A New Paradigm to Ending Homelessness | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

There's one moment from this pandemic and actually many moments that I'll never forget. When the stay at home order went into place, my daughter looked at me and said, what about people who have no home to stay in? She was right. What about them? Where do they go? How do you social distance in crowded shelters? How do you avoid catching COVID 19 when you are sleeping and eating in public spaces and don't have access to clean water to wash regularly? This pandemic has brought to light a lot of issues, serious issues that we really need to face head on and lean into racial injustice, health care disparities and homelessness. Good morning, I'm Lia McGowan Hare and welcome to another one of our live weekly conversations as part of Leading Through Change series, a chance for you to hear from leaders that are doing their best to work through these very challenging times. Now, before I turn it over to our our amazing host, Salesforce Chief Philanthropy Officer Ebony Beckwith. I want to preview the next hour. Ebony will be interviewing Dame Louise Casey on how she is leveraging her extensive experience in her role as the chair for the Institute of Global Homelessness while also currently leading British government task force during excuse me, COVID 19 till to end homelessness. Now after that, we'll hear from Beth Sander, principal at Community Solutions on how she leads Built for Zero, a movement of more than 80 cities and countries across the United States, excuse me, counties providing proving that homelessness is solvable. Beth will also show us a special demo on how they are using tableau to power their data operations. Now as we do every week on Leading through Change, we want to help those that need it the most. Millions of people already rely on the United Nations World Food Program for food they need to survive and COVID 19 is making these conditions even worse. This pandemic could double the number of people suffering from severe hunger by the end of the year. To help prevent a hunger pandemic, the World Food Program is scaling up to reach 100 million people across 86 countries with life saving support. Now if you can please go to salesforce.com wfp and join us in ensuring the world's most vulnerable people have enough to eat during this very critical time. Now, through July 31, 2020, Salesforce will be matching donations up to a total of $150,000. Again, that's salesforce.com WFP now over to you Ebony.

Thank you so much Leah. And hello everyone. I'm Ebony Beckwith, Chief Philanthropy Officer at Salesforce. You know today's conversation on homelessness feels especially relevant as the COVID 19 crisis continues to displace tens of thousands of people and adding to our global homelessness population of over 150 million people. To give you an idea of just how many people that is, that's almost four. California's, two Germanys, all of Russia. It's 2% of the entire world population. So helping homelessness is a top philanthropic priority for Salesforce as it relates to our work with the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically around ensuring that our communities and our cities are safe and inclusive. Today we've donated over $7 million and our employees have volunteered nearly 150,000 hours to organizations combating homelessness. And when COVID 19 hit, our Impact Labs team convened international organizations to discuss solutions for how to help the unsheltered shelter in place. Going to Leah's point earlier, and let's be clear, an issue as big and complex as homelessness cannot be solved with philanthropy alone. It requires heart plus action. And my next guest is all about action. Dame Louise Casey is the Board chair of the Global Institute of Homelessness. She is also the head of the British Government task force focused on homelessness during COVID 19. And since March she has moved over 15,000 people without shelter and into temporary accommodation. That's what I call action. Dame Louise, it is a pleasure to welcome you to leading through change today. Thank you for being with us.

It's my absolute pleasure. Good evening from London is what I should say.

Good evening. Yes, that's right. So you'll have to indulge me. I wish we could be doing this in person so I could give you a squeeze. But I have an icebreaker question for you and this is something you must have been incredibly honored to receive, a damehood from the Queen, as your name implies. Dame Louise Casey, for our non British listeners, Can you tell us a little bit more about this honor and how it came to be?

Well, this is a surprise. Nobody told me you were going to be asking this. I feel like going and getting it because it's on my wall just over there. But I mean, essentially we have an honours system and what it does is it recognises people's contribution above and beyond their day jobs, if they're volunteers or people that make additional contribution, basically. And so I was made. So a dame is the equivalent of a sir. And we're a rare breed. There are less dames than sirs. No, no, no surprises there. I was about to say something ruder, Ebony, but I held myself in check. So, yes, I was blown away. By it. I remember getting home at 20 past 10 at night, and there was a normal brown envelope in the. In the thing. And I was thinking, what's this? Why the bloody Cabinet Office writing to me? What have I done wrong? I was literally like, what do they want? And I opened it up and it said dbe, which is Dayton, basically. And I. Yeah, it blew me away. Just this very sad thing is my mum. Neither of my parents were around to see it. I think my father, who was an Irish Republican, would have been about it, whereas my mother would have been delighted.

I think they'd be very proud because this was granted to you for your work with families and vulnerable people. So tell us a little bit about the moment when you knew this would be your life's work.

