Building Changes Annual Luncheon

Thank you, Betsy, for that kind introduction. And thank you all for this warm welcome.

As some of you may know, I come from Nebraska but Washington is my adopted home. I’ve lived here for more than 30 years; my career took off here; I raised my family here. And my wife Tricia and I established our charitable foundation here.

I love this state. Now, you may be wondering who I’ll be rooting for when the Huskies play the Cornhuskers in Lincoln next week. Let me just say...Go Cougars! Just wanted to see if you were paying attention...

Ever since moving here, I’ve been passionate about improving the lives of our state’s underserved communities. That’s why it’s a great honor to be invited to speak today on behalf of Building Changes. It’s really a pleasure to talk about an organization that is serving our community in such a creative, innovative, and effective way. I’m going to describe exactly what Building Changes is doing for our community, but first I want to tell you a story.

Since becoming CEO of the Gates Foundation in 2008, one of the great privileges of my job has been the  opportunity to get out of the office. Not only to speak at important events like this one, but also to visit with our beneficiaries around the globe.

In India, I’ve met with rural health workers helping to keep young children in their communities vaccinated against polio and other preventable diseases. In Ohio, I’ve met with students from poor families who are overcoming many obstacles to complete college degrees. And in Mozambique, I’ve sat down with smallholder farmers and heard about their efforts to grow more food and boost their incomes. I was even given a chance to sit behind the wheel of one of their tractors –which is always a treat for a farm boy from Nebraska. 

One of the amazing people I’ve met during my recent travels is a young woman who lives just next door in Tacoma.

Her name is Danielle.

Danielle grew up in Alabama, where the only certainty in her life was its uncertainty.

Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother struggled with drug addiction. They separated when she was a young girl. Danielle grew up poor in public housing projects, drifting from her mother’s apartment to her father’s place and later to her grandmother’s house, friends’ houses, and back to her mother’s again. “It was rough,” Danielle told me.

At 16, Danielle was pregnant. At 17, she was a mother. On her 18th birthday, Daniele and her baby daughter, Nevaeh (NE-VAY-A), were forced to move into a shelter. Their struggle with homelessness had begun.

When most people think about people who are homeless, they see a single man, maybe mentally ill, maybe struggling with addiction, living on the street, sleeping in cars and parks, unable to enjoy the security, stability, and comforts of a home. That’s what I’ve seen most frequently in the many years that I’ve participated in the One Night Homeless Count.

But the fact is that these single adults who are homeless are only about half the homeless population. Most of the other half, often invisible, are families like Danielle’s.

What’s most frustrating to me is that in a state with such wealth and innovation, there are thousands of families like Danielle’s without a home. This is simply unacceptable. On any given night, about 7,000 families in Washington state sleep in shelters, in cars, on couches, or simply on the street. They become homeless for many reasons: they lose their job or get evicted; they get sick; they suffer from domestic violence or drug addiction.

Homelessness is not simply a loss of an address. It’s a loss of stability and security that has far reaching impacts for its youngest victims.

Homelessness disrupts kids’ schooling and emotional development, leading to school absences, poor test scores, and serious behavioral problems.

These were the risks Danielle and her daughter faced when they moved to Washington last year, still homeless, but in search of a better life. She got connected to Mercy Housing Northwest, a grantee of Building Changes that provides affordable housing for people who are homeless. Danielle called, shared her story, and a few months later she and her daughter were placed in a two-bedroom apartment at Mercy Housing’s Hillside Gardens in Tacoma.

Hillside Gardens is more than putting a roof over Danielle’s head. It’s giving Danielle a new start. Through a case management program funded by Building Changes, Danielle was assigned a single case worker who helped her furnish her apartment, find a part time job at a local retail store, and get enrolled in a pharmacy technician program at Clover Park College. Her case worker, Dana, also got her set up with subsidized childcare at the college and a work study job.

Danielle, who’s still just 21, is juggling an extraordinary number of burdens – two jobs, a full course load, and, most importantly, being a single-parent. But thanks to the work of Building Changes and its grantees Danielle is succeeding.

When I asked Danielle what motivated her, I already knew what she would say. Dozens of photographs decorating her apartment revealed the answer: her smiling 4-year-old daughter.

“She’s the reason I’m trying to do so well,” Danielle told me.

Unfortunately, stories of success like Danielle’s are increasingly rare in this economic climate. For every family that finds a path out of homelessness, another is losing its home.

Families are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.

Across the country we lose more affordable housing every year than we’re building. There is not a single county in the United States – out of more than 3,000 – where a working parent who earns minimum wage can afford rent. In the Seattle area, a person earning minimum wage would need to work 104 hours per week to afford a small apartment.  So as much as we’d like to have enough housing for families who are homeless, we can’t. We can’t build our way out of this problem.

What can we do?

As you often hear governments, businesses, and other non-profits say during these tough economic times, we need to learn how to do more with less.

I know how that sounds. Many times trying to do more with less, really just means you do a lot more, less well.

But tough economic times can also encourage us to be bold, think differently about our work, collaborate with new partners, and find new solutions to age-old problems. In short, these are times that spark innovation.

In Washington, we are fortunate to have Building Changes leading the way in this effort.

