Who Is Leading the Way and What Works

Across the first seven modules, we have learned to see poverty differently. We examined our perspective and stereotypes, discovered that poverty involves far more than money, and considered the roles of government support, communication, affordable housing, and the local community.

Module 7 brought those lessons together. Churches, parachurch ministries, government agencies, and nonprofits may serve the same people, but good intentions are not enough when they operate independently. Reducing poverty requires shared responsibility, clear communication, coordinated systems, and a common objective.

That leads us to the next question: Where is this working? In Module 8, we will examine places and organizations already making measurable progress. But we must be clear about what each example represents. Houston, The Way Home, shows us a coordinated regional system. Built for Zero helps communities coordinate and measure their efforts to reduce homelessness, while Purpose Built Communities provides a comprehensive framework to transforming neighborhoods affected by concentrated poverty. Housing First is a method for moving people from homelessness into stable housing and is often used in other models. The Los Angeles Dream Center is a faith-based organization demonstrating sustained outreach, residential recovery, practical support, and discipleship. Dream.Org works at a different level, building unlikely coalitions to advance criminal-justice reform, successful reentry, and access to economic opportunity.

Let’s begin a deeper dive with Houston and The Way Home.

In 2011, the Houston region counted roughly 8,500 people experiencing homelessness on a single night, giving it one of the nation’s largest homeless populations. The city, counties, housing authorities, and nonprofit organizations were already doing considerable work.

But, as we discussed in Module 7, they often operated in parallel rather than as one coordinated system.

Managing homelessness through repeated crisis responses was also extremely expensive. Houston officials reported that people experiencing chronic homelessness were generating approximately $100 million annually in emergency-room costs alone. That figure did not include the additional costs scattered across ambulances, police, jails, shelters, courts, outreach, and street-cleaning services.

A later analysis illustrates how high those combined costs could become. It estimated that an adult experiencing homelessness who used every applicable county service could generate as much as $126,132 in annual county costs across community services, criminal justice, healthcare, and mental-health systems. That was a maximum-use scenario—not an average and not part of Houston’s original 2011 calculation—but it demonstrates how costs can accumulate when multiple systems repeatedly respond to the same person.

Houston adopted the Housing First approach, moving people into permanent housing and then providing services intended to help them remain stable. Houston officials later estimated that housing and supportive services cost roughly $18,000 per person annually. Public sources do not provide the exact line-by-line calculation behind that estimate, but it reflects expenses such as rental assistance, housing navigation, case management, and continuing support. It is also consistent with national cost research. Officials estimated that leaving someone on the streets could cost public systems three to four times as much as providing housing and support. That did not guarantee a specific amount of savings, but it suggested that permanent housing could be a more productive use of public resources than repeatedly relying on hospitals, ambulances, police, jails, and other crisis systems.

In 2012, HUD identified Houston as one of ten priority communities facing significant homelessness challenges; Houston also had what was reported as the nation’s sixth-largest homeless population. At approximately the same time, 25 local organizations launched an initiative to house 100 veterans in 100 days. They reached the goal, demonstrating that organizations could accomplish more when they worked through a coordinated process.

These developments did not independently cause Mayor Annise Parker to act; her leadership was itself essential. But the combination of high public costs, federal attention and assistance, political leadership, and the early veterans’ success created strong momentum for change.

The catalyst was not simply, “We have too many people experiencing homelessness.” It was closer to this:

We are spending enormous amounts managing homelessness. Our organizations are working hard but not producing sufficient progress. Federal officials are challenging us to change—and an early coordinated effort has shown that a better approach is possible.

That combination of financial pressure, public accountability, political leadership, federal opportunity, and early success moved Houston from managing homelessness to reorganizing the system designed to address it.

So, under the mayor’s leadership, here is what they did.

Houston brought more than 100 local partners together under The Way Home, the name given to its regional homelessness-response system. Rather than allowing each organization to maintain its own separate pathway, the region agreed to function as one coordinated network.

