Promoting Accountability and Outcomes
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Homeless assistance programs should be evidence-based and outcomes-driven. However, regional homelessness information systems fail to provide the kind of data needed to determine whether programs are working.
Tracking performance and increasing transparency would help states and municipalities ensure funding goes to programs that help people rebuild their lives—not trap them in a cycle of homelessness.
Program Audits and Transparency
Homelessness service providers are notoriously opaque when it comes to funding and success reporting. States can change that by conducting regular audits of government-funded programs to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely. Comparing the success rates of different organizations and strategies would ensure that funding only goes to approaches that measurably reduce homelessness. Taxpayers could rest assured that their money is truly helping their most vulnerable neighbors build a better life.
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Performance-Based Funding
In the public sector, non-governmental agencies and nonprofits often receive a set amount of state funding without regard to their success or failure.
In the private sector, success and innovation are rewarded with prosperity, while failure and inefficiency are met with losses. Shareholders hold companies accountable for their decisions and incentivize positive outcomes.
Performance-based funding allocates bonus funds to organizations that prove to the state that they are succeeding in certain metrics, such as successfully helping someone in the throes of addiction to achieve and maintain long-term sobriety or providing job training that leads to stable employment.
Integrating performance-based funding will root out ineffective service providers and give charities with the best programs an opportunity to grow. In short, this will change lives.
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Data Transparency
Elected leaders need a clear picture of the true scope of homelessness in their state. Developing robust, comprehensive, anonymized data reporting would offer that insight. And making that data freely available to the public would help innovative homeless services providers develop programs that better assist those in crisis.