Close your eyes and imagine a world where homelessness is no longer the pervasive issue we see in American cities. Keep in mind that on any given night, roughly 84,000 Americans have been homeless for at least a year. Now open your eyes and visit the Community Solutions website<\/a> to learn about 10 American communities that have ended veteran homelessness and three that have ended chronic homelessness.<\/p>\n

Community Solutions helps communities adopt the best problem-solving tools from multiple sectors to end homelessness and the conditions that create it. The organization was created by Rosanne Haggerty, who spent 20 years developing affordable housing but couldn\u2019t build apartments nearly as fast as homelessness and poverty were expanding. In 2011, she launched Community Solutions with a team of co-founders to find faster solutions. Today, they help communities optimize their existing resources to make measurable social change at scale.<\/p>\n

But how exactly are they getting these results? Homelessness, like education gaps and poverty, is sometimes seen as an intractable problem, but at StriveTogether and the Cradle to Career Network, we know better.<\/p>\n

For members of the Cradle to Career Network, Community Solutions\u2019 process will seem very familiar. Their approach includes focusing on data; facilitating partners toward shared goals and action; targeting strategies to specific sub-groups (e.g. chronic, veteran or youth homelessness); identifying technical, complex and complicated challenges; and testing and refining strategies with small tests while thinking about the policy changes and resource flows needed to transform systems to END homelessness in communities across the country.<\/p>\n