Weekly e-Newsletter | January 4th, 2023

Reflections from Amy Schwabenlender, Executive Director

Sporadic reflections from the front lines serving single adults experiencing homelessness, one eye kept open on COVID, Phoenix winter, disrupting systems and living up to the legacy of a champion. It's been 14 days since my last post. Approaching 15 months of loss of smell personally, and no new scents other than skunk. Maybe 2023 will bring me some olfactory progress.

I've never been big on making resolutions at the turn of a calendar year, as I approach life as a more frequent exercise in setting goals, practicing new disciplines, and embracing the notion of continuous quality improvement when it comes to both the personal and professional.

What I have done the last couple of years professionally is use the white board in my office to sketch out broad goals for the Human Services Campus, Inc. and ending homelessness. Each year the white board went through edits - adding and subtracting info and clarifying.

Today I erased the bell curve that graced my wall for the last year.

When I started to draw the bell curve twelve months ago, I didn't know it would become a powerful tool for strategic conversations, planning and conspiring for the greater good. A set of two simple lines, one a very rough estimation of an 80/20 bell curve, and the other a close-to-straight line representing "functional zero." On the topic of ending homelessness, the bell curve is to depict that the middle of the curve is where a majority of resource and discussion happens when we speak of homelessness. And we get stuck here in the middle when we talk about ending homelessness. What it really takes is prevention on the left end and housing on the right end. The inflow of people into homelessness will continue happening unless we have very real and successful prevention strategies. And we need enough of all types of housing on the right end to create an outflow of people thereby "ending" their individual homelessness. The bell curve must be flattened in order to have an effective system and achieve functional zero. [Read More...]

Season 2, Episode 4 of "It Happens at STN"

The December episode includes an update from Valley of the Sun United Way on their Mighty Change agenda as part of the Community Collaborative. In the Room discusses when and how to access professional help for teens, Project Greenprint talks about leaving places better than you found them, and McQuaid Mission examines the reality of affordable housing…. It’s all here in “It Happens at STN.” [Watch it Here...]

The next episode will be filmed on February 2nd!

Click Here to View All Episodes.