A three-year pilot program, the Realization Project, shows enormous potential for a dramatically different way to solve the homeless problem: focusing on preventing chronic homelessness among those at high risk by empowering them to find living wage employment. That’s the message in a report, “The Work Behind Work,” issued Feb. 15 by the Economic Roundtable. The key is “a justice-centered, comprehensive approach to restoring the human spirit and engaging the labor market.”
“Over two-thirds of newly homeless individuals in Los Angeles are working or actively looking for a job,” said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable. “By providing help, including jobs, during the first chapter of homelessness, we can dramatically stem the flow of people into chronic homelessness.”
The project provided career training, case management, childcare, behavioral healthcare, temporary housing, support for basic needs, socioemotional support and help in getting a job. It engaged 42 students at Long Beach City College across three 10-month cohorts. They were assessed to be at high risk for persistent homelessness and wanted to support themselves by working. Almost all — 95% — were housed at the end, compared to half at the beginning, and their employment rate was 41% higher. Wages also increased dramatically. “Although 46 percent of participants reported earning less than $15 an hour at intake, none earned less than $15 when they left the project,” according to the report.
Community colleges are an ideal focus point, as the report notes. Nineteen percent of California’s 2.1 million community college students are experiencing homelessness. “This equates to over 100,000 community college students facing housing insecurity every day in Los Angeles County…. Given that one-in-four unhoused individuals attended some college, it is critical to support vulnerable students in achieving their educational goals and overcoming adversities.”
The project was supported by a broad coalition of over 30 partners, including the LA County Federation of Labor, and was the result of a long iterative process. “Back in 2008 we broke out public costs for people experiencing homelessness. It was kind of a hockey stick pattern, with most people having pretty low public costs, a few people having very high costs,” Flaming told Random Lengths. They developed screening tools to find high-cost homeless folks, “Which mostly amounted to going into hospitals screening people who’d had a difficult journey, and putting them in housing. And many of them died fairly soon after we housed them,” he said.
“It led us to think, ‘You know what if we had gotten to these individuals early in their journey rather than at the end of it? What if we’d gotten to them before all of this wreckage had occurred in their lives?’” That in turn led to developing predictive screening tools for people who will become persistently homeless, which laid the foundation for the Restoration Project. But the iterative learning didn’t stop there.
“We initially thought it was really just a matter of the job, and we launched the program about the time COVID 19 hit, and we began to realize that it was more complicated than that,” Flaming recalled. “We needed housing, and we needed to deal with trauma, and we needed skill development, and then we needed the job,” he said. “But the central idea from the beginning was to look at homelessness as an income problem, rather than just an affordable housing problem and to build on the motivation of folks in fact to support themselves and be able to pay rent through a job.”
While it’s not a panacea, it adds a new, powerful tool to the existing policy toolbox, at the very least. At most, it could help profoundly reshape the entire way in which homelessness and related problems are dealt with.
“Most of what’s going on is reactive and siloed,” Flaming summed up. “You have programs that deal with a slice of a human being’s life in a particular problem area in a person’s life. And they tend to be reactive to the level of distress and history of homelessness in the person’s life. So, they’re not forward-looking and they’re siloed.” In contrast, the Restoration Project employs its predictive tools to identify those at high risk of chronic homelessness, and addresses a range of problems that stand in the way of holding quality, living-wage jobs.
“The big idea is we’re really not going to turn the corner on homelessness until we have more tools that work,” Flaming said. “Right now our big tool is housing,” but it’s expensive and takes time to build, he noted. “I don’t see how we house our way out of homelessness. We need many more tools,” he said.”If you look at homelessness as an income problem, not just a housing problem, then the tool becomes pretty obvious, that employment is an important tool.”
This isn’t just one expert’s opinion. It’s a view shared by the homeless as well. Unemployment or other financial reasons were cited as reasons for loss of housing by 48% of homeless adults in surveys in 2017 and 2023 — more than double any other cause in 2017 and more than triple any other cause in 2023. And the majority of other top reasons cited — such as drug or alcohol abuse, mental health issues, family conflicts, separation/divorce, incarceration, etc. — are also dealt with in the Realization Project model.