Wow. So I think it's taken me a while to get my head around this, Ebony, that I think I feel like I had a calling, really, to try and serve the poor and particularly people who are homeless. And, of course, in latter years, as we get older, we look into our. I certainly have looked into my family more and more clearly. And my father was from a huge Irish family in Ireland, and they were tenant farmers. So when their father died, the entire family were made homeless. And basically one son was sent to New York, one son was sent to Canada, one son was sent to Australia. My father arrived on a boat at the age of 13 to Liverpool, and another brother, Kieran, came to London. So I think just devastated completely, their family. And I think that many, many years later, that now runs quite deep in my soul. And I don't think people should experience homelessness. And I certainly think we should do a significantly better job to protect children.

And you certainly are. So let's fast forward to today. You are leading a British government task force focused on helping homeless during COVID 19. Tell us a little bit about how you're leading that effort.

So, I mean, to be honest, Ebony, I mean, I realize I'm on a huge salesforce call, but it's been a bit insane. I mean, essentially, I was in Sydney doing the Institute of Global Homelessness work, and it became clearer. I was doing street work in Sydney with colleagues there, trying to figure out how they could kind of do a fantastic job to reduce the number of people sleeping on the streets. And the kind of. The COVID 19 started to become a real thing, and nobody knew about it. By the time I got home into London, I was like, what are we doing? I mean, literally, what are we doing? So I used the fact I'm a dame And I'm really annoying. And I muscled my way into Whitehall and I told them that they really needed me and that I was, you know, needed. And I basically asked them if they needed some help. And it's been a tremendous experience to that I don't think I've ever experienced before. The number of people that have stepped up and organizations like St Mungo's in London, one of our biggest charities that helps with rough sleeping and homelessness. They literally opened up 800 plus hotel spaces overnight. It's just been an extraordinary experience. And I think the thing that's really profoundly interesting, when I met you, Ebony, last year in your HQ in Salesforce, we were talking about homelessness and how to stop it. I think what's been really interesting about COVID 19 is that it basically we got those people in so we could stop them from dying. You know, our key job here was not solving homelessness, we were staying ahead of that disease and our job was to get as many hotels. You know, I was on the phone to Travelodge, to inter hotel, you know, it was literally, can I, can I, can I? Teams of people trying to basically get as much university hotel, any redundant accommodation where people could self isolate. So we didn't, we closed down all our shelters. We took everybody in off the street. We had what Beth and I would call by name lists. So we knew who those people were and we knew how to go and get them. And essentially we brought in 15,000 in the space of weeks. I wrote out to everybody in the country saying let's get everyone in, don't ask questions, don't worry about it, just get them in. And now it's about over 20,000 people have come in during this crisis. And I mean, it's early days yet, but we had the Office of National Statistics, which is an independent body, published on Friday statistics. I've been holding in my heart, holding on, hoping to God that we had really done the best job to protect people. And as of the end of June, we've only lost, and it's 16 too many, but we've only lost 16 people to COVID 19 in our homeless and shelter population. So for me that justifies the resources, but it also shows what is possible when you want to do something. So everybody says tackling homelessness is impossible. Of course it's not bloody impossible, it's whether you want to do it. And so we took something that was impossible and we made it possible. And I've just been privileged to be part of it.

That's great work and the perfect segue into my next question to you. And we get this question a lot, and I'm sure you do too, because a lot of money and resources have been thrown at this issue. So let's talk about why you think homelessness is truly solvable and how we can go about solving it. It's a question on everyone's mind.