A central part of that change was Coordinated Access for all participating providers— using ClientTrack, Houston’s HMIS software, to share authorized information, coordinate referrals, track housing placements, and reduce duplicated efforts. This allowed a shared process for assessing needs, prioritizing people, and connecting them with appropriate housing.

Simultaneously, Houston aadopted the Housing First approach, moving people into permanent housing without requiring them to resolve every condition contributing to their homelessness before receiving a home. Funding and performance expectations were aligned so participating organizations worked toward compatible standards and common outcomes.

The region developed partnerships with landlords and paired housing with supportive services to help people remain stably housed. When encampments were closed, teams sought to arrange housing before people were moved rather than simply displacing them.

Together, these changes transformed many disconnected efforts into one coordinated regional system focused on lasting housing outcomes.

Consider this illustrative example, which parallels the example we used in Module 7—but with a coordinated response rather than a haphazard one:

A man experiencing homelessness visits a participating shelter. A staff member completes Houston’s standard Coordinated Access assessment and enters the information into ClientTrack. The system shows that an outreach team has already met him, helped him replace his identification, and documented that he is a veteran living with PTSD. Instead of starting over—or sending him to several unrelated agencies—the shelter updates his existing record.

When a suitable housing opening becomes available through another participating organization, Coordinated Access matches and refers him according to the community’s prioritization process. The receiving organization reviews the authorized information, contacts him through the outreach worker, and records whether the referral was accepted. Once he is housed, the placement and continuing support are documented in ClientTrack.

This accomplishes several things:

• The man tells his story once rather than repeatedly.
• Providers see which assessments, documents, referrals, and services are already underway.
• Agency duplication is eliminated.
• A housing opportunity is assigned proactively through the shared criteria rather than reactively to whomever shows up on any given day (a hit or miss approach).
• The referring provider can follow the referral to completed, creating a feedback loop.
• The regional system can measure whether he remained housed and where service gaps occurred.

Coordinated Access determines the pathway; The ClientTrack system records and communicates the information along a pathway of authorized participating providers abiding by privacy protections built into the system. It should be noted that while Houston selected ClientTrack, there are alternatives. Another community might select WellSky Community Services, Bitfocus Clarity, CaseWorthy, or another HUD-compliant platform. What is needed is a system that allows all of the different organization to share data.

Perhaps you are wondering about the cost of this system. Houston’s response did not have one single price tag because The Way Home coordinates many programs and funding sources across a three-county region. Before the system was reorganized, however, the network received approximately $23.9 million in HUD homelessness funding in 2011; today, the larger regional system coordinates roughly $70 million annually in public funding. Most of that support comes from federal sources—including HUD grants, rental-assistance vouchers, and veterans’ programs—supplemented at different times by city and county resources, federal recovery funds, philanthropy, and private partners. Local providers submit project budgets through The Way Home; the Coalition reviews and ranks them, and HUD awards funding according to eligible renewal amounts, federal formulas, national priorities, competition scores, and available bonus funding.

It should be noted for smaller communities, Houston’s funding grew with its regional size and housing capacity.

Houston’s change was primarily about redirecting resources from repeatedly managing crises toward permanent housing and coordinated support, not simply reducing the homelessness budget. The transferable lesson is to coordinate the federal funding already available, measure local crisis-system costs, and invest according to the number of people and housing units needed locally.

Houston demonstrates what can happen when a large region stops operating through disconnected programs and begins functioning as one coordinated homelessness-response system. Government agencies, housing authorities, nonprofits, outreach teams, funders, and landlords now align their work around shared data, coordinated access, housing placement, and collective accountability. The result is one of the nation’s clearest examples of a substantial and sustained reduction in homelessness.

And, for the city, spending is more effective. Housing and coordinated support reduce costly, repeated crisis responses across multiple public systems, allowing resources to be redirected toward longer-term stability.

