, So,

how is bartun Day's homeless shelter doing. Let's make a dashboard that shows their outputs and outcomes um and then make sure that they're getting the important funding they need from federal partners and elsewhere. In the last ten years, there's been an exceed change, and not just because of our work, but lots of other good folks doing work out in the field to say, actually, what we need our coordinated systems that start to look beyond program project

to talk about system or community language. And I think that's part of the challenge, honestly, is to create the space for people working in homeless response or homeless services to see how their work rolls up to that big picture aim. Because I think if we don't do that, you're totally right, which is what We'll have one dashboard that the mayor and that you and I are looking at, and the other one that's meaningful for the boots on the ground, and we got to sink those things up.

There has to be some way in which I see how my contributions on the front line roll up to that COVID dashboard number, right, And I think that again, what's awesome is that we have this accessible, I think for all of us today, for better and worse, involuntarily. So but yeah, we're all way too familiar with infection rates and are not and hospitalization rates, and I see you capacity and how you as a citizen in your community or somebody working in a hospital. What is your

role to play in that data? You have one right and we've really like tried to public health message with mixed results where am as socially distance you have a role to play. Then the curve right, and so what is the analog here for homelessness in housing? I think there there is one or there is a role for

us to play. And especially if you work in the space right like, it's crucial that you see the work you're doing, whether as a policymaker or a frontline staffer, or somebody working in a healthcare system or another adjacent system. What's your role on the work to end homelessness where you live? And how do we make it easier for people to ask and answer that question. I mean a lot of the tools you're using sound like the way many of his experience. You know, any digital service at

this point right there trying to know their customers. They've got dashboards, whether it's like a ride share company or an e commerce company, auto business, there is much more real time. You know, you don't take a snapshot once a year and use that to guide your decision making, and you don't exist for years on end without actually understanding who you're serving, you know, and and getting user

feedback and observing folks. So you're you're applying some of the things from tech and business in part to this this place that could really use a boost and really use some innovation. But I'm I'm also hearing it's not just throwing machines, and there's a lot of soft skills going on here, some local politics, some cajol ing and

enticing maybe, and and literal meetings. You know, it probably moves a little slower than than a server would then some code would compile, because you gotta get somebody to that meeting and make them see Glendale. You gotta sit next to burd Bank and we're cool and we're not trying to fight each other over this, and you gotta listen. It sounds like you do a lot of listening rather than kind of swooping in with your preferred solution to

the problem. And my categorizing this balance pretty well or is there a piece that I might be missing it. I think you're categorizing it well. And what I'll say is, I think part of working at scale forces you to view the forest, and what I mean by that is sure, I could try and create the perfect bespoke tech solution that really fits today's workflows in my one community. And the reality is, what we've seen is that the portability

of those awesome solutions. Right. I've been part of multiple hackathons that involved large fortune tech companies bringing top engineering talent to bear on trying to create something that's going to meaningfully contribute to ending homelessness where they are and I laud those efforts and I think that there's value in them. And what makes the transportability of those solutions hard is that today, at least a lot of the plumbing the foundational work nationally isn't there. I think this

is not just true in homelessness, right. Um, you know, I think a year or two ago, a lot of the country started to pay attention to police data and police incident data, right, police involved shooting data, if we want to use that language, and again it's apples to oranges. I could build something awesome that works for one city and then the ability for another police department to piggyback and say, let me just download that from the app store and start using it, right, And so what is it?

