# Presentation: 043329

## Creating Viable Strategies for Systems Change

## Why Systems Change?

- 	Most services for persons who are chronically homeless are highly fragmented:
- Access to services is haphazard at best.
- To recover, homeless persons must seek out and combine the services they need.
- Programs and resources are cobbled together without an overall strategy.

## Systems Change Works!

- Integration of services and supportive housing are a proven strategy for success.
- Integration doesn’t just happen – it must be planned, pursued with vigor, and sustained with efforts over time.
- Success requires innovation, stretching, and creative use of existing and new resources.

## So, what is a system?(Corporation for Supportive Housing)

- Try a new approach to defining systems:  A system is the ways that...
- Power
- Money
- Ideas and values
- Technology or know-how (methods and skills)
- Day-to-day routine (habits)
- ... are linked to achieve a mission or goal.

**Notes:**
The “system” is the set of relationships that link these 5 elements with each other and with the goals that they are meant to serve.

## Changes in Power

- Changes in power require that:
- Duties and authority are rearranged.
- Designated positions are given responsibility for new activities.
- Stakeholders that have not been heard or present may assume new and different roles.

## Changes in Money 

- Changes in money require:
- Analysis of how funds are currently or traditionally identified, allocated, spent, and monitored
- Development of new resource procedures
- Testing of new procedures for reliability, manageability, and effectiveness.

## Changes in Ideas and Values

- Changes in ideas and values require:
- Re-examination of traditional definitions of “success”.
- New definitions of “success,” rooted in different data, standards, and values that are widely shared.
- Discussion of and education about “success” across multiple systems.

## Changes in Methods

- Changes in methods require:
- Identification of new promising practice approaches.
- Development of skill bases among practitioners required to implement promising practices.
- Implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of changes and new models.

## Changes in Habits

- Changes in habits require:
- Understanding the demands of an integrated, “multicultural” environment.
- Providing training and rationale for changing habits.
- Developing capacity among participants to interact with each other differently as part of their core work activity.

## What is Systems Integration?(Kelly Point Partners)

- Housing and human services systems are integrated when there is sharing of:
*Information*
*Planning*
*Clients*
*Resources*
*Responsibility.*

## Who Should Collaborate?

- Programs that target homelessness _and_ mainstream programs.
- Housing: development and finance, rent subsidy.
- Services: mental health, addiction treatment, health care, social services, employment.
- Trusted bridge-builders.

## How Systems Change Occurs 

- A better way of doing things is recognized.
- A new vision guides the change process, e.g., “No Wrong Door.”
- Resources are made to work together:  Allocation of housing and service resources are coordinated.
- Administrative and program structures are linked:  There are shared policies, procedures, and funding mechanisms.

**Notes:**
These are “the five signs” or key elements / indicators of systems change.
Achieving real and lasting systems change is different from (more than) making the system do something innovative – it’s about new patterns of doing things in a new way on a consistent basis so they become habit –an accepted part of the way people and organizations do their jobs 
People and systems regularly do the new thing – not just in response to a special initiative, or because particularly skilled or committed individuals happen to care about it – and others can rely on the system to operate in a changed way

## Effective Systems Change

- Requires* persistent* pressure on *most* or *all* of the key elements over a *sustained* period of time (years, not months).
- To get there, begin with:
- Persuasive short-term accomplishments.
- Production of a new product or service by extraordinary means, just to show it can be done and is worth replicating.

## Systems Change Building Blocks

- Planning collaboratively
- Building consensus and setting goals
- Investing and leveraging resources
- Coordinating and streamlining funding
- Building provider capacity
- Developing industry standards, quality assurance, and monitoring
- Cultivating leaders and champions
- Using data and communications to make the case

## Expect Resistance!

- Systems change unsettles old systems as it builds new ones:  This is to be expected!
- Old systems exist because they have survived pressures before:  You are the next concept of the day and hopefully will disappear!
- Services and housing are not just separate systems, but separate and distinct cultures with unique histories, institutions, beliefs, values, and stereotypes:  Build “multicultural competence!”

## Head for the Dysfunction

- Look for places in the *old *systems where players are most unhappy and frustrated.
- Utilize media incidents and disasters.
- Show potential allies _real_ solutions – e.g., field trips to visit model programs.
- Create shared ownership to promote shared accountability and commitment.

## Agree on Where You’re Going

- Change relies in part on proof that new methods will achieve more than old ones, with better quality, while maintaining consumer-centered protections and safeguards.
- Assess progress consistently.
- Insist on quality in housing and services alike.
- Demonstrate and enforce mutually shared standards.

## Data is Your Best Friend

- Identify the costs of homelessness.
- Project savings from reduced crises when effective services and housing are provided.
- Data don’t have to be perfect – circulate what you know and do have available.
- Work at getting more data – it may take years to get, and then even longer to make usable.

## Make the Case!

- Communicate what you know to key policymakers:
- Focus on the results instead of the problem.
- Keep language and concepts simple.
- Gather and use personal stories.
- Promote media interest.
- Put a “face” on the findings:  Consumers and human stories (anecdotes) are the essential companion to data.

## Cultivate Heroes & Heroines

- The most effective champions aren’t necessarily the most powerful individuals (although they can help!).
- Businesspeople, budget officials, staff aides, and advisers all may be better than professional advocates or top elected officials.
- Leadership must be passionate and untiring.  Find a gifted ‘salesperson’ with a huge Rolodex and a convincing command of the subject.

## Be Creative About Money

- New money is powerful, but scarce and hard to sustain over time.
- Most change comes from old money used in new ways.
- Work to assemble a funding package that does more, solves more problems, serves more goals, _*and*_ uses equal or less money.
- One effective pilot or demo can start the process.

## Create Systems that Make Sense to Clients

- Even when using money for the same *purposes *as before, make applications and the administration of funding consistent with the *experiences and needs* of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.
- Put the client first in terms of how we define, conceptualize, and move toward integrated systems solutions that promote true change.