Innovation and impact at scale: Why our partner organization, Community Solutions, is a model for success

We’ve known for years that Community Solutions, our partner since 2017, could truly change the landscape of homelessness in the U.S. Its Built for Zero program is driven by a belief that homelessness—as widespread an issue as it is in the U.S.—is solvable. If communities are equipped with strong data infrastructure to enable them to see every person experiencing homelessness and what they need to exit it, they can make measurable progress toward the goal of ending it forever. That idea is working. In the last several years, Built for Zero has enabled 12 communities to reach “functional zero” in homelessness, and many more are making strides toward the goal of ensuring homelessness is either eliminated or rare and brief if it does occur. 

And just today, we got the news that the big funders are taking notice. Built for Zero is one of the six finalists in the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change, a competition for a $100 million grant that will go toward an organization making measurable progress against a widespread and entrenched issue. This is the recognition and massive investment that they need to radically scale their approach across the U.S. and internationally.

I was talking to my colleague Jason Schumacher, who first brought Community Solutions to the attention of Tableau Foundation. Beyond the sheer excitement, both of us are feeling at one of our partner organizations getting this recognition—right after we just announced our own recommitment to Built for Zero—something he said to me stood out. Built for Zero is a success story because Community Solutions invested the time and effort into figuring out a program design that works and is truly scalable and adaptable—and they had the time, space, and support to do so.

When Jason first opened up the conversation with Community Solutions, he reminded me, we didn’t know that Built for Zero was going to be this success story. At the time, Community Solutions had just wrapped up its 100,000 Homes campaign. Through that effort, they worked with 238 communities to identify by name and house 100,000 vulnerable people. Their hope was that by investing in public housing stock across the U.S., homelessness would consequently decrease or come to an end—but that didn’t exactly happen. Instead of giving up, Community Solutions realized it needed to think differently. Rather than focusing just on moving a set number of people into housing, it needed to focus on equipping communities with a solid data infrastructure to identify every single person who is experiencing homelessness by name and track what services they interact with and what they need in order to be able to exit homelessness. 

That kernel of an idea would become Built for Zero, but at the time we started the conversation with Community Solutions, it was just in the early days. They wanted to figure out how to transform the community dashboards they manually updated monthly in Google sheets into something more dynamic, automated, and interactive so homeless service providers could see the list of individuals, and measure homelessness inflow and outflow in near real-time. We didn’t know what that would look like, but we gave them a small software grant to get started. A few months later, they had a prototype dashboard that they were able to bring to communities and ask: “Could you see this being helpful? Could this help you end homelessness in your community?”

They heard a lot of “yes,” and also a lot of suggestions, which they worked to incorporate. Now, that kernel of an idea is the widespread and effective Built for Zero model, which is up for this substantial, game-changing grant.

The true power in this story is how many lives are being improved—maybe even saved—through communities’ ability to solve homelessness. But there’s something in here that as a grantmaker, I keep thinking about, and believe could be a lesson for everyone in this space: Supporting organizations as they go through the learning and iterating process is just as important as supporting them once they’ve proven themselves out.

When I talk with Jason about Community Solutions and what he sees working, he always talks about how they are constantly learning and tweaking the way they interact with their partner communities. This ability to adapt to changing circumstances is so valuable, especially in 2020.

Throughout their work, they’ve taken the time to really assess their programs, and to learn what’s working and what’s not. They invest in prototyping and working extensively with the communities they serve to make sure the tools they’re providing them are useful. Because of that, they’ve been able to develop a model that is making a tangible difference. 

We had a small role to play in that. Tableau Foundation has always believed in supporting organizations that have a glimmer of an idea of how data and Tableau might make their work more effective. But we also don’t require that idea to be fully fleshed out. We believe that organizations do their best work when they’re given the space and support to try and fail and then try again—until they land on something that works. By granting software and financial support to nonprofits with no restrictions, we try to translate that belief into action. 

We’ve heard from many of our nonprofit partners that that’s different from the mainstream grantmaking process. Oftentimes, for nonprofits to receive support, they need to have a fully-constructed program or strategy. In a true Catch-22 situation, they sometimes already need to have proof that it works. And for new ideas, often the grants are so restricted that nonprofits can’t be agile and pivot to meet the real demands of the community as they’re going through the process to learn more about them.

My hope is that nonprofits can access the funding that’s right for every step of their process. In the early days, they could benefit from unrestricted support so they can test out and pilot their program ideas. And once proven, that’s where the big, goal-driven funding can come in. And then, they might have a shot at a MacArthur-level grant. 

There’s a balance here between supporting innovation, but also investing in scaling what works. In the grantmaking world, there’s a lot of excitement around funding the latest innovation that’s proven to have potential. That’s certainly important—but it can’t come at the expense of really doubling down on other programs that have the potential to scale and make a massive impact. We’ve all seen that long trail of innovative projects that died by the side of the road because nobody else was willing to step up and fund them to scale. We have to stop doing that.

Especially in the context of homelessness, there’s a very tangible benefit of investing in a proven solution like Built for Zero. The way I see it is that if every community fighting homelessness had to invent their own version of Built for Zero from scratch, it would take years—after all, it took the Community Solutions team quite a bit of iterating to get to the point where they are now. And in that time, there are hundreds of thousands of people living without shelter, who will continue to suffer as their community reinvents something that already exists. 

But instead, by adapting a model that’s already proven to work in Built for Zero, communities could reach people faster, and make tangible change. We at Tableau Foundation have recognized this all along, and we’re thrilled that MacArthur Foundation has too. Seeing Community Solutions named among the six finalists for 100&Change confirms the efficacy and importance of their Built for Zero model—and it confirms their goal to functionally end homelessness in communities across the U.S. is even more possible.