So, I mean, there's a couple of things. This is second time round really for me. So 20 years ago, under the 97, 98 administration here, the Tony Blair administration, they made it a political priority to reduce the number of people sleeping on streets in the United Kingdom by two thirds over a three year period. And by the time we left off three years, the numbers of people were in the hundreds. We took it from the thousands and we reduced it to the hundreds. And I think in the intervening period, and you know, colleagues, my very wonderful esteemed colleagues in the United nations, know, I say this, I say it a bit too publicly, is that we went from a country of national celebration and good practice to, frankly, a national, a country of national failure. And actually the numbers of people sleeping on the streets went back up again. The kind of the grip on the system was lost, resources were withdrawn. That classic political moment that when you can't see it and it's not under your nose, you stop funding it. Which is one of the challenges that actually you have to be able to fund the system in order to get long term change. Not just moving people quickly off the streets, but finding permanent solutions. So the way I do this, I mean, I kept this so simple when I went for the rough slip for the homelessness job 20 years ago. I'm almost embarrassed to admit this 20 years later. I mean, I obviously started out young. Ebony, Basically, I call it the bathtub. So for me, the way to solve homelessness is to essentially, it's like an overflowing bathtub. There we have it on the graph. And so basically, when street homelessness is an overflowing bathtub, it's really straightforward. Anybody that has a bathtub that has overflow, lucky you, you've got a bath, you live in a house. But when it overflows, do you know the first thing you do when you run into the bathroom? You switch the taps. It's the first thing you do is you prevent the problem getting any bigger. What do we spend most of our time doing in homelessness? Just alleviating the problem. We put food out on the streets, we open shelters, we keep alleviating and alleviating the suffering caused by Homelessness, we don't think what's creating it. And how do I stop that? The second thing you do is you reach into the bathtub and you basically have to go for the difficult and the challenging. So this is not going for the low hanging fruit, this is not going for easy wins. You get in there and you help the people stuck in the system. And for me, people that are on the streets, and I saw them in San Francisco, I see them in London, I see them in Sydney, I see them in Bengaluru, I see them in Santiago, in Chile, that what you have on the streets quite often are people who've been out too long, they have very significant problems. And the solution to their problems, as I used to say, to persuade people that give me money from the government, the solution to rough sleeping is neither cheap, easy or basic. And it's more than a cup of soup. So you've got to switch the taps off. And sometimes that could be something really simple. So, for example, we knew in London which prisons discharged on a Friday evening and essentially sending them to the street. We knew which prisons discharged on a Monday morning, giving a fighter chance to prevent homelessness. I know during COVID 19, but basically we've had a thousand people come out of prison onto the streets. We've had a thousand people out of hospitals come onto the streets. Everybody on this call knows that's preventable. So you prevent it. You dive in and deal with the most difficult. You'll upset a few people along the way. Because there's a hard truth here, is a lot of people do a lot of things, but they don't solve the problem. And you have to be clever to solve homelessness. You don't just keep doing things. I don't want to nip Beth's session next, but data and information used cleverly is how we've all got things done. And then the final thing you do is you have to recognise the fact that the solution to homelessness isn't just a house, that I think we all think that you can shelter your way out of homelessness, that you can house your way out of homelessness. Last time I checked, I need to get people treatment and I need to get people jobs and I need to remove the label homeless. And the most extraordinary thing about COVID 19 is that some of my colleagues working on the front line and they get to. I get this virtual world, but I get to see it is they brought in people that we didn't think we brought in in years. We've brought in people who were frightened because of COVID 19. And now they're staying in. So, you know, I don't know, Ebony, I think that everybody thinks something is too difficult and people fund what's difficult. And actually we should be looking at and doing what's smart and what's clever. And that's what the bathtub is. It prevents. It deals with the most difficult and it gets. It gets the system to think about how you help people out of that system permanently. I said to the prisons minister in this country last week, you have to work out whether you're the prisons minister, which is not a bad thing to be. Keep people alive in prison, make sure you don't have riots, do it as humanely as possible, drop the number of suicides. Or are you the minister for reducing the risk of reoffending? If you want to stop people reoffending, start before they go into prison, work with them whilst they're in prison and don't send them back out onto the streets at the end. And that's another version of the bathtub. It's all doable. Everybody on this call must know that if we get this right, it is achievable and it is doable. Absolutely.

And I love that. The imagery of that, it's very clear and I think we can all understand it. So for organizations who want to take action and help solve this problem, what advice would you give them?

So what do I think? I think the first thing I wanted to mention at this stage, Ebony and I know Salesforce and other organizations are really committed, is that we have a moment right now around the Sustainable Development Goals and work that the Institute of Global Homelessness has been doing alongside UN Habitat and actually UN officials as well, which is in February, for the first time, there is now an agreed broad definition of homelessness. And the reason I wanted to say this is because the sad fact is we don't know what the extent of homelessness is globally. We know more about how to count birds than we do how to count homelessness. And at this point, I have to name check a friend of mine, a guy called Mark McGreevy, who is quite well known in the international homelessness world, and he went out in his back garden one day. He's lucky to have a back garden. And he saw a guy next door, this is a few years ago, Ebony, with a pen and paper, and he was basically counting birds and counting what type of birds there were. And that was. That was done by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Would that we had a Royal Society for Protection of human beings. But anyway, don't get me on that one. So what is really interesting is that we are able globally because the RSPB is a global organization to look at trends, to look at where some birds are dying out, some birds are growing in numbers, where migration patterns happen, but we can't do that on homelessness. And I think that is one of the biggest problems. I've worked for 20 years for governments, for prime ministers. I'm on my fifth prime minister right now. If you don't see it and count it, targets and action don't follow. So I think one of the most powerful things that could come out of what is happening at the moment with United nations and the Sustainable Development Goals is a very specific piece of work around homelessness and how we globally can compare it otherwise. My worry about the Sustainable Development Goals as they are is they none of them mention homelessness specifically enough. Even number 11 doesn't get into the detail of the fact during COVID 19 all around the world, the story that Leah told about her daughter saying, I'm all right, Mum, we're all right, but what about everybody else? That has to be made gritty and proper. And the only way I think we can do that, Ebony, is to be very firm about wanting that global count, wanting that global definition. And I think that's the key thing for me.

I think that's right. I think everyone knows in business what we measure, what we track, what we count, what we hold ourselves accountable to, that's what gets done. When we take our eye off the ball or we don't have targets, you know, it gets a little loosey goosey. So I completely agree with your point there. So now what about. Oh, go ahead.

