HOMELESSNESS IS A WIDESPREAD CHALLENGE in American cities. On any given night in Detroit, for example, annual counts showed that more than 1,700 people were likely to be either living on the streets or in shelters or other transitional housing.
To tackle this problem, leaders in Detroit, Michigan, launched the Detroit Housing Resource Helpline in 2023 for vulnerably housed city residents. The centralized helpline receives about 8,500 calls each month and helps the city identify households with housing needs, including those at risk of homelessness, and connect them to resources.
To help better connect residents with services, the city worked with Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab (GPL). The GPL, launched in 2012 by Jeffrey Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy, works directly with local governments and jurisdictions across the United States to tackle homelessness, improve child welfare, and strengthen community-based public safety.
The GPL—part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at HKS—has led collaborations with practitioners in 112 jurisdictions on 278 projects, redirecting $7 billion to services and efforts focused on better supporting people and families. It has also trained more than 3,700 public servants who are invested in continuing to grow the solutions their communities need—from strengthening alternative 911 emergency response in Madison, Wisconsin, to building a new model for child well-being in South Carolina to improving outcomes for people awaiting trial in Clark County, Washington.
In Detroit, the GPL analyzed the thousands of calls that came into the helpline and collaborated to design screening criteria and processes for connecting people with the resources they need according to their circumstances. “With the help of the GPL, we’ve been able to take a variety of datasets and put them together to understand the start and end points of residents reaching out for housing resources,” says Chelsea Neblett, the chief of housing solutions and supportive services for the city of Detroit.
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Improving procurement
SINCE ITS FOUNDING, the GPL has helped more than 200 communities improve procurement—the often-cumbersome process governments use to contract for goods and services. While this issue may seem esoteric, nearly everything that government does requires procurement, so better procurement means better results for residents.
This year, the GPL’s procurement team launched an independent nonprofit, Partners for Public Good (PPG), to continue and expand its longstanding procurement work with jurisdictions. The leadership of PPG includes Elena Hoffnagle MPP 2018, Colin Erhardt MPP 2019, Laura Merryfield MPP 2019, Isabel Garcia MPP 2022, and Amanda Jaffe MPP 2022, as well as CEO Kailey Burger Ayogu, who was a fellow at the HKS Center for Public Leadership while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Partners for Public Good is now home to the Procurement Excellence Network, a community of more than 2,500 government officials from over 900 governments across the United States, Canada, and Latin America.
Among its current projects, PPG is assisting cities with project planning and procurement challenges on federal infrastructure grants and helping school districts improve school lunch quality through better procurement. Members of the PPG team have also helped Seattle, Washington, improve ambulance response times to non-life-threatening incidents, enabling 90% of ambulances to arrive to calls within a goal timeframe. The team has helped Jackson, Mississippi, whittle down over $10 million in unpaid invoices to vendors to just $100,000 in a year’s time. In San Antonio, Texas, their work has also linked job quality and procurement, helping the city pilot incentives for vendors to hire job seekers from the city’s Ready to Work Program.
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Banner image: An aerial view of volunteers loading food into vehicles at a mobile pantry in Detroit, Michigan. Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Image; faculty portrait by Martha Stewart; inline image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images