Habitat City: Reflections on the Midwest Regional Convening of UN Habitat III

On Thursday, March 31st the University of Chicago hosted the first of five U.S. convenings centered around the United Nations' upcoming Habitat III conference. The "Learning from the City" conference brought together scholars, practitioners, philanthropists, politicians, and thought leaders to ask two questions: "In the 20 years since Habitat II, what have we done?" and, "In the 20 years following Habitat III, what will we do?"

To the first question, the consensus seemed to be that both the Midwest and the U.S. as a whole have spent the past 20 years sharpening their tools and acquiring new ones, from the advent of Big Data to improved, coordinated systems of care in cities like Chicago. Progress has been made in some areas, and ground lost in others. It has been 20 years of experimenting, learning, and planning.

But: "We have done enough planning," said Caroline Goldstein, Interim Executive Director of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). The time has come to put those plans into motion, to solve problems where we know how and learn figure out solutions where we don't. As Michael Jasso, Chief of the Cook County Bureau of Economic Development put it, the time as come to "be strategic and creative, using our new tools to make our resources work."

But how?

Multilateral Partnerships

"Let's talk about impact on whole regions," began Harriet Tregoning, Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Community Planning and Development in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Her keynote, less a speech than a Q&A, focused on the value of learning from others' progress, keeping one another in check and building each other up. In other words, a "big coalition" that is capable of collectively confronting issues that spread across multiple regions and jurisdictions.

This idea of collective impact ran through all of the day's panels. Multi-sector, multi-jurisdictional, and even multi-national partnerships allow for a many-pronged problem-solving approach. Taking the example of housing and homelessness, Nonie Brennan, Chief Executive Officer of All Chicago, identified five persuasive reasons to adopt a collective impact model:

1. Multiple partners allow a group to take on the full range of complex causes and consequences of a social problem;

2. Shared management means shared responsibility, shared accountability, and shared resources;

3. Coordinated systems can provide a comprehensive set of tools and solutions for clients to achieve the best possible outcome;

4. Continual communication guarantees that all partner organizations have the best information, research and data toward improving programs; and

5. Strong partnerships foster "backbone support" that keeps everybody on course toward the final goal.

"There is no community issue that can be solved without community collaboration," Brennan stressed. Widening these kinds of partnerships not just to multiple organizations within a field but across disciplines and jurisdictions brings in a wealth of new expertise, resources, and perspectives to tackle problems that often have roots in multiple fields.

We see this play out all the time in homelessness: people end up on the streets due to a confluence of multiple causes. Canada's Homeless Hub notes that "homelessness is usually the result of the cumulative impact of a number of factors, rather than a single cause." They cite structural factors (like access to affordable housing), systems failures (like inadequate discharge planning for people leaving correctional facilities), and individual factors (such as mental illness, domestic violence, or a traumatic event like job loss). Embracing that complexity creates robust systems engaged in finding and disseminating long-term solutions.

As Bob Dean of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) put it, "Communities can learn from one another, sharing and coordinating to find solutions."

Leadership

Local leadership is both a means to acquiring assets and an asset of itself. Jeremiah Boyle, Managing Director of Community and Economic Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, phrased it thus: "It is vital that a leadership infrastructure exists which is inclusive, diverse, and holistic to push forward a vision."

This concept of "leadership infrastructure," which requires group participation rather than depending on a single dynamic leader, offers the same kind of shared responsibility, accountability, and stability that multilateral partnerships do: if you lose one passionate voice, another is able to step in and continue the work. For this reason those infrastructures must be built to look like the population they serve, crossing racial, economic, religious, and political boundaries, and must include voices from the many fields and sectors that contribute to complex social problems.

What's more, that infrastructure can provide support to leaders as they push through the often exhausting process of designing and implementing change. Community support and confidence that a system can operate in the absence of influential individuals goes a long way toward preventing burnout.

"There is no community issue that can be solved instantly," as Brennan explained on Thursday. Creating healthy, thriving leadership groups strengthens not only the influence of the group but the leaders themselves for the long haul of fixing deeply-rooted social problems.

Action Bias

Data-gathering is a vital part of the change process. Data allows organizations, governments, and coalitions to measure the impact of their programs or policies. LISC sums up this process as, "Engage, Plan, Act, Evaluate, Repeat."

But data without action is useless; it provides a framework for thinking about solutions and need, but at some point those thoughts must translate into concrete action. In discussing her tenure as the mayor of Gary, Indiana the Honorable Karen Freeman-Wilson discussed how Gary's "greatest gift is the ability to plan and execute at the same time."

As Stacy Tessler Lindau of CommunityRX phrased it, "We are already in a data-driven society. But how can we use that data to do measurable good and improve quality of life?" A representative from the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology noted that Chicago uses its data as a jumping-off point, not the end goal. Data collected on incidences of food poisoning, for example, are sent immediately to inspection services.

"Why wait?" asked Goldstein. "If you can solve an immediate problem, do it."

There is no single answer to problems like homelessness; though all communities have something to teach others and something to learn from them, ultimately local environments will have to adjust programs and policies to fit local contexts. As Paul Howard explained during the Brno Challenge Convening, "One community takes [a solution], improves on it, and sends it on to the next community."

The Way Forward

IGH believes that our four primary program areas will advance this holistic approach in the field of homelessness. Our leadership program seeks to cultivate a robust leadership infrastructure for agents of change across the globe. Targeted convenings like the one in Brno are designed to determine concrete, actionable solutions to shared problems. And we hope through our global advocacy to help build partnerships across borders and jurisdictions. It may be that no complex issue has a simple solution, but they do have solutions.

So, to return to the conference's second question, "What will we do about today's social problems?" the answer is as simple as it is complex: solve them.

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