I think the thing I've been thinking about, and I know Community Solutions and Beth is going to talk about this after, and I completely back that work is that if we had something, you know, my thing here is like 15 years ago was the last time anybody had a look at a global count. 15 years ago. The whole tech industry is completely different. You don't need to go in your back bloody garden anymore and do a census. We can do it all on our. I won't show my Nokia, but I'll show you that one instead. We can all do it on these phones. It's like there is a way here to actually say what can the public do? And I think if you do global count, if you do local analysis, so what's really important is that it connects. So in this country, in Sydney, in Adelaide In Bengaluru, IN the 80 cities that community Solutions is working with in the United States, we have data and by name lists that mean when Covid happened, Leah's daughter could know that somebody somewhere was going to go out and make sure we were safe harboring those human beings. So you want global count, you want local analysis, and that gets you action. And the other thing I think we get wrong, Sorry, I'm talking too much. I'm watching the clock go round. But I'll just say this, then I'll shut up. I told you. I told you I talk too much.

I love it.

I love it.

I'm like the mad dame on the line with 10 million people. I've got my moment to tell the world this is doable and you use it. Amen. So I think the thing I think is really interesting about your question, which is so profound, is we spend a lot of time thinking we're solving this and we're not. And part of how we do that is we get real information about real people and their real lives. So I haven't met many people and I've done street work now for 30 years, and I still do it. I still annoy people by doing outreach work in every city that we work in. And if you start listening to somebody's story, you'll find out why they're out there. It doesn't take long to work out that they've probably moved from shelter to shelter to shelter or that they've been because they're black or that they are a woman and they've got a child. So they put a true story. They put this woman in a mental health shelter when she was completely compos mentis because she was in debt in New York for something like a hundred dollars. I could have given her $100 and she wouldn't have spent a year in a mental health shelter with her daughter, you know, so all of it is solvable if you use the information and you let the people power their own solutions. And we can do that anywhere in the world. I desperate to get my hands at some point on San Francisco. I'll just put that out there.

You are welcome to come help us with this, too. So let's talk about the people in the public. So for everyone watching this program and for everyone who wants to get involved, for the young ones like Simone, who think about what can we do? What is your call to action for all of us?

Well, that's another unexpected question. Ebony, My starting point about all of this is what should I be doing as myself, before I call on governments or anything else, what should I be doing? And I think right now, because of COVID 19 and because we're looking at a world now where actually maybe we can end homelessness, because we certainly in this country, we have no reason to go back to mass homelessness. Here we can lift the safety net, but the starting point is, what can I do? And those things are, you know, the real basics. So you can make donations, as has just been highlighted on the call about food hunger. You can give your clothes to somebody rather than actually chucking them out. You can choose how you look after your neighbour, then you can volunteer in night shelters and day centres. Then, if you're a tech person, you can help somebody like me work out how the hell you do tableau and how you make sure that you're able to do it through to then corporates deciding that maybe they want to put their full weight behind something, there'll be people on this call that are running something to do with employment. I tried to get all the fruit farms, so we. We have fruit here every summer and the fruit farmers basically need people to pick their fruit. I thought, fine, fruit farm people connect, you know, and the fruit farmers wouldn't have thought of that for themselves. The government spent money doing some sort of wartime pickup for Britain thing. We had, you know, upwards of 5,000 people in London who were in hotels, some of whom we could have got those jobs. So I think for me it's think conscience and think action, and that's a personal decision. And what flows from that, though, is then what. What can we do as organisations? And that's where I think some of the partnership work, some of the stuff like Institute of Global Homelessness, we are wanting to put ourselves right in the middle of a global call for action. We are powering through this work with colleagues in the United nations, but we can't do it alone. And if organisations want to join us or individuals, that's one of the routes that can be done. But the starting point for me in all of this is you have to have hope that something is possible. I just don't accept ebony. I hope I stay this way to my dying day. But we do not have to have a world that is this terrible. We can come out of COVID in my country with children not being hungry and with people not being on the street, and maybe we do a better job by old people. And layered across all of that is we certainly know here, and I'm glad we know it, is that COVID 19 disproportionately affects people from the black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. And we know that because they're more likely to, to be poor. So these are the facts we now need to do something about. And it's incumbent on everyone to do something about it.

Thank you, Dame Louise. That was brilliant. I love what you said. Think conscious, think action. Now we're going to open it up to Q and A. So Leah, I'll turn it back over to you to read us the first question.

Sure. Thank you just so much. Great information from that. And you should also delve into motivational speaking there, Ms. Dane Casey, because I'm ready to go out and like we're gonna fix this today. So the first question is Amy on the live stream asks Ms. Dane Luis. In the salesforce.org Impact Labs program, our community, stakeholders and pro bono volunteers are collaborating to identify ways technology can help address homelessness. Now I know you mentioned a little bit about this in one of your answers, but, but what advice do you have for us in other companies who are looking to leverage technology to address and solve the issue of homelessness?