For more than 20 years, Building Changes has been a pioneer in exploring new, creative ways to improve the lives of our most vulnerable people and families. First by becoming a leader in building housing for people living with HIV/AIDS, and then in 2004, overseeing the Washington Families Fund, a public-private partnership to make programs like the one Danielle is benefitting from in Tacoma available to families who are homeless across the state.

Under Building Changes’ leadership over the past six years, the Washington Families Fund has evolved to do even more. Building Changes is now leading work to fundamentally change the way we deal with homeless families in the Puget Sound.

Let me explain Building Changes’ vision for assisting families who are homeless with a metaphor.

Think about how you rent a car. You can fly wherever you want in the world, go to a car rental desk at the airport, hand over your credit card, sign some papers, and you’re handed a key to a car. You hop in the car and off you go. You may not notice it but that’s an amazing, highly integrated system that’s been developed involving not only the cars but also insurance, legal issues, licenses, and credit cards. It’s all built around the goal of putting customers first, meeting their needs, and getting them on their way.

But imagine for a minute if you landed at an airport and instead of going to one car rental desk you went to a dozen or more. You first needed to make multiple stops at different desks to find the place that rented the specific kind of car you wanted, have your license and paperwork reviewed at another, stop again somewhere else to have your insurance and driving record researched, and then stop somewhere else to arrange for a credit check, before you could go yet somewhere else to arrange for payment.

Instead of being quickly sent on your way in a freshly washed rental car with a full tank of gas, you’d likely be spending hours waiting in multiple lines, growing more frustrated by the minute.

Sound absurd?

Well, that’s the experience thousands of families who are homeless have when they go in search of help.

Right now if you become homeless in Washington State, you must seek out help by making countless calls to a half dozen different agencies you think might be able to provide some type of assistance. You put your name on a waiting list and you wait. What you get offered, or what you are able to cobble together, may or may not meet your family’s needs. It’s hard to know if you’re making the best use of resources or receiving the help you need since nothing is coordinated. It’s no wonder that more than half of all families who receive assistance in Washington end up slipping back into homelessness. They don’t always get the type of help they need. They don’t get help when they need it. And they don’t get help in the amounts needed to meet their challenges.

Let me be clear: there are no villains here. Every organization trying to help families out of homelessness is filled with tireless, dedicated staff doing their best for the families they serve. The inefficiencies of our current system are an accident of history. In the 1960s, the number of single individuals who were homeless increased dramatically, and well-meaning people responded to the emergency the best they could. This happened all over again in the 1980’s, when family homelessness first spiked significantly. But the reactions of governments, providers and even our own philanthropic sector to these crises – all too often to build shelters – quickly hardened into a system that was never designed as a system.

Together with its many partners, Building Changes has encouraged government, churches, non-profits, and volunteers to rethink how they coordinate their collective resources to help families who are homeless. The goal is to create finely-tuned partnerships that put our state’s most vulnerable families on the path to stability and self sufficiency.

And I’m delighted to share some of the progress Building Changes has been making toward this goal.

Under Building Changes’ leadership, the Washington Families Fund has served more than 1,000 families with housing and intensive case management services.

The fund also launched new partnerships with the Workforce Development Councils to test “Employment Navigators” in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. These navigators work to make sure families who are homeless have access to a coordinated array of education, training, and employment services.

Over half of formerly homeless parents receiving support from the fund have become employed within 12 months. And on average their family incomes have increased 32 percent.

In Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties, Building Changes is at the forefront of efforts to create one door policies so that vulnerable families will have one place to call or one way to request help instead of negotiating a half dozen different agencies and case workers. In an effort to prevent families from becoming homeless in the first place, the counties are also developing early warning systems that can flag families who start receiving food stamps or have utilities shut off. That way they can assist vulnerable families before their problems snowball and they lose their homes.

This is the kind of bold, innovative work that’s needed to tackle the challenges of homelessness in our state. And thankfully Washington has organizations like Building Changes and its many partners to make it possible.

What do all these improvements add up to?

A new kind of safety net.

Instead of a safety net that entangles its clients in a spider web of inefficiencies, Building Changes is weaving a safety net that is more like a trampoline, catching vulnerable families before they fall into homelessness and propelling them into lives of stability and self sufficiency.

Building this new safety net will take many partners, including government, churches, volunteers, and, most importantly, vulnerable families. As Michael Mirra, the executive director of the Tacoma Housing Authority, told me recently: this new system is not just about asking families what they need, but also helping them identify the steps they need to take along the path to self sufficiency.

Let me close by telling you one more story about Danielle.

Just as my visit with Danielle was ending, I asked her what her dreams are. She wants to finish school, have a successful career, and support her daughter 100 percent, she told me. Most of all, she added, she doesn’t want Nevaeh to experience the same struggles she did as a child.

I think that’s a dream we can all believe in. It’s a dream that Danielle feels so strongly about, not only for her own family, but also for other families who are homeless, that she took time out of her busy schedule to be with us here today.

Danielle, thank you for joining us.

Building Changes is making Danielle’s dream a reality. They are realizing the dreams of thousands of other families too. But they cannot do it alone. They need your help.

Working together, we can end homelessness.

Thank you.