And you know, we started to dig into some of these foundational questions just in the last year or two, honestly, to think about what would enable the space to be more like that. I I brought up the example of healthcare earlier, and top of mind for me these days is if you are somebody who's experiencing has in crisis or homelessness, you can today almost anywhere download your own profile so that you have tangible ownership of that data so that you can just forward it onto your next

case manager or choose to disclose or not disclose. Right, So that feeling of what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of this service machinery? Right, all really well intentioned. But again I think there's this quote that we often talk about. Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results that it gets, right. It's it's sort of credited to outward DEMI is like the father of quality improvement science. But but to me, what

that means is not malintention. It's just the thing that we've chosen to prioritize. Right. For a long time has been are we spending money? Well, that has been the question, and more narrowly than that, are we running effective programs and projects to manage homelessness. And so we've got a ton of machinery and a ton of infrastructure designed to answer that question, and folks are trying to bend that

machinery to answer a different set of questions. And that's what a lot of our work is is designed to help people pivot those systems that are designed to answer one set of questions to try and solve homelessness and asking answer the questions needed to do that. There's ah, that's this is good. Now we're now we're GM and not that we were before. But I'm really feeling this because so much of our experience with technology as users sometimes victims is uh, we're engaging with a system designed

to answer a question we're not aware of. No, we think by way of of loose and slop. Example, we think that you know, Facebook is answering the question how can I stay in touch with my friends and family? And the question they're trying to answer is how can we monetize our knowledge of your behavior by selling it to brands and agencies? Right, That's that's probably a higher

priority question. There are is answering many questions, but their system is designed to optimize outcome for monetization of user behavior and data, not necessarily the quality of your relationships with your friends and family, much less the fabric of

our democracy and the sustainability thereof. So if we were designing a system that was like, how do we build healthy communities where people feel seen and can interact even across difference, we probably wouldn't build this version of Facebook.

But that's not what the VCS funded. That's not the question they were asking, and they were in charge of how that tool got deployed ultimately, So this is really good around homeless services as an example, are we trying to manage are we trying to optimize program output, or are we actually trying to in homelessness and achieve this thing that that your organization calls functional zero in terms of the experience and the quantification of homelessness in any

given community. So my question to you, what is the community look and feel like when it achieves functional zero when you actually end homelessness overall or at least for major categories that you're tracking, because your data is so much more personalized. So I think it looks two ays. Uh. First, for the person who's experiencing a house in crisis, it's rare.

That's one one important piece. It's a brief. Right. So the amount of time you spend in the waiting room, so to speak, right, if we want to use the analogy of a hospital, is relatively little. The waiting room of available housing. That exactly right. How long is somebody in a homeless shelter or sleeping outside? Right? How long are they experiencing homelessness but connected to services before they're

able to get some support? Right? That ultimately is sort of so let me, let me, let me I want to Actually, I'm gonna split this into two different questions. So first, what is your definition of ending homelessness or or what are some examples of definitions your team has seen from the various places in which you're operating. Sure, so we have a shared definition that we use nationally

that you mentioned called functional zero. The shorthand version of it is that very few people are experiencing homelessness at any given time. And then when you double click on that, what needs to be true is that few people enter homelessness, you're able to support the folks who are experiencing homelessness pretty quickly, and that when folks leave homelessness, they don't

cycle back, right. So again just at a conceptual level, pretty straightforward, and we sometimes you sort of the analogy of what would it look like if you started to think about an empty bathtub. Well, I want to make sure that the rate of which water is draining out of the bathtub is pretty high, and I want to turn the faucet off, right, and so both of those things.

And then when you start to get into the weeds, well we got to figure out where are people coming into homelessness from, what is the precipitating events or what what is happening in people's homeless histories. And unsurprisingly, what you look at across the country, I think is that we don't know a ton because our data hasn't been that strong. But what we do know is that it maps largely to network poverty. In other words, you can't make rents and nobody can fill the gap for you.