Houston’s The Way Home demonstrates how a region can reduce homelessness when a region coordinates its providers, data, funding, and utilizing the Housing First approach, which helps people who are already experiencing homelessness move into permanent housing without first requiring them to obtain employment, achieve sobriety, or complete treatment. It should be noted that Housing First is one of the most extensively studied approaches to homelessness with research showing that providing permanent housing without first requiring the aforementioned sobriety, employment, or treatment substantially improves housing stability for those same people—although housing alone does not resolve the challenges faced by a person once homeless.

But a community cannot rely solely on helping people leave homelessness while more families and individuals continue entering it. Lasting progress requires both an effective response and a way to reduce that inflow.

That brings us to our next topic: Preventing Homelessness Before It Starts. We will begin with the Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System in California, one of the strongest documented examples of proactive homelessness prevention available to us. Rather than waiting for a household to enter a shelter or begin living outside, the system identifies people facing an imminent housing crisis and provides targeted financial assistance and support intended to help them remain housed. But before we examine how the system works, some background is important.

In 2007, Santa Clara County counted approximately 7,200 people experiencing homelessness on a single night, including more than 4,300 in San José, a.k.a. silicon valley. Later research found that more than 104,000 different county residents experienced homelessness at some point between 2007 and 2012, generating an average of approximately $520 million in annual public and nonprofit service costs. This accumulation of local evidence showing that Santa Clara had many organizations, substantial spending, and multiple plans—but insufficient accountability, inadequate housing, fragmented prevention, and more people entering homelessness than the system could house, acted as the catalyst for change.

At the time, Santa Clara County had an Office of Affordable Housing and an established Continuum of Care collaborative. The housing office primarily administered affordable-housing programs and supported the development and preservation of housing. The Continuum of Care served as a regional planning, funding, and coordination structure rather than as a single agency.

It brought county departments, independent cities, nonprofits, hospitals, businesses, landlords, funders, and other stakeholders together, but it did not have authority to direct those independent organizations. Its responsibilities also included coordinating HUD funding applications, homelessness planning, data collection, and the community’s system of housing and services. Leaders recognized that many local organizations were addressing separate parts of homelessness, but no independent regional body was aligning their strategies and resources. A Blue Ribbon Commission chaired by San José Mayor Chuck Reed and Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage therefore recommended a regional public-private coordinating structure. That recommendation led to the establishment of Destination: Home in 2008.

Destination: Home was created to serve as a coordinating “backbone,” bringing together government, nonprofits, housing providers, businesses, philanthropy, and other community partners around one regional strategy. It was not intended to replace government or become another direct-service provider. Government retained its public responsibilities through the Continuum of Care and Affordable Housing while Destination: Home worked across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries that no single government department controlled.

Santa Clara County then established a countywide Coordinated Assessment and Entry process in approximately 2012–2013 for people already experiencing homelessness. The county brought in the Clarity Human Services as its shared HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) platform, serving a function similar to ClientTrack in Houston. The County, through its Continuum of Care responsibilities, became the lead for HMIS, Coordinated Entry, federal reporting, privacy, and compliance.

But even with shared homelessness infrastructure, prevention remained fragmented. Agencies did not necessarily use the same screening questions, eligibility standards, assistance rules, workflows, or follow-up procedures. Some also maintained their own databases in addition to HMIS, creating duplicate data entry and data-quality challenges.

Local leaders also reported that roughly three people were entering homelessness for every one person being housed. And the 2015 Home Not Found study estimated that public and nonprofit agencies had spent an average of approximately $520 million annually responding to homelessness between 2007 and 2012. The conclusion was that Santa Clara could not reduce homelessness through housing and crisis response alone; it also had to reduce the number of households entering homelessness.

As a result, in July 2017, Destination: Home helped launch the Homelessness Prevention System, or HPS, in partnership with Santa Clara County, the City of San José, private funders, local nonprofits, and a long-established community organization called Sacred Heart Community Service.