“Deeply damaging trauma and injustice that are profoundly devaluing and confidence-shattering are universal among individuals on a path to persistent homelessness,” the report states. “Restoration of the human spirit and rebuilding hope and purpose are essential for homeless workers to achieve their productive potential.” To do that, the project “was rooted in a holistic, person-centered capability model” that “affirms individuals’ inherent capacity for self-directed change and growth, while acknowledging the role that unmet physical, mental, and emotional needs play in cycles of poverty.”
Increasing Hopefulness Is Key
Hope played a key role in the Restoration Project. “We all need hope to go on living. We need things in the future that we want,” Flaming said. “If a person is truly filled with despair and defeat, it’s hard for them to see possibilities that make it worth changing and worth putting out effort.”
“High-hope individuals adapt strategies to overcome obstacles more easily than low-hope individuals. High-hope individuals are more likely to find and maintain higher earnings that provide housing security,” the report explained. So, “The curriculum was designed to share concepts and engage processes to increase hopefulness in three specific areas: goals, agency, and pathways.”
The three are closely interrelated, Flaming explained:
To act people really do need to be able to state some goals. So, one of the things we did in the project was to push people as early as we could to try to articulate goals. And then, once people have goals, to have a sense that they in fact have the capacity to act on those goals, they have agency. And then find pathways. to find the next steps to take to use agency and personal accountability and the help they are being given to move toward those goals.
The report put it like this:
Concrete goals empower people to visualize the future they want and help clarify choices about how time and energy are invested each day….
Agency is the persistent belief that identified pathways will lead to attaining goals….
Pathways thinking involves finding strategies that provide a course toward achieving goals despite barriers and complications
The work on creating and refining goals was foundational. In addition to employment goals, participants developed goals in at least one other major life area (physical health, academics, relationships, etc.) in a months-long process involving workshops, classes, and formal and informal meetings. A workbook, “Your Goals and their Realization,” provided guidance on turning long-term desired outcomes into actionable SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time sensitive) goals.
Regarding agency, the report summarized:
The project’s core learning objectives revolved around increasing participants’ sense of agency, thereby empowering them to choose and make bolder steps toward earning living wages, achieving housing security, and overall well being. This was accomplished through applying a system of accountability, developing habits of self-affirmation, and curricular and programmatic offering that addressed participants’ physical and mental health, and social and holistic needs.
The work on pathways was two-fold. First, the program itself provided a starting point by easing their acute housing insecurity, providing mental health and social services that they need, and leveraging resources for their career path. Second, curriculum provided knowledge and life skills that included meditation, financial literacy, career advancement (resume writing, mock interviews, developing an elevator pitch), entrepreneurship, and transition planning for continuing their progress after completing the program.
Next Steps
Now that the report has been released, explaining the project and showing the results, another big task lies ahead: getting people on board to begin moving from pilot project to systemic adoption. “We’re briefing elected officials,” Flaming said, in addition to which, “You need to identify players who are capable of coming together and doing this…. You need empathic and mature and wise case managers for this. You need somebody who can develop skills, community colleges are pretty good for that. And you need a funder who’s putting in some money.” He looks forward to “Bringing together these clusters of community colleges, places people can live, and case managers and money in different geographic areas to replicate this.”
Beyond community colleges, there are other potential focal points,” Flaming noted. “There’s four year colleges, because there’s a lot of homeless students in every educational system. The same program could be replicated for reentry programs, for people coming out of incarceration, and out of jail,” he explained. “So there are a number of system points where you’ve got people who are both homeless and aspiring, and people willing to make changes in their life, people wanting to make changes in having high levels of need. And so finding those places and screening people in getting them into these programs, and also doing it at job fairs. So it could be done in a lot of different places. I think the essential ingredients are somebody who has a high level of need and is also willing to, wants to change.”
As a last thought, Flaming framed the task ahead as a system change.
“I think it’s very hard to put a value on something that hasn’t happened. But if we’re going to intervene preventively, we need to do that,” he insisted. “Accountants can always put a cost on something after it happens, but anticipating the cost of something that’s going to happen and prevent it, that’s the system change that’s at the root of all of this. And so that’s what we’re trying to advance.”