And you know, I think we know which groups historically in America are have been most likely to experience network poverty and the deep structural racist roots of that truth, right,

Black Native Americans. I mentioned it earlier. The other thing that I think is true is that there's this moment of you know, I mentioned your conversation about returning citizens, right, And there was a line in there that I think Shaka said where he said something along the lines of I'm having trouble getting an apartment or I didn't know what it would be like to try and meet eligibility criteria or get screened out of being able to rent

an apartment. Right. Is that we've got all of these folks, whether they returning citizens, folks discharging out of foster care systems. Um, we talk about adjacent or upstream systems. Right. So the idea of what parts of the social safety net shabby though it might be in America or other systems, are people touching before they experience a housing crisis or before they become homeless? Right? And the answer is often one

or more systems? Right? And so what would it look like for those systems to start to view their responsibility as Hey, I've got a metric of nobody leaves our system and enters homelessness, right, and can we even track that? And what would that look like? What would it take? And and we're doing some cool work right now. I don't think we've got it figured out, but there's cool work with some some big not even public just like private healthcare entities, to just say like, hey, you've got

this huge footprint, you have all these emergency rooms. It actually benefits your bottom line to have fewer people homeless because we know that those folks can cycle in and out of emergency rooms and have adverse health outcomes. So it's not just the right thing to do, but it also sort of aligns with your profit motive. Great, awesome, Let's figure out what it looks like for you to have a goal of nobody leaves your hospital and enters homelessness over a window of time, or start to activate

you as feeling part of solving the problem. And I think that's the thing is more than anything, what is true in communities that have ended functional zero is more and more people feel like they have a role to play in making sure homelessness has ended in their community. It's not something somebody else is doing, it's something we are doing collectively. And I think that feels really powerful. After a short break, we'll be right back the connection.

It's something that we've lost in so many parts of our society and even in our own bodies. But you made me think of like a bodily injury metaphor where you know, I've had issues with a knee, and you know, if I can work on that issue by just focusing on the knee, I can get X rays of the knee, I can inject steroids into the knee. But I can also work on the muscles around the knee right. I

can give massage therapy. I can do strengthening exercises for the hamstring and the quads and the calves and the shin muscles, and that can provide extra support so that a weak quad isn't exacerbating my knee pain and my knee problem. And so as you move upstream and maybe down to know where people coming from, where they're entering the crisis point from where you're seeing knee pain, Um, there may be a quad issue going on higher in

the leg. And where are they going to you know, after this brief, increasingly brief period of not having housing, do you have somewhere for people to go? You know, and what role do you play in creating a resilient kind of network and shared responsibility about reducing the flow into that tub and also you know, draining it quickly when people find themselves in there to begin with. So, so where do people go in these functional zero communities

when things were hmming along. I'm working much better than a lot of us have seen from the outside. Yes, so I think um to use that healthcare hospital analogy. Something that we've seen as a missing link in a lot of communities is that even when they start to think of themselves as a system with that shared aim,

the triage function. So the first thing that happens when I go to an emergency room is they asked me a couple of questions and they figure out if I can chill for a couple of hours or if they need to get me into a bad space ap right, And that I yeah, I think you know it's it's not new, And I think a lot of communities over the last couple of years they've been trying to build that muscle of sort of leveraging data and process and systems, thinking to figure out how to match individual people with

a level of support. But I think the challenge here is that for a long time, the tools that we were using for that process were a little bit opaque, and like you were saying earlier about Facebook and your Facebook is operating with one North star aim and you are operating with a different one. It's not to say these weren't aligned, but I think that the people closest to the problem weren't at the table for designing how

that triage process would work. What was important to people, Like a really interesting experience that I had just in the last couple of years is we started to think about how could we support communities to measure the equity of their systems right. So you can imagine a world where community they're hitting all these quantitative stats, very few people are homeless. The system is is churning along and moving, and they're not serving everybody equally, or somebody is getting

left out. And what we realized is that when you engage folks, it's not just the quantitative side. They also

want to know how did it feel? And so so to bring it back to your question about, you know, the outflow or the moving into permanent housing in these communities that have achieved functional zero or that are doing something right or different, I think what is true is that the experience of receiving support preserves people's dignity, and more than that, they feel like the system was responsive to them. And for me, I'll admit this was a

blind spot. Right. It's not just how many days somebody was experiencing homelessness, But there's this more subjective piece of it, which is like what quality like the quality of those days? Right? Uh?

