Rosanne Haggerty

Rosanne Haggerty’s organization, Community Solutions, is strengthening communities to end homelessness by creating homes, connecting community resources, and sharing proven solutions. Their approach trains communities to organize their resources more efficiently and use health data to match the homeless with housing, health and mental health care, and jobs.  The Community Solutions model stabilizes vulnerable people, enables them to return to health and employment, and lowers the significant public costs associated with homelessness.

Community Solutions builds on the team’s 20 years of experience developing solutions to homelessness in New York City. There, as part of Rosanne’s first social enterprise, Common Ground, they developed a range of innovative housing options, achieved an 87% reduction in street homelessness in Times Square over 3 years, and launched a model neighborhood-based homelessness prevention program in Brownsville, Brooklyn that has already helped nearly 400 families stave off eviction. In July 2011, Community Solutions became a separate social enterprise to take those and other tested innovations to scale initiatives like their 100,000 Homes Campaign, a movement of more than 100 communities working together to house 100,000 homeless Americans. So far, in partnership with Community Solutions, participating communities have found homes for over 11,300 people nationwide.

Over 2 million people experience homelessness each year in the United States, yet a large gap persists between what has been shown to end and prevent homelessness and what most communities actually do. Community Solutions meets a need that many communities have in coordinating their resources and services in an efficient, targeted, and cost-effective way. By offering a process for systematically identifying, housing, and assisting those who are in extreme states of housing need, Community Solutions is helping a growing list of communities reduce homelessness at a significantly reduced public cost.

Rosanne and her team are already working to expand their model in communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia. While the systems and resource pools associated with homelessness often differ from country to country, a general lack of coordination in local efforts is common. To deliver on their mission, Community Solutions is exploring ways to shift government spending from crisis interventions to housing support. In addition they are looking to expand their use of technology to link systems around the needs of vulnerable people and enable collaboration between organizations. Finally Rosanne and her team hope to build their organizational capacity to sponsor continued innovations in housing, health, and sustainable community supports for vulnerable people to transform the way government and the public respond to homelessness in the future.