So in a way I think Beth will knock this out of the ballpark actually to use an Americanism, did you notice that I'm trying to, you know, global. And so I think one of the really, I mean I said it very quickly because I was conscious of everyone's time but it is utterly crazy that the last time we did a global count or estimate actually was 15 years ago. And I think here we will have more of a grip on it because of COVID 19. But there is something that is crying out to use and leverage the tech industry across things like by name lists, analyzing data in individual cities, in individual towns. And I think one of the things Leah, that I found very interesting and actually Rosanne Haggerty who is one of Beth's colleagues and I have been on other sides of the Atlantic for about, I don't want to admit to it, but it's at least 20 odd years and we've been on a parallel journey where we talk from time to time. But it's really interesting. We've come at this from you've got to be clever to solve homelessness. And part of being clever is having the right technology and I don't think we have a consistent approach to that technology. So we've got, you know, for example, Microsoft are really active in Sydney. Salesforce is active in quite a number of places. Apple are active. I don't, you know, Amazon, there's lots of great companies doing things. I just think there could be something here to use this global moment of the pandemic to unite around. How do we have consistent data, or data, as you would call it in some places? How do we have consistent information that also drills into something that somebody like me can use? Because that's the other thing I want to be able to know when a town is running into trouble. I want to know when the warning signals are coming up. So Blair introduced a traffic light system here of red, amber, green. So basically, lots of our delivery plans have red, amber, green. And when they get to red, we panic, we try and stop it at amber, and we're all happy when it's on green. And we all do that. Certainly in my day, Leah, we were doing that using paper. In fact, I'm going to make you really, really laugh that I'm literally sitting on this call with something we call a treasury tag. And I mean, look at Ebony's face. Ebony is like, I told you not to get this woman on this call. She's just too live and uncut right there. And so we have to make this doable. And I think that's where the tech industry can just really floor it and could make a really massive significance. And some of this stuff we don't need to research, but we don't need to spend three years now trying to work some of this stuff out. We have just shown in the United Kingdom what you can do when you've got determination. We could do it a lot better for the longer term in different ways. We've shown it's possible again.

Awesome. This next question is for Ms. Ebony. Ashley on the livestream asks, what can the US learn from what Dame Luis and Igh have done internationally?

That's a great question. I think we have to go back to the bathtub analogy. I love that we have to turn off the faucet. And the best way we can do that is to look at the data. As Dame Louise mentioned, we have to understand the people behind that crisis and how we can help them. And once we understand the people, I think the key is in then doing more to unlock solutions for how we can help. Again, I go back to what I said in the beginning. It's using heart plus action to understand what we need to do and then taking the right action to do it.

Absolutely. And I know you know this Ebony, Bryan Stevenson talked about the power of proximity. Right. How do you serve people if you're not there with the people to understand what they need? And I love that's what the bath analogy did for me was like you need to go deep and understand it's very easy to throw money at things, it's very easy to, to throw food. But it's not solving the problem like getting in and understanding the stories of how some of these people got in this situation. Maybe there is a pattern that we need to look at. So I love that analogy. I never thought of using that. But thank you for. I'm going to look at my bathroom very differently now. Next question is Elliot on the live stream asks how would rethinking the definition of homelessness and consequently the type of data required to measure it contribute, contribute to evidence based policies and the achievement of SDG Target 11.1 by 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing, basic services and upgrade slums.

Is that familiar?

Yes, it is. I'm sorry, Ms. Daniels.

No, that's absolutely fine. It's just, it's like doing one of those interviews. I hope I've still got a job at the end of it, let alone get a new one. Might need a new one. But I mean, I think the really interesting thing Leah, about that question is that right now nobody knows whether they'll achieve it or not. So if I was British government, quite often you don't want to count stuff actually you're not that keen on defining things because when you define them and you count them, you've got to do something about them. And I think there's just a real issue with that particular sustainable development, which is the one the whole of housing and homelessness hangs on to that one, thinking 11.1 is ours. But actually if you look at most of those sustainable development goals, you've got people that are homeless that will be left behind even when you get movement on them. That's where the kind of the work that Richard Curtis and others are doing is so important. But it's so important that we layer it with this issue around homelessness. And if you can't compare it, if you can't count it, if you can't know the quality of it, then we won't know whether we've met those goals effectively or not. And my real fear is something that's got real momentum. United nations staff missions. The really interesting thing about the thing that happened in February with the United nations, that it was the African missions who collectively lobbied the hardest to have the definition and comparator on homelessness. And I think that speaks volumes. If they need it and want it, then why is the rest of the world standing in their way.

Great.

Our next question, Malia on Livestream asked Dame Louise in the US the main issue is resources from mental health help and workforce reentry that are the main causes behind homelessness. What programs can be instilled to help remedy this?