Sacred Heart had decades of experience helping local households through financial emergencies and had served as Santa Clara County’s designated Community Action Agency since 2008. Because of that experience, it was selected to help turn the prevention strategy into a functioning service network. Sacred Heart became the system’s day-to-day coordinator—training partner agencies, maintaining common procedures, supporting data collection, administering assistance, and helping participating organizations work through one consistent process. Destination: Home helped develop the strategy, organize the partners, and raise flexible funding.

Over time, the initial pilot expanded into the countywide Homelessness Prevention System operating today. In 2024, Santa Clara County assumed formal oversight of the system, with Sacred Heart continuing as the network coordinator and Destination: Home remaining an important strategic and funding partner. Here is how the system works:

The process begins when a household contacts the central prevention network or one of its qualified community partners. A family might be referred by a social-service organization, housing provider, court, health clinic, community group, or another agency.

Staff determine whether the household met the basic conditions for prevention assistance, such as, whether the applicant lived in Santa Clara County, met low-income guidelines, remained housed at the time of application, and faced an imminent loss of housing. The household then completed a standardized risk assessment designed to distinguish a temporary financial difficulty from a crisis likely to result in homelessness.

That distinction was essential because the system did not have enough money to pay every overdue bill in the county. It attempted to direct assistance toward households with a high probability of becoming homeless without intervention. Case managers examine the immediate threat, the household’s income and resources, prior housing instability, available family or community support, and the specific expense standing between the household and continued housing.

Once a household qualified, the goal was to identify the smallest effective intervention that could resolve the crisis. Sometimes that meant paying past-due rent or utilities. In other cases, it meant covering a security deposit, negotiating with a landlord, providing legal assistance, helping the household access benefits, arranging transportation needed to preserve employment, or helping the family relocate to another safe and sustainable home. The assistance was targeted and temporary rather than an open-ended subsidy.

A case manager coordinated the response and helped connect the household with other resources that might improve longer-term stability. Participating agencies followed common operating procedures and documented the relevant assessment, assistance, and outcomes in the county’s shared data environment, Clarity Human Services.

As for the cost, the annual budget grew from approximately $1.6 million in the pilot year to about $29.7 million by the end of 2024, with capacity reported at approximately 1,700 households. The funding mix also changed. The pilot was financed primarily by private sources; by 2024, approximately 82 percent of the budget came from public sources and 18 percent from private sources. Current program materials reported average financial assistance of approximately $7,000 per household, reflecting a larger system, changing housing costs, and a broader mix of needs than the early evaluation cohort.

Public funding came through Santa Clara County, the City of San José, and federal, state, and local revenue streams. Private and philanthropic funding raised through Destination: Home remained important because it could respond to needs that restricted public grants might not cover. The partner agencies were not simply paid bonuses to cooperate. They received service contracts and capacity support to employ staff, conduct assessments, provide case management, issue rapid assistance, enter data, and follow common procedures.

In July 2024, Santa Clara County formally assumed management of the expanded prevention system. That transition did not mean Destination: Home or Sacred Heart had failed. It reflected the model’s movement from an externally incubated pilot toward a more permanent component of the county’s safety net. County oversight allowed prevention to be integrated more closely with public housing, benefits, healthcare, and other government services. Sacred Heart continued as the network coordinator, while Destination: Home remained a strategic and funding partner.

The sequence is therefore important. Destination: Home and its partners developed and tested the model. Sacred Heart helped operate it. Community agencies delivered the assistance. Evidence showed that targeted intervention could prevent homelessness. Public funding then allowed the network to grow, and county government assumed formal oversight so the work could become more sustainable and more closely connected to the broader safety net.

Santa Clara’s research demonstrated that targeted, temporary financial assistance can prevent some households from entering homelessness, and researchers estimated that the benefits exceeded the costs. But Santa Clara County has not eliminated homelessness, and prevention alone cannot overcome an affordable-housing shortage, inadequate income, or every family crisis.

