Catching the Vision
What is the vision for creating shelter and housing in a community?
What does a true Continuum of Care actually look like?
How do you create the vision and how do we get the community to support it?
What are we truly trying to create?
What does building community really look like?
These are questions that I often think about at night. I often feel that the vision we are trying to create is hidden behind a thin veil of fear and misunderstanding.
Most communities want a healthy housing and rental market. Most communities want affordable housing for their citizens. Most communities want to help people in need and help lift their citizens out of poverty.
However, we tend to run into disagreements on how to get there and what it looks like.
This kills projects in communities all the time. Civil discourse erodes and most people don’t have proper communication skills to work through disagreements towards a solution. It turns into a yelling match where people make it personal and attack each other’s character and in the end fear wins, nothing gets accomplished, and the status quo is maintained. It’s a disgusting cycle to witness.
This cycle can be corrected and, in many cases, mitigated if we can paint a picture of the work we are doing and the community that is being built. As I wrote about in a previous article, each community has its own unique message that needs to be painted. Your story needs to be told, and your community needs to be the hero of your story in order to bring them closer to your mission to address homelessness.
In order to paint this vision for the community, it would be help to define what a Continuum of Care is. According to the National Alliance on Homelessness a Continuum of Care (CoC) is: “a regional or local planning body that coordinates housing and services funding for homeless families and individuals.”
Every region has a CoC and you are probably connected to it directly with your work.
What does a continuum look like though?
I tend to envision a continuum as a community that has pathways from homelessness, to shelter, and into permanent housing. In a previous article I showed the Pyramid of Hope that was created to help depict what this looks like.
Often our work involves helping communities create shelters, campgrounds, and tiny house villages. These programs are often the first step in a continuum for people to come off the street. Once people are in a bed and receiving services, the next step is to get people into more permanent forms of housing as you continue to support them on their journey. Each step is meant to increase an individuals self-sufficiency and reduce risks of returning to homelessness.
Building a continuum means building a community of care. It means building community connections that build each other up, hold each other accountable, work collaboratively to transform peoples lives, and inspire hope in those that have lost their way.
What does a continuum look like in your community? What is the picture that you want to create?
This work starts with a vision.