You know? And again like I have been in a hospital bed where you press the button and a nurse doesn't come for like an hour, versus you press the button and they show up, and the two days in the hospital bed feel very differently depending on the responsiveness of that push button feeling right, And so there are so many things we know, right like that about the

quality of care. And again, because we've been used to this resource scarcity and trying to optimize resources, which yes, I get it and I understand, but that scarcity mindset activates in you efficiency over everything, and the reality of being on the receiving end of an efficient system can sometimes be pretty decumanizing. And so how do you threat the needle there? It's hard, right, I'm gonna admit, I mean, part of it is how do we get out of

scarcity so that we don't have to do that? And you know, in the last couple of years, there's been an influx of resources that means that in more and more places, we might not have to choose between equality of care and an efficiency standard, which is a false economy anyway. But I think we're getting to a place

where people are asking those questions more often. The health care metaphor is really appropriate because it's also it's life and death is it's really a high impact sector versus like the retail shoe experience some of us have, right it's just less critical, you know, to our daily lives as important as sneakers are. Too many people listening to us right now. No offense to my sneaker heads. But a dashboard could show a hospitals having great success in

their surgeries. The patient can tell you a different story about how they were ignored or disrespected or treated without any sense of ownership or agencies. I've been in that situation, family members have been in that situation, and you feel used, abused, ignored, and you realize I'm not a doctor or a lawyer, and I need to be both those things to get

my needs met here effectively. And so if you're going through a not a health crisis but a housing crisis, yeah, the idea that you don't have control of your own profile and you're just kind of being passed around and somebody else's database and they're telling you things about you that aren't even true or not even asking um and

the quality of your time and what's up. Well, I was just gonna say, I think I think not just telling you things that are not true, but maybe asking you to relive something super traumatic over and over and over again because their data systems can't talk to each other. So I've got to ask you about the domestic violence that precipitated you experiencing homelessness, and maybe you're not really

trying to talk about that this morning. And then does that inhibit you from being eligible for this rental assistance program? Because I don't know the thing that's gonna unlock the door because finger right, Like again, what we've surfaced is a way in which the system is not designed with that user initially in mind. And a lot of folks have done really meaningful work to start to try and transform these systems, but I think we've still got work

to do as a country on it. You're so, should we just put like community solutions in charge of the remaining of of this sort of homelessness response in the United States? No, and I'll even correct you and say we're not responsible for either. But I do think we should do, though, is try and get more and more of the country feeling like they're of a movement of ending homelessness. I think there's something really powerful in that.

And what I see is that when folks start to expect or understand that things can be better, they start to show up in a different way, right, whether they're working in the system, whether they're an informed citizen in their community. I think starting to do this mindset shift work to say, you know, I expect there to be accountability for results. I don't think this is a problem

that's intractable. Obviously, we've got a housing crisis at a national level, yes, and even within that context, there are shades of doing better and worse right with the hand that you're dealt. And so not to say we shouldn't push on the structural barriers that exist, Yes, absolutely we should.

And you and I both know that in a community like Los Angeles, there's just been a big influx of resources from the state from a local ballot measure, multiple local ballot measures, right, And so how are we thinking about the impact that that has on people's experience of housing instability and crisis on our experience of living in neighborhoods, and you know, starting to get curious about how we would know if we were making progress towards and then

homelessness where you live. I think it is a good first step. This is a good segue because I'm I'm hearing you as a listener, not just as the host of this show. And I want to be a part

of this community solution. To use your organization's name. I have, you know, been saddened by and frustrated by and feeling impotent about this perceived an actual level of increased you know, housing crisis and the failures of our society in so many ways to have people living on the streets as one example, What are some ways that I can get more involved, that I can bring to bear, that I can plug in in some way I want to help