So that's where I go back to the fact that I think people have to really know who is on the street and where they're coming from. And until you know that, you don't know how to switch the taps off. So I've no doubt that, I've no doubt in some of the cities I have visited in the United States that the number of people with very significant and indeed florid psychiatric illnesses and mental health issues is way too high and not way too high. It's a tragedy. They're dying young, they're dying ill, they're dying alone, they're dying in the proximity of other people that are equally ill. It's just shocking beyond actually. But I think you have to go back and look at the system to see how could you have stopped that in the first place. So the fact that, you know, I did outreach in Chicago many years ago when we, when we first set up the Institute of Global Homelessness. The home is in DePaul University in Chicago. And I was out with an outreach team and the outreach team reached a point where all they could do was give people socks, give people water and give them a ticket so they could go on the L and be legal throughout the night. And we met a 60 plus black woman who had been discharged from hospital that day, who was carrying in her carrier bag chemotherapy treatment. And she had a cyst on her neck, just huge. And I look round and I just thought, this is desperate. This was for maybe 2014, 2015. And I thought, Chicago, surely we can do better than this. And they can and they have. But it takes those individual stories, I think, to then say, what do you really need? And then, you know, how much treatment you need to be spending and how and why. I'll say really quickly. The data in London showed one thing. We have 5,000 people regularly sleeping rough in England. In London, our numbers were really high. But of the people sleeping rough in London, the number of people that have been out for more than two years who therefore had drug, alcohol and mental health problems was 88%. Your approach to homelessness in London is not just a numbers game. It's about working with that 88. And that's where some of the charities have done just such a tremendous job. During COVID 19. I'm watching that clock literally go down to zero. I'm so well disciplined, it's unbelievable.

But we still have time, even just for one more. You're just such a wealth of knowledge, we cannot let you go without, like, pulling as much as we can out of you. So our next question, Ms. Dame Louise, is for you and we'll keep it brief. How should we think about keeping. Keeping people housed now that they are off the street and off shelters, now that they are in temporary housing, what is the UK doing?

Well, I have to say, we're pretty fortunate in the uk because we've persuaded. Sorry, that's too harsh. Enabled the Prime Minister to find 105 million pounds for us to spend on making sure we keep people in. And I don't want to spend all of that money in hotels, Leah. I mean, that's the other thing that. What we want and what, to be honest, what we want is the same. Every local authority, every council in the country, every charity has done just something utterly extraordinary. It's been such a. Such a. An amazing thing to be part of in such a terrible time. I mean, COVID 19 has just been awful. Our death rates in the United Kingdom, as you know, are high. Our tested positive rate, when we can test people, has been high. We've got old people passing away in care homes, not being able to be held by their loved ones as they pass away. It's been a really, really tough time. And in the middle of all of that, there's been this group of amazing people that basically have got 15,000 people in, and we were bloody determined to make sure that they don't go back to the street. So we've had, obviously, commercial hotels go back into use, but it's a range of things. I'm trying to buy hotels, we're trying to. We're using university accommodation that isn't being reused, we're using permanent housing. So for the first time, we're getting new permanent housing, affordable permanent housing with support. So we've got about 105 million and about 160 million in permanent housing, which should go a long way, Leah, to actually making sure those people don't go back to the street. But we still have a way to go, but we'll get there.

That's right, because as you stated, it is not impossible. And if you think about it, impossible spells I'm possible.

I love that. Dame Louise, thank you so much again for joining us. This was really informative and brilliant as always. Thank you for bringing your unique perspective to this critical issue and for all the work that you're doing. Really, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Thanks, Ebony. Thanks, Leah.

Well, now I want to bring in our next guest, Beth Sandor, principal at Community Solutions. Now, Beth has spent more than 20 years working in the field of housing and homelessness, both here in the US and in the United Kingdom. She is also the co director of Built for Zero, a national movement of more than 80 communities working to end homelessness, measurably end homelessness. And I love what Beth is going to talk to us about today. So, Beth, thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to be here and to have the honor of hearing Dame Louise Casey talk before me.

Oh, Beth, thank you. Start, Beth, by telling us how Community Solutions thinks about formlessness.

Yeah. Well, I think Louise Casey talked about it in detail that first off, homelessness is completely solvable. And we are in a moment now more than ever when we see homelessness as a public health crisis. And I think COVID 19 has demonstrated that with people experiencing homelessness, twice as likely to be hospitalized with COVID 19, two to three times as likely to die if they contract the coronavirus. And we also know that in the public health crisis that is homelessness, black and Native Americans are four to five times as likely to experience homelessness than white people. And these are not problems of individuals. These are problems of systems and systems that we built. And just as we built these systems, we can dismantle them and build systems that actually work and get the results that we all seek to get, which is is ultimately a sustainable and, as you said, measurable end to homelessness across every community in the United States.

That's right. And I love the idea of the Built for Zero movement. Tell us a little bit about that and how that got started.

