Cross-Sector Partnerships Roadmap – Part I

The Cross-Sector Partnerships Roadmap offers a high-level step-by-step guide to 

creating cross sector aging, disability, health and housing solutions for individuals and 

families due to complex needs that span across sectors. As the affordable housing 

crisis persists, more individuals and households with housing-related needs may be 

turning to additional systems including the aging and disability networks, primary care 

and behavioral health care, criminal legal systems, child welfare system, and income 

supports. To improve housing stability—and so each person and family can live 

successfully and sustainably in the community, our individual systems need to come 

together to provide a seamless and equitable set of support for those complex multisector needs. 

To streamline access to services, better leverage resources, and ultimately make 

community living possible for more people, the Housing and Services Resource Center 

(HSRC) cultivates partnerships between every unique sector. This high-level roadmap 

can start partners on the road to more effective and efficient systems that drive gains in 

housing stability and health equity in our communities. The first step is for each potential 

partner to learn more about local organizations that serve the same people with different 

assistance. When partners understand the vital role that other organizations have in the 

community, they can identify where supportive services might intersect. This 

understanding sets the stage for engaging other organizational leaders who have a 

strong commitment to the values and to the change that is needed in communities to 

address challenges of access to quality services and housing. 

This first installment of the roadmap focuses on the initial four aspects of cross-sector 

planning. 
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3

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1) Understand the Need

2) Formalize the Team 

3) Be Aware of Available Resources and Resources Needed for Success

4) Design the Intervention Model

Steps #1 and #2 commonly sit with systems or organizational leaders, while steps #3 

and #4 are developed and carried out by departments’ operational leadership. All the 

steps are needed to take a project or systems integration to fruition and scale, but the 

first four steps lay the foundation for all upcoming efforts. For an overview of the full 

Roadmap, see Figure 1.

Figure 1. Overview of Cross-Sector Partnerships Road 

Map

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Understand the Need: Convene People with Lived Expertise, Analyze Data 

& Discover your Partners

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Formalize Cross-Sector Partnership Planning Team

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Assemble Resources with Each Sector Contributing According to their 

Core Mission 

4

Design the Intervention Model

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Design Multi-Agency Referral System & Engagement Process

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Develop Evaluation & Reporting to Monitor Outcomes

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Implement Using a Rapid-Cycle Quality Improvement Model

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Analyze & Communicate Outcomes & System Impacts
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The First 4 Steps of the 8-Step Roadmap

Step 1—Understand the Need: Convene People with Lived Expertise (PLE), Analyze 

Data and Discover Your Partners

Addressing complex community needs drives most partnerships. System leaders need 

a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the needs.

Convening PLE to hear their voices about need and how systems work on the ground 

should be part of this roadmap from start to finish. Communities in states such as 

Arizona are using town halls to hear from a broad array of community members and 

partners. PLE who can serve as part of the emerging cross-sector planning team can be 

recruited from these town halls.

Partners also need to share and analyze public health and population level multi-sector 

data to understand how to identify priority populations’ characteristics and needs and 

develop common cross-sector definitions of populations, needs, and the evidencedbased practices to address those needs. A need may be identified in one sector that 

leads to a landscape assessment on who addresses that need in our communities:, for 

example, social-needs screening leads to more awareness in the health sector 

regarding housing instability. As other sector partners are identified, sectors will be 

matching data with cross-sector partners and align those quantitative findings to set 

priorities.

Finally each sector may need to learn more about local organizations that serve the 

same people but with different assistance. Partnerships in the earliest stages should 

create a local landscape assessment to learn who the right partners are to bring to the 

table and with resources that are needed by those you serve, but are not managed by 

the systems you operate. The HSRC website has a useful set of directories for finding 

local organizations in different sectors. 

Step 2—Formalize the Cross-Sector Partnership Planning Team

Partners identify all funding and resources likely needed to address community needs 

as identified in step #1. Cross-sector analysis enables each sector to better understand 

the gaps of their partners. As gaps arise, work to quantify those gaps. 

Each sector should contribute according to their core mission. That is, the housing 

sector contributes housing resources, while the aging and disability networks contribute 

independent living and other supportive services. As this analysis deepens, each sector 
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learns more about the challenges of the other sector and the policy changes and 

funding needed to fill gaps.

Joint priorities are developed from each sector’s perspective. While the long-term goal 

is scale and systems integration, the short-term goal may be smaller scale pilots due to 

limited resources and the need to develop cross system models.

Step 3—Assemble Resources with Each Sector Contributing According to their Core 

Mission

Successful cross-sector partners planning teams require the right mix of leaders, policy 

makers, PLE, and operational staff. Partners identify key public, private and non-profit 

members, determine collaborative leadership, make decisions, refine goals, and

develop project design and timeline.

The team should be unified around values (e.g., addressing equity in communities) and 

a shared high-level goal that meets key objectives across sectors. After those values 

and goals have been agreed upon, more concrete objectives should be developed. 

Often partnerships use a mix of metrics across sectors, such as decreased rates of 

homelessness and housing instability and gains in health and well-being. 

The team should meet regularly and have an outside group of political leadership and 

community members to which the planning team reports on progress.

Step 4—Design the Intervention Model

Intervention models use evidence-based models, employ person-centered practices, 

are trauma-informed, and use a Housing First and Harm Reduction framework for 

healthy, and thriving individuals, households, and communities. The cross-sector 

planning team should offer and describe potential intervention models in their meetings 

to other partners that may not be as familiar with the models. 

The intervention model ideally would have been researched and tested with similar 

populations but innovation and adapting to local context may also be valuable. 

The intervention model should clearly lend itself to the outcomes and community 

impacts that have already been decided upon within the cross sector-planning team. 

The model should also be able to be constructed from already determined resources 

from step #3. When one or more of these factors is not the case, the cross-sector 

planning team works to address the gap together.
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Developed in partnership with the Corporation for Supportive Housing.