share some of this responsibility that you talked about, shared accountability, these shared goals. Where can I be a part of that? Such a good question. So I think three things come to mind. The first is just to start to understand homelessness as a solvable problem that's about systems and not about the failing of individual people. I think a lot of us don't know anybody firsthand who is currently experiencing homelessness or has experienced homelessness recently, and so it becomes

a dehumanizing story. Right that person who is almost over there. I don't know anything about them. They may not look like me. It's hard for me to see myself in them, and so I start to view the matter a move right or to center them in the narrative about homelessness in my community. Oh, those people and their substance use,

or they're out of town or nature or whatever. Right there are neighbors, and I think that there's something really powerful in leaning into that discomfort, though may make you feel impotent, as you were saying, of viewing those as people deserving of a home, not about fixing the people,

about fixing the system. So that mindset you have feels crucial. First, The second thing for me is I mentioned those continuums of care won key term CEO c S. Type in your your community name and CEOC into a web browser. You'll figure out some information about local folks doing the work. And I think I would encourage for people to get connected to those entities. It's a little bit of a learning curve, I know, but you know, you can sort of choose how you want to approach it and get connected.

For folks who want to feel more involved in direct, tangible material support, tons of opportunities, I think, especially as fingers crossed the pandemic starts to wane wherever you live, for folks to show up and start to get face time, to humanize some of the folks experiencing housing crisis in

their neighborhood with their community. And then for people who are maybe looking for a little bit more of that system angle or orientation, I'd invite you to to start to get some of those committees or decision making groups right, So, how are we deciding policies on how the money gets spent or how we're measuring success. A lot of those have participatory processes where they're really excited to have people

show up. And just like so much of participatory democracy, the people who tend to show up often I think aren't maybe are the listeners of your program, And so I'd encourage more people to start to get involved and tap in. And then maybe the third thing that I'll say is that you know, I mentioned these themes of data and accountability and shared aim. You know, I mentioned that Menino mayor survey and how few mayors across the country said they view success on homelessness as tied to

reductions and homelessness, which is bananas. Right. If I ask anybody you know, or my parents or whoever, how should we think about if we're doing better on homelessness? One of the first things people say is we should have fewer people who are homeless. How is that arrow trending? Right?

And we've got to be able to see that more than just annually, and we have to be able to see that in a way that passes the sniff test for the people doing the work on the ground across a variety of communities, right, And so start to ask for that accountability for that line of state into the data where you live. I think we should start to feel in the same way that if I if tomorrow they started to tell me we can't tell you how many COVID cases there are you know a county, I'd

be like, what do you mean? I mean, who do I call? Right? We should start to expect that, right, like, let us raise the bar on what we expect um and again not just seeing the data, but understanding which way is headed and why um and start to unpack and have those conversations. There's always a set of elections going on, and mayor is a very important one. And so just to have in mind a question to ask your mayor or the people who want to who want

that job, you know, what's your definition of success? How will you know if your plan to you know, reduce homelessness is working and if they are, I don't know. And let me tell you another red flag too, right, which is if you live in California, or in Washington State, or in somewhere where of homelessness is visible. I think a real risk to us having a scoreboard that's about how visible homelessness is is that we create a big old set a warehouses and we shove people into that.

Not because that's the ultimate end state goal, but if we create a set of incentives, if we say to our mayor, the measure of your success on homelessness is the number of tents on my block. Think about the easiest way to shrink the number of tents on my block. It's a lot easier to move people out of sight and out of mind than it is to solve some of the underlying structural challenges that we face in our

communities that are leading to the homelessness crisis. And so I think, more than anything, I think I want to also say, if you're going to engage with elected folks, be sure to ask not just what's the plan for the encampments or of folks sleeping on my block? Not to say that isn't important. I know for a lot

of different reasons that matters to people. But that second question of how will I know that the data is showing those folks are in safe and stable, permanent housing and not just in a homeless shelter that we've built last week down the street, because that's not really success. That's a step in the direction, for sure, and especially if that homeless shelter is high quality and is a

