The complexities of social justice, and how to accelerate the results we all want to?see

Poverty, homelessness, violence, racial disparity in incarceration, the struggle to find good education and healthy food: how do we prevail against such complex problems?

Donating to social causes has become an important initiative for some of the richest people in the world. Billionaires create grant-making foundations or contribute to philanthropic organizations in hopes of bringing about the kinds of changes that will help alleviate the world’s inequalities.

Unsurprisingly, those highly successful people are intent on setting very big goals for their investments in social causes.

Yet, here in the richest country of the world, despite the many initiatives in place, the brutality of poverty persists.

Tonight, in America, about 40 million people will be living in economic poverty. [4]

Why aren’t we seeing faster results?

I’ve been reading a number of books on topics related to homelessness and other problems affecting the poor, including the ones in the reference list at the end.

I needed a place to share with people who don’t have the same amount of time to read that I do some key lessons I’ve identified in those books, so I decided to use Medium for that purpose.

What follows is a first attempt to summarize some of the key lessons extracted from several important books:

1. Housing first

Housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated as simply a business, a crude investment vehicle, something that just ‘cashes out’. [2]

In [2], we learn the story of ‘Arleen’, a high school dropout from Milwaukee raising two children and often exposed eviction a result of her sons’ behavior. In a cold day in January 2008, her sons were playing outside tossing snowballs at passing cars. A driver stopped after the boys hit his car and ran inside of their drab apartment, breaking down the door with a few hard-heeled kicks. The man left before anything else happened, but when the landlord found out about the door, she decided to evict Arleen and her boys. They had been there 8 months.

Arleen kept moving from shelter to rental and back, finding it harder and harder to afford a place to live that didn’t expose her children to drug dealing, chaos, and violence. Her oldest son attended five different schools between seventh and eight grades. One day he snapped back at a teacher who had snapped at him, kicking him in the shin. The teacher called the police, and when the landlord heard about it, he made a deal: if Arleen left by Sunday, he’d return her rent and security deposit; if she didn’t he would keep her money and evict her. Arleen took the deal and returned to the cycle of shelter-rental-eviction she was so familiar with.

2. We don’t understand a problem until we’ve seen it up close.

How many people develop strong opinions about criminals, high school dropouts, or families experiencing homelessness without knowing any person who fit these categories? While improving the lives of millions requires systems changes, effective changes require first acquiring close-up experience to understand the problem well. [3]

A lot of (all?) funders are well-intentioned. With a few exception, the problem is that frequently lack subject matter expertise. [4]

3. Data is key to ensuring that investments are wise and achieve results.

Performance measures matter. Let me narrow it down to the three that matter the most:

- How long are people homeless?

- How many people did you move out of homelessness?

- Of all the people you moved out of homelessness, how many came back into homelessness? [4]

We need to treat data in homelessness and housing more like you use data when driving your car. There are lots of things you could look at or be concerned with when driving, but you can whittle it down to a few things you care about most, such as whether you are in Drive, how fast you are going, and whether or not you have gas. From time to time it will be relevant to know if your blinker is on. And if any of those other lights show up, such as engine, oil, brakes, or tire pressure, it may be worth exploring those further. We need dashboards in homeless and housing programs to behave much the same way. We need to think of which things we need to keep a steady gaze on (things such as shelter capacity, outreach capacity, movement into housing), things we need to know about from time to time (number of unique individuals to engage with the system compared to repeat users, rates of diversion) , and stuff that we need to explore further they they show up (overflow in shelter, motel use, newcomers and refugees using shelter services, housing closures, ends to encampments). [4]

We cannot and should not be secretive with data, even when it points to things that we are not proud of showing to the world. I think every homeless service provider at the point of intake should publish in big bold letters and numbers how many people they served last year, how many moved into permanent housing, and how many came back. [4]

Data warns us of a problem we wouldn’t have seen otherwise — say, needing ambulances deployed closer to nursing homes at mealtimes. And that predictive capacity gives us the time to act to prevent problems. [3]

Choosing the wrong short-term measures can doom upstream work. The truth is, though, that short-term measures are indispensable. They are critical navigation aids. In the Chicaco Public Schools example, for instance, the district’s leaders ultimately cared about reducing the dropout rate. That was the mission But they couldn’t afford to wait 4 years to see whether their theories were paying off. They needed more proximate metrix that could guide their work and allow them a chance to adapt. (…) So the school leaders started watching students and grades — measures you could examine and influence on a weekly basis. The theory of change was: If we can boost attendance and grades, we can improve a student’s On-Track standing, and that will boost her chances of graduating. The short-term measures were well-chosen: The plan worked brilliantly, as we saw. [4]

Where do we go from here?

Well-intentioned funders need to take a critical look at their initiativest o ensure they are both evidence-informed and community-informed.

Evidence-informed means making recommendations that are informed by the best evidence and data currently available. Community-informed means giving voice to those most impacted […] and meaningfully including them in the decision-making progress for adressing it.” [1]

As Abt highlights in [1], the best solutions combine a healthy mix of immediacy and sustainability, reactivity and proactivity.

Proactive solutions include offering underprivileged kids at a young age access to programs before they get drawn into a life of violence, providing financial help for poor families to pay their outstanding rent and utility bills, finding means of transportation for a worker at risk of losing his job after his care broke, and so forth.

Reactive solutions comprise things like providing shelter for youth fleeing an abusive situation, connecting shelter guests with mental health and substance use treatment,, connecting ex-offenders with job opportunities, etc.

In the most disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, housing is highly unstable, marked periodically by disruptive evictions. Schools in these neighborhoods are often described as “dropout factories”, with sizable proportions of the student body failing to graduate. Waste sites, landfills, incinerators, and other environmental hazards dot the landscape. Access to jobs, transportation, and other services is severely constricted. Individually, each of these challenges is daunting. Collectively, they are overwhelming. Concentrated proverty puts individuals, families, and communities under intense and unrelenting pressure. When it persists over longer periods, it leads to criminality and violence. No one kind of deprivation is responsible, instead it is multiple deprivations, all operating at the same time, all fixed on the same people living in the same place, that eventually results in the highest level of victimization and crime. [1]

[1] Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence — and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets, Thomas Abt.

[2] Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

[3] Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, Dan Heath.

[4] The Book on Ending Homelessness, Iain De Jong.

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