Innovations
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The Innovations Team at Common Ground brings together staff from each Common Ground program to create new tools and strategies for ending homelessness. Over a 90-day period, called a “wave,” the team – under the guidance of Process Improvement expert Tom Nolan – conducts mini-experiments, scans for best practices that can be adapted to new contexts, performs analyses, writes reports, and presents findings and recommendations to the Common Ground leadership.
At quarterly meetings, the Innovations Team presents the results of the most recent wave and makes decisions whether to pursue further research and development or integrate the findings into operations. At these meetings, new priorities are identified, new waves begin, and the Innovations Team resumes its process of experimentation, research, analysis, and evaluation.
Here’s an example:
Charged with achieving a 2/3 reduction in street homelessness in Brooklyn, Queens, and Midtown Manhattan by January 2010, our Street to Home program needed to know whether its efforts were effective. The team was receiving annual numbers through the HOPE (Homeless Outreach Population Estimate) count, but thought more frequent evaluation would better inform their work.
James McCloskey, a member of the Innovations Team, is piloting mini-counts, making this part of routine operations of the Street to Home outreach. Each week, as outreach teams canvass Brooklyn and Queens, they are conducting a count of one census tract, which has been selected at random. The numbers are reported and then compared to the previous HOPE count. An analysis will indicate whether the mini-counts accurately predict the findings of the annual HOPE count. If they do, mini-counts will be incorporated into the standard operations of the Street to Home program, providing a significant tool to measure whether we are on target to achieve our goals.
Previous waves have included testing the Vulnerability Index, investigating Cognitive Impairment among our clients and tenants, and launching the Hospital to Home program.
