Brno Challenge Convening: Data Toward Action
- Dec 29, 2015
- 4 min read
UPDATE: See the full Brno Challenge Convening Report, including a FAQ on the VI-SPDAT and detailed summaries of presentations.
On the first day of the Brno Challenge Convening, Senior Director of Knowledge Sharing at Community Solutions Paul Howard likened homelessness interventions to jazz music: fluid, changing, and adaptable. "One community takes the theme, improves on it, and sends it on to the next community," he said. "Every community does something well that other communities could learn from. It’s not that everything every city does will be helpful to others, but there will be enough that you can learn that will make it worthwhile."
"Adaptability" was the word of the moment in Brno. In a room full of advocates, service providers, politicians, and researchers from the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Spain, South Africa and Chile, the goal was not to find a "one-size-fits-all" approach to collecting actionable data that can move people toward housing. Instead, IGH partnered with the Building and Social Housing Foundation (BSHF) and the Brno City Municipality to create a focused space for participants to share strategies that may be adjusted and adapted to fit many different contexts but still produce comparable data.
This challenge has been of particular interest to the European Campaign to End Street Homelessness, coordinated by BSHF in alliance with FEANTSA. The European Campaign has made use of the VI-SPDAT, a pre-screening tool co- developed by OrgCode Consulting, Inc and Community Solutions to assess the needs of homeless people and match them with appropriate interventions. Using the survey across a pre-determined area allows a city or neighborhood to know who is experiencing a specific type of homelessness by name, with enough information to match them to appropriate housing services and interventions.
Every city involved in the campaign has learned about the VI-SPDAT and is using it to develop a system which works in their context. This approach--learning as much as possible from what others have done while making space for local adaptation --mirrors other aspects of the European Campaign.
"In order for this campaign to be European-wide, we were trying to structure it around a set of loose principles which are similar to the 100,000 Homes campaign in the U.S. These relate to providing Housing First in a way that is right for each context, knowing who is on the street and using this data to target action, and improving the co-ordination of housing and support," explained Tom Archer, Programme Manager at BSHF.
As an added benefit, understanding a handful of the same core questions across borders will allow the cities involved to compare the situation on their streets to those of their neighbors, not only as a benchmark of progress but as an opportunity to share and obtain knowledge. Whether that's learning from Barcelona about cultivating a culture of volunteerism or looking at London's extensive web of data-sharing, there are things each community can teach and learn.
"As you learn from each other, you’re going to adopt some things that you like and others will adopt from you; it becomes an ongoing process of learning and emerging and figuring things out," summarized Howard. "You’ll find that other communities may have figured something out that you’re struggling with, and you may have figured something out that others are struggling with."
For some, the idea of cultivating a by-name registry initially seemed daunting and superfluous. Brno, for example, already had recent numbers regarding the number of rough sleepers in the city.
"The good thing about [macro data, such as] a Point-In-Time Count ... is this idea of what’s happening on a typical night. So it’s not over a period of time,” said Mark McPherson of the London-based organization Homeless Link. "But every community has a different methodology for conducting their Point-In-Time counts, so there's no way to compare. A by-name registry allows us to compare data. So the two work quite well in conjunction together."
In other words: the macro-level data collected from methods like the Point-In-Time count shows a place's long-term trends; individual-level data collected from a Registry Week shows who is experiencing homelessness in real time and what it can do to move specific people toward housing.
"Information that you get from a traditional count can be used in support of a Registry Week," explained Data and Performance Manager for Community Solutions, Andi Broffman. "You’ll already be mapping, using volunteers, and talking to people. It’s an alignment of the processes and not a competition between the two."
So what's next? Every city represented at the Brno Challenge Convening committed to doing a Registry Week in their community, with support from the Institute of Global Homelessness and the European Campaign to End Street Homelessness. Those who are part of the European network of cities working to end street homelessness will have access to campaign resources--and to each other, creating a network of communities learning from and teaching one another.
The Institute of Global Homelessness has pledged to provide ongoing support to participants from the Tswane Leadership Foundation in Pretoria, South Africa and CalleLink in Santiago, Chile as they move forward with registry week pilots in 2016.
Comments