Yeah, like Louise Casey talked about, it's been a very long journey, kind of a 20 year journey for our organization of learning and iterating, but with the mission always being a lasting end to home homelessness that leaves no one behind. And that work started 20 years ago with the kind of intuitive belief that I think everyone listening will connect with that housing is the solution to homelessness. And so our team started in New York City building beautiful, permanent, supportive housing. We built over 3,000 units of housing across New York City. But after doing that for a decade, had to take a hard look at there were still very vulnerable people on the streets outside those buildings. And so while we were winning awards for that, we weren't really making the difference. We thought we were that people, our buildings ended homelessness for the people that were lucky enough to get inside them. But that systemically we weren't seeing that change. And so we started to talk to people sleeping on the street and ask what was their experience? And when you do that, you quickly find out the kind of horrible chutes and ladders process that people, very vulnerable people, have to navigate to be able to move off the streets or out of shelter into permanent housing. And so we had this aha moment of, okay, this is a process improvement problem. This is a systems change problem. And so what if we designed the system really around the user? If we said, who is the most vulnerable person? But for us, redesigning that system won't come off the street into housing. And so we launched in 2010 a national initiative called the 100,000 Homes Campaign, where the mission of that was to start with the most vulnerable people, the people with highest mortality risk, and redesign the system for them. And a lot of that work was really built off of the work that happened under Dame Louise Casey's leadership in the uk and so we took that and said, okay, how do we make that work here in the U.S. and so we did that. And after four years and working with 186 cities who housed 105,000 very vulnerable people, we saw a lot of great results for individuals. But what we also didn't see is that at a population level, the cities and communities we work with, we expected that if you housed lots of very vulnerable people and redesigned your systems to accelerate housing placements, you would see the overall population reduce. And we just didn't see that. So in 2015, we got back together again and said, okay, what are we missing here? And we designed what is now built for zero to answer the question, how do we move away from counting up to housing placements and instead count down to a population level reduction that is sustainable and measurable and consistent across the United States. And so we invited any community who was willing to work with us on that to come in. And we were lucky enough that 75 at that time and now 80 communities kind of raised their hand to do solve for impossible to say, okay, what would it take to do this? And we have learned so much over the last five years of this work and have seen now 12 communities that have ended sustainably veteran homelessness and or chronic homelessness on a path to ending all homelessness across their communities. And that's our mission now, is how do we create credible evidence, proof points across Every type of community in the United States that this is possible and scalable.

I love that you're taking a data driven approach to ending homelessness. You're taking a look at it, you're analyzing the data, you're going back to the drawing board, you're iterating and then being really innovative. As you mentioned, and we talked about this earlier, there are over 80 communities that you're working in. What does it look like in one of the communities that have successfully and difficult.

Yeah, I think it's a great question and I'd start by explaining what it feels like to a person experiencing homelessness when a community ends it. And one of the first communities that ended veteran homelessness, Gulf Coast Mississippi, which is a region of 6 counties in Mississippi, when they ended veteran homelessness. If you were a veteran and you became homeless, you would be permanently housed in 11 days. And, and that is so powerful to live in a community in a region really that you can trust that if the worst thing happens to me, if all the other systems fail me and I become homeless, that in my community, people will ensure that I get safely rehoused in 11 days. And that's what we want it to look like in every community across the country, for every single person. And that is happening now in communities we work with and is within our reach to scale. But we have seen among the 12 that have ended for one or more populations and the 40 plus communities that are seeing reductions, all of them have had five key things. And I think Louise touched on a lot of these. The first is a commitment to a shared, measurable aim that homelessness. Ending homelessness is not just a slogan or a notion. It is something that we can objectively measure and are committed to, to looking at all of the programs and all of the investments across our community are going to add up to getting to zero on homelessness. And we're going to look at that every day, every week, every month, and know if we're making progress. So that's the first thing we see in communities who are making progress or have gotten to zero. Second is a data feedback loop, both qualitative and quantitative data on what's happening in the system and what's happening for people. And I think this is especially important as we look at ensuring that our system isn't causing more racial disparity as we redesign these systems. And then they have a dedicated nimble team who has the capacity and the capability to do systems change work. And I think we see in many communities that you're asking People to solve very complex problems on the back of other jobs. So they're doing program administration, a federal fund, and then on the side are supposed to figure out how to solve for one of the hardest challenges in our communities. And we need to invest in a team like we have at the national level, but at the local level who can really dedicate, live and breathe this issue without having to be distracted by other side jobs as well. And then that team, equipped with the data, equipped with the ability to be accountable for the aim, has testable, proven practices. So things like housing first and motivational interviewing and outreach that they are testing solutions at the local level. But it's seen not as a recipe. There aren't six things every community in America should do. There are six things that every community should test and adapt in their context and see is it driving reductions? And that that team, and someone mentioned this in the questions, has access to flexible resources so that the resources aren't constrained by something we thought would work two years ago, that that team can pivot in response to the data when they get new information and have the resources to bring to bear. That if they find they need something different than they needed six months ago, they don't have to wait a year to apply for funding. They can move in that moment.

Anything else, in addition to these five things that you mentioned that will make this a new reality for communities around the world?

