AaEA Affiliate Week: Lindsey Stillman on Creating a System of Care for Vulnerable Populations

Hello, my name is Lindsey Stillman and I work at Cloudburst Consulting Group, a small business that provides technical assistance and support for a number of different Federal Agencies. My background is in Clinical-Community Psychology and so providing technical assistance around evaluation and planning is my ideal job! Currently I am working with several communities across the country on planning and implementing comprehensive homeless service systems. Much of our work with communities focuses on system change by helping various service providers come together to create a coordinated and effective system of care, rather than each individual provider working alone.

Lesson Learned:

• The new HEARTH legislation includes a focus on system level performance versus program level performance. This has required communities to visualize how each program performance feeds into the overall performance of the system in order to identify how to “move the needle” at a system level. Helping communities navigate between the system level goals and the program specific goals – and the connections between them – is critical.
• Integrating performance measurement into planning can help communities see the value of measuring their progress. All too often grantees or communities are given performance measures that they need to report on without understanding the links between their goals and activities and the performance measures. Presenting performance measurement as more of a feedback loop can help remove the negative stigma around the use of evaluation results and focus stakeholders on continuous quality improvement.
• Working with agencies or communities to create a visual representation of the links between processes, program performance and system performance can really help to pull all of the pieces together – and also shine light on serious gaps. Unfortunately many federal grantees have had negative experiences with logic models and so finding creative ways to visually represent all of the key processes and outcomes/outputs/etc. can help to break the negative stereotypes. In several communities we have developed visual system maps that assist the various stakeholders in coming together to focus on the bigger picture and see how all of the pieces fit together. Oftentimes we have them “walk” through the system as if they were a homeless individual or family to test out the model and to identify any potential barriers or challenges. This “map” not only helps the community with planning system change but helps to identify places within the system and processes that measuring performance can help them stay “on track” toward their ultimate goals.

Rad Resources:

• United States Interagency Council on Homelessness Data Resources

• Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Performance Measures

• National Alliance to End Homelessness Performance Measurement and Improvement Resources

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Atlanta-area Evaluation Association (AaEA) Affiliate Week with our colleagues in the AaEA Affiliate. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AaEA Affiliate members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.