tune to people's needs and experiences. Sure, by all means right, but I think we have examples of major cities on the East Coast or and other leather places where they've invested really heavily in a really big and expensive shelter system, and while it definitely meets some of people's immediate humanitarian needs, it's a bit of a band aid, right, And and so how do we avoid creating a set of incentives that push people to invest more and more in just

bigger band aids, right, because that makes them look good. So I think that's important catch forty to to stay on top of. I'm glad you pointed that out. Thank you. We call this show How to Citizen. We consider citizen as a verb, not a legal status, and you know it means all kinds of things to Our definition of citizen is like premised on these four basic blocks. But you got your four blocks, right, your four elements of built for zero. We have ours for How to Citizen,

which involved number one showing up and participating. Number two, you know, investing in relationships with yourself, with others and with the planet around you. Number three understanding power. That is something we all have and it shows up in more than just votes and dollars. There's a lot of different ways to exercise it and generate it. And number four that we use all these to benefit our collective selves,

not just our individual cells. So as you hear that overview, and you've you know, done some homework, I hear too. I appreciate that you know what the show is about what does in the context of you're doing for work, what does it mean to citizen? What does citizen as a verb mean to you? I love those four building blocks that you have. What resonates most with me is the citizen is to feel responsible for the circumstances of

your community. Right. So it's a bit of a blend of showing up and investing, but also benefiting the collective as you've had in there. And to me, I think when we bring it to the issue of homelessness, viewing yourself as playing a role in your community beyond just like are you nice to people? Are you humanizing? Do you smile? Yes? Does matter? But more broadly, at the system level, are you starting to think about showing up in that space as having a role to play, um

as feeling part of the collective ownership? Right? I think more than anything, one of the things that happens when you start to humanize people, to make eye contact, to not look away, to ask people their names, to see how they're doing, to view them as your neighbors, is it unlocks a sense of responsibility, right, um, And and I think that we are we are accepting of the conditions in our communities. Right to me, how the citizen also means to feel responsible for the status quo where

you live and to feel responsible for making it better. Right, And like you said, that might be about exercising your power in terms of elections or money. It might be about exercising other things. Right, Um, I don't know. But what I do know is that if I accept, If if I walk through skid row in Los Angeles and I accept that it is what it is, and I don't know what to do about it, it's out of my hands or it's untractable, it can't be solved. It's

the easiest way. Don't let myself off the hook. And I think more than anything else, I asked people not to do that. Right, almost this is solvable. Look around. If your community is not ending homelessness, try and figure out what you can do to change that. And so, like I said, I think folks can go to our website and figure out how to get involved. See if their community is part of Built for Zero And if not, what's the website? What's the website? Say at Community dot Solutions,

how did you get that? How did you get that cool domain name? That's a domain name? I'm the tech and data guy. Man, that's what we do. Very cool. Speaking of you being a tech and data guy, you've shared a lot about the programs and about your approach and some of the victories and some of the challenges. Why are you working here? What what's led you to spend you know, your full time work efforts in this organization working on this problem and these solutions More importantly, Yeah,

I appreciate that reframe. So I started at Community Solutions a little over seven years ago, which is wild. Um. It was one of the first handful of jobs I had out of college. My academic background is in international development, and then I went back to school there in my

career and double down on statistics. And the reason I did that, and the reason I stick around at Community Solutions is because what I learned in those first handful years in my job was that we've gotten pretty good, especially around issues like housing and homelessness, at helping one person or one family, Right, something really compelling about homelessness

as an issue area. So there's there's a really obvious we don't need to go to the lab and come up with the cure for homelessness, right, It's not like,

you know, biomedical research is needed here, right. The cure for homelessness is housing, period And what we know is that we have a really robust set of evidence informed social work practices, housing models, and housing stability and support models that say, and for folks who don't know that, there's this great term called housing first, and there's a whole bunch of associated research and models for how you successfully implement housing first to help one household, one family,