I think the belief that it is possible not only among the people doing this work, but I think everyone who has influence over policy and resources, I think often we show up in a way that seems like maybe we actually don't believe we can solve this problem. And credible proof points, I think the more evidence there is that communities are doing this, I think the more believable it becomes and the more of a reality it is will become. The political will. I think Louise talked about this about in the UK when they made huge progress. That was because the political will was really brought to bear. And I think that is something that every person in a community can help do, is really hold mayors and county executives and businesses accountable for outcomes and say, are we driving reductions in homelessness? Do you have access to that data? And if you don't, we demand that you transparently get it and allow us to see what progress we're making for all this investment. And I think one of the key things to make it a reality is to really move away from talking about homelessness as a static problem, which I think has really not served us well as like if we just build 10,000 units of housing. We can solve this problem. Homelessness is such a dynamic problem that is changing all the time based on the ecosystem in our communities. And that we need problem solving skills, data, and an approach that is as nimble and dynamic as the problem is. And we need to talk about it that way and think about ending homelessness as really constantly solving.

Great. Now, I know you have a demo that you wanted to share with us today to illustrate how you're using the power of this data and the power of the tableau platform. I will hand it over to you to take us through it.

Great. Yeah, let's take a look at that demo. I think it will help bring to life and help people visualize some of the things that Louise and I have been talking about. So I'm going to show you the tableau visualization for Kern County, California, which is in Northern California county of about a million people. Those community leaders have made a commitment to end chronic homelessness, which is long term homelessness among people with disabilities. And this dashboard allows those community leaders to be able to look month over month, how many people across our county of a million people are experiencing chronic homelessness? Are all of these investments and activities adding up to fewer people experiencing homelessness this month than last month? And as you can see, they have done an incredible job over the last six months of really driving reduction and using this data to make decisions about how to do that. And I think that's the key, is that looking at this information every single month allows those leaders, implementers to decide when something's working and they should scale or double down or when they need to something that they hypothesize would work is not happening the way that they expected. And as you can see, they held under three people experiencing chronic home health for four months. And then in May of 2020, it ticked up. But this data allows them to go deeper and really see why did it tick up and how might what levers do we need to pull? And I think Louise talked about the bathtub and we think about that as how many people and who is coming into the system every month, which are the purple bars on this graph? And then who is exiting and how many people are exiting every single month of homeless response system and what do we need to do to pull those levers to be able to drive reductions. And as you can see here In November of 2018, the Little Red dot at the bottom there square lit up to tell that community, hey, inflow into homelessness is exceeding outflow. Something's going on here. You need to pay attention or you're losing ground. And then those leaders can dig in and say, okay, of the total people who came in, 21 people who came into homelessness this month, how many were completely new to the system? And how many people did we know were housed? And fallout again. And as you can see, all of them were completely new. Which means the right strategy, there is partnership with upstream institutional players to figure out what is it going to take to keep people from coming into the system. And then in the same way, they can dig into outflow and say, okay, of the people that exited the homeless response system, how many were people we housed? How many people disappeared? And the strategies that community would use to accelerate outflow would be different, right? If they need to work on bringing new resources to bear improving the housing placement process versus expanding outreach and navigation if people are disappearing. So this is a little bit wonky, but the point of all of it is that it equips community leaders and implementers with the information they need to know. Are we designing a system that is capable of driving reductions and iterate and learn and create a data culture which allows that to happen at the community level? And, you know, our dream is that every county in America has a dashboard like this that is transparent and public and allows them to iterate and learn, but also holds them accountable for ending homelessness, which is completely within our reach. So if anyone wants to dig in more to what's happening with Built for Zero, you can check out Built for Zero.org and we're excited to see where this work goes next. Our communities are doing incredible, incredible work at the local level. I'll hand it back to you, Ebony.

Beth, that was absolutely my next question. Like, how do we get this in the hands of more people? So you just talked about the website. I. That was so powerful and the data was so amazing. So thank you for bringing that to life and offering to put into the hands of anyone who wants it. Kabeth, I really appreciate you being here with us today and not just speaking about the issue of homelessness, but really showing us the work you were doing to solve it and how others can get involved. I feel very hopeful after speaking to both you and Dame Louise. Leah, I want to bring you back in. Wasn't that an amazing conversation?

It was. And you're right, Ebony. I mean, sometimes you think about the issue of homelessness and it feels so overwhelming, like this is not solvable. But hearing both Louise and Beth speak about it, I feel hopeful about it. And really feel empowered to help. And I love getting data in the hands of the local community so it doesn't feel so distant. Right. I can actually go and look at the data and say, what are, what are, what is the data for my county? And I can see how I'm impacting it. So that's, that's really powerful.

So I just want to close by saying Dame Louise Casey, Beth Sandor, thank you so much for being here with us today. And Leah, I will turn it back over to you to close us out.

Thank you so much, Ebony. And thank you once again, our amazing guests, Louise Casey, Dame Louise Casey and Beth Sander. You can find more about our leading through change stories at Salesforce D.

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