Economic Roundtable

Preventing Homelessness with Jobs

Systems Change through Income Empowerment and Housing as a Right

Successful Demonstration Phase

The Realization Project demonstrated that employment can have an immediate impact on reducing the number of people living on the streets. This project cost $17,150 per participant, which is the same as one year of public costs for the same individuals if they had not been helped.

The Realization Project was a three-year, heavy-touch demonstration project. The project utilized predictive screening tools, temporary housing, case management, behavioral health services, skills training, and career support. The successful results from the project are documented in the recently released report, The Work Behind Work.

Ninety-five percent of participants had stable housing after they left the Realization Project. Their employment rate was 41 percent higher when they left the program than when they entered. The average post-project wage for all of the employed participants was $20.69, and 18 percent are earning more than $25 per hour.

Predictive Screening

When they entered the project, all of the participants were homeless or on the verge of homelessness and likely to be persistently homeless for at least a year. This assessment was based on the results from two predictive screening tools developed by the Economic Roundtable. The first tool identifies low-wage workers who are likely to become persistently homeless after losing their jobs. The second tool identifies youth receiving public assistance who are likely to become persistently homeless in the first three years of adulthood.

These screening tools predict the adverse outcome of persistent homelessness before it happens so that high-risk individuals can be identified and helped before there is extensive social, economic, legal, and medical damage in their lives from prolonged homelessness.

Within the universe of people going into homelessness, the tools single out individuals who are likely to be homeless for a year or longer and whose public costs are likely to exceed the roughly $17k cost of providing full-person support to help them get a living-wage job.

The screening tools are very accurate – seven times more accurate than random predictions. The development and accuracy of the tools is explained in the report, Early Intervention to Prevent Persistent Homelessness.

Restorative Justice

Poverty and underemployment are often symptoms of deeper trauma that is profoundly damaging, devaluing, and confidence-shattering. The innovative framework of the Realization Project lays the groundwork for practical discourses on justice and emotional intelligence in community. This fundamental level of human equity is more vital than mere sociological labels. In this project model, participants’ justice work begins with doing themselves justice through learning and performance.

Persistent homelessness is prevented by empowering high-risk unemployed workers and young adults to earn a living-wage and claim a permanent right to housing. Chronic homelessness is addressed as a problem of racial injustice as well as a problem of inadequate income by providing comprehensive services and skill development for jobs paying wages that cover rent for adults on a path to chronic homelessness.

Employment expands the array of system-change strategies for combating homelessness by highlighting the agency and capacity for self-determination of homeless individuals. It leverages the lived reality that two-thirds of homeless adults are doing something to earn money and one-third are trying to find a job in the formal economy. This is a societal asset for empowering these individuals to shape their own trajectories out of homelessness.

Homeless workers have diverse needs. Interventions should be targeted to match the type and severity of workers’ needs, ranging from direct employment to heavy-touch intervention with housing, behavioral health services, job training, and employment.

The model calls for providing individually tailored support. Services include housing, mental health therapy, team building, vocational assessment and mentoring, career planning, access to apprenticeship training for union jobs, academic advisement, coaching on obtaining and keeping a job, and post-employment support. Participants are part of cohorts that foster a sense of community centered around promoting the achievement of personal goals for employment, housing, and education. Individually and as a group they develop skills needed to overcome their challenges, posed by poverty, lack of family support, foster care experiences, discouragement, anxiety, depression, gaps in educational knowledge, criminal justice records, and unfamiliarity with living wage occupations.

Scaling Up

The next phase of this project is bringing together organizations that have the necessary array of competencies and are interested in being prime movers in implementing this model.

The goal is to scale-up employment interventions in homelessness through public and non-profit adoption and implementation of the project model. This includes the strategy for reducing the inflow of more people into persistent and chronic homelessness through early, holistic, person-centered intervention.

The plan is to establish demonstration clusters that will be created through collaboration between Los Angeles County and City department and other stakeholders. The purpose is to galvanize governmental agencies and service organizations to scaling up proven anti-homelessness employment strategies.

Convenings and Operational Planning

The first step is designing, hosting, convening, evaluating, and following up through a series of in-person working meetings. These 2-3 hour sessions will convene key leaders and advisors in different geographic areas and stakeholder groups to collaboratively explore and plan holistic employment interventions to prevent persistent homelessness.

Convened groupings will combine leaders across relevant sectors including public policymakers, government agencies, apprenticeship and non-apprenticeship unions, community colleges, workforce development, veteran and reentry experts, as well as other service providers and community and philanthropic partners.

The stakeholder groups will plan collaborative efforts to scale-up employment-based homelessness interventions based on the premises that:

1. There is broad public support for empowering adults to earn an income, afford housing and share in the dignity of work.
2. Most adults experiencing homelessness want to find sustaining employment; there are untapped resources for helping them achieve this goal.
3. Evidence-based screening tools should be used to target high-need young adults and workers for early intervention.
4. Costs for comprehensive employment services are offset by the public costs that are avoided by preventing persistent homelessness.
5. Person-centered holistic support is a collaborative strategy that leads to sustaining employment, complementing housing, mental health and social service systems without competing for the same resources.
6. Employment is a scalable strategy because there are multiple mainstream sources of potential support including public job creation initiatives, local hire agreements, college and university grants, job training programs, and union apprenticeship programs.

The convenings will assemble community-level teams for operational roles including recruitment, training, housing, case management, and employment.

Technical Assistance

The Economic Roundtable leadership team will provide one-on-one technical support for new projects, providing advisement for planning comprehensive services and using the public domain library of curriculum materials and case management strategies developed in Phase I.

Underwriting

The project has been funded by the California Community Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, the Long Beach City College Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Kaiser Hospitals Foundation, the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at USC, and the Economic Roundtable.