run one excellent program. So okay, we know how to help one person, one family, one run one excellent program, and yet the sum total of all of that activity isn't resulting in the outcome we care about. And that is a really interesting and thorny puzzle. It's what drives me out of bad every morning is to say, how can I help contribute to us unlocking that thorny puzzle. But what also gives me a lot of hope is because we know how to help those one family and

one person how to run one excellent program project. These feels like an easy place for us, easy air quotes, place for us to start to take a stand on raising the floor on what we are willing to accept as a society and a culture in terms of poverty and minimum standards of quality of life in our communities. I think about the fact that we have collectively decided that if you get hit by a bus and you

don't have insurance, we give you healthcare. And we've decided collectively that if you can't afford something to eat, you can qualify for a foods type and or about of it. These are human rights. And when you look at that, you know some of your listeners may be sort of familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a long y term for what's the bread and butter stuff you need to stay alive as a human being? Right? Housing is on

that bottom level. It's the base of the pyramid. It is a thing that we know people need, and yet somehow along the way we are not yet out of place where all the people eligible for housing assistants get it right. And so there's a resource constrained angle, but there's also a set of system decisions and designs, and I'm excited to get to work on those things. Where did you grow up? So I am the child of refugees,

I'm an immigrant. I grew up across Toronto, Washington, d C. And then throughout my childhood increasingly more upscale suburbs of Washington, d C. So we started out in Congress Heights. Back when I was a little kid, we lived in public housing. We had the opportunity to sort of move up that socioeconomic ladder. I got to see it firsthand. I spent a lot of my childhood formative years either living in subsidized housing benefiting from some of these public programs, or

turning around and having folks live with us. Uh So sort of that chain migration story of having relatives or even community members who am not related to sharing space in our home. And so what feels true to me is that there's a really crucial linkage here in terms of housing and opportunity, right, those things are linked, and

I think sometimes we missed that. And so as we're having these conversations about what kind of country you want to be or what kind of person I want to be in my community, I think this issue area I really feels like it hits close to home and it moves me. And then in terms of the data and tech side of things, I think, after having worked in this space for a couple of years, what felt true is that people were in the field, we're experiencing data and tech as a barrier to their work and not

as a catalyst. And that felt bananas, right, And I have this this quote actually that it sits on a sticky note on my monitor. I'd love to to share it with you, which is from somebody who's a frontline worker, and they said, I've seen how our data and tech systems contribute to people spending time on the streets and being more likely to die on the streets, and it's unacceptable.

And we know we have data that says if you're experiencing homelessness, you're life expectancy decreases by about seventeen years on average. And that's not. That's real, right, that's real harm. It's not I'm having fun sleeping on the beach stuff, right. And so once you start to see that and you think about, you know, what does it mean to be doing international development work? But then you come home and there's an encampment on your block. Who's got that ball?

Who's doing domestic development work? And lots of people are doing it. But I think we have an opportunity to shift what that looks like. Thank you for letting me in there. That it you make sense doing what you're doing to me who just met you, and you snuck

a pun in there bringing it all home. I caught that that was good, And I think you know, it's something you started off with a while ago about seeing folks in a housing crisis, seeing people who are unhoused as people and as our neighbors, and and it feels like you know something that you got to experience and be a part of as a child yourself. You're taking people in, You're being taken into something like we're all connected, we're all family here to some degree, and take an ownership,

you know, for our communities. It's it's our responsibility the way things are, and it's also our responsibility to change the way things are. And if we can, you know, say we more on both sides of those as opposed to they or you or just anybody but me. That sense the ownership, I hope, is more empowering. You've left

me feeling more empowered. I'm going to be contemplating, you know, housing as a is a human right and as that base level of Maslow's hierarchy, as well as my unhoused you know, neighbors as neighbors, and I definitely have some questions for these people trying to represent us in the various halls of a form of political power. Because you've raised the floor, I think on what we should expect from ourselves, and for that, I thank you for citizening

so much. Thank you wonderful to be in conversation with you, and I feel excited for us to continue to build the movement across the country that believes some lessness is solvable. We're doing it, yo. That was That was a dope conversation. Like Ura said, homelessness is solvable, and we're doing it, so true to form for our podcast. Here, here's some actions you can take to be part of the solution. As always, we offer this in three levels. First, try

these personal reflections. This is something you can do all by yourself. I prefer if you try to do this out loud though. These are inspired by Ross's recommendations, and I just want you to repeat after me. I believe that homelessness is solvable. I understand that we must fix systems, not people. I consider people experiencing homelessness in my community

to be my neighbors. Guys. It play it back. If you need to look at yourself in the mirror, think it out loud inside your head, but really I want you to try to say those things and believe them, because so often we behave as if we think the opposite is true. And I think if we start saying something different to ourselves, we might show up differently in the world. All right, here's the next level. Let's get more in full formed in a way that continues to

humanize these neighbors of ours. There's a really cool website an organization called Invisible People. You can find them at Invisible people dot tv, and they use storytelling, education, news and activism to change the narrative on homelessness. These videos are really well done, really compelling, and they tell a whole story most of us don't see if we just

rely on the news and social media. From their site, you can find links to their Facebook, their Instagram, their Twitter, and their YouTube, so there's no excuse not to find them because they're they're everywhere. After watching two videos myself, I became a supporter on their Patreon. It's that good. So check that out and just adjust the information sources you rely on to tell you the story of a house people, and this is one that put to that

narrative in the hands of folks much closer to that experience. Finally, our level three publicly participate. What single action have we come up with feed to do on this one? Well, in this case, we're outsourcing. We're leveraging existing efforts through arosis organization Community Solutions. They set up a whole page literally devoted to citizen action. Like I'm not kidding. You go to this page and there's a big old icon

that says for citizens. And they don't mean people with documentation, they mean people like you if you're listening to this podcast. They built a whole page for you. We're partners and didn't even know it. So here's the website, Community dot Solutions slash take dash as an hyphen action, Community dot Solutions slash take dash Action. It's a whole playbook to learn more, to connect locally to those continuums of k are that we're all a part of, and to hold

our communities and our elected officials accountable for hending ending homelessness. Now, look, we got links to all this and more as usual at how to citizen dot com and in the episode show notes of whatever software you're using to listen to this podcast. Right now. Follow us on Instagram at how the Citizen. Tag us in your posts, use the hashtag how the Citizen. And here's a special ask because I didn't know I was going to get a chance to talk to you again before we dropped another full season

on you. Season four. We're thinking about it, we're figuring it out, and I want your thoughts. So if you're if you're on the Instagram, you d m U, s apt message tag, whatever the lingo. It's always changing, get at us on Instagram, or if you want a more thorough, direct and less public line, email comments at how to

citizen dot com. We still have that channel open, and I would particularly be interested to know who you want us to bring on the show, what types of topics do you want us to engage in, and how else might you want to connect with each other and with the show, Because I gotta be real, I missed making this show which on Zoom like we did in the first season. It was a little lower tech in some ways, a little lower sound design, but it was nice to be there within the room with you in some ways.

So whether it's you know, live during recordings or with some kind of online forum, let me know how you might want to connect with me, with the show and with each other more as we figure out what to do for season four. Look at that poet. Didn't even know it alright, Chell How the Citizen with Barrett Tune Day is a production of I Heart Radio podcast. Our executive producers are Me Barrattum Day Thurston, and Elizabeth Stewart. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional original music for

season three from Andrew Clauses. This episode was produced and edited by Max Williams and special thanks to Joel Smith I Heart Radio, Mischa Yusuf and Samika Adams from Dusklike Productions. Thanks y'all, m m HM