Transition to Rockford, Illinois

Houston showed us how a large region can reorganize its response after homelessness occurs, while Santa Clara demonstrated how targeted assistance can prevent some households from becoming homeless in the first place. Now we turn to Rockford, Illinois—a smaller community that used the Built for Zero framework to answer a different question: Can a community measurably end homelessness for a clearly defined population?

Rockford is a northern Illinois city of approximately 147,000 people, with roughly 337,000 people in the broader metropolitan area. It sits on the Rock River, about 90 miles northwest of Chicago and only about 17 miles south of the Wisconsin border. Despite its smaller size, Rockford faced the same persistent challenge confronting many larger cities: homelessness.

Rockford had been struggling with the effects of deindustrialization, unemployment, violent crime, opioid addiction, and homelessness. Then, in 2014, several men experiencing homelessness died in fires. Those deaths exposed serious gaps in the city’s ability to identify people, conduct outreach, and connect them with appropriate help. The homelessness-response system was also fragmented. Rockford’s frontline housing advocate, Angie Walker, frustrated that their annual Point-in-Time count was not useful for moving people into permanent housing, began researching more effective approaches. That is when she learned about Zero: 2016—a national initiative later renamed Built for Zero. Believing its coaching and data-driven methods could help Rockford, Walker brought the idea to Community Services Director Jennifer Jaeger and recommended the city join.

Jaeger was highly data-oriented and frustrated that information was being entered into databases without being used to move people toward housing. She believed the Rock River Homeless Coalition lacked a clear, measurable goal which she needed in order to better focus her efforts. This appeared to be her answer. Walker and Jaeger presented the opportunity to Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey who was already frustrated by years of fragmented efforts and had a personal connection to the issue: his father was a veteran who, because of alcoholism, had once been at risk of homelessness. At approximately the same time, the Obama administration launched a national initiative called the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness. It invited local mayors to commit their communities to ending veteran homelessness, with support from federal agencies such as HUD and the Department of Veterans Affairs. That challenge gave Rockford just what it needed: a clearly defined population, a measurable goal, federal support, and public accountability. Morrissey accepted the challenge and committed Rockford to ending veteran homelessness.

With the mayor’s public commitment came the political backing needed to bring local agencies to the table. The city also had some financial leverage with the agencies because it administered federal homelessness funds and housing vouchers, while the Obama administration helped make existing HUD and Veterans Affairs resources available. But it should be clear, Rockford’s buy-in came primarily from political leadership, a shared measurable goal, public accountability, and relationships—not from financial incentives alone.

It is also important to understand that Rockford already had an HMIS. But, as in our other case studies, having an HMIS did not mean that every agency used the same system—or that the available information was complete, current, and useful. Rather than delay cooperation until everyone agreed on one software platform, Rockford combined HMIS records, information from participating agencies, and outreach findings into a shared by-name list. The partners united around a clear goal and began meeting weekly to review each veteran’s situation, address barriers, assign responsibility, and move that person toward permanent housing.

The city held the backbone agency role because it was already the CoC (lead agency for the local The Rock River Coalition), it was the cities fiscal agent, it administered federal homelessness resources, supported coordinated entry, employed the key outreach/data staff, and could convene city departments.

Still, unanimous buy-in from members of the coalition was not automatic. As a result, Rockford built participation through a shared goal, which was to end veteran homelessness and subsequently end chronic homelessness; a public mayoral pledge that signaled the effort was a priority; direct invitations from the mayor to shelters, clinics, programs, and other partners; weekly case conferencing using a common by-name list and monthly public data reporting and accountability through RockStat.

Rockford did not invent an entirely new homelessness-response system, nor was its change driven primarily by a Houston-style calculation of public costs. Its catalyst was a combination of human tragedy, operational frustration, political leadership, and federal opportunity. What distinguished Rockford was its decision to begin with a clearly defined population—veterans—and a measurable goal: functional zero. That focus helped unite agencies around one shared outcome before the community expanded its efforts to chronic homelessness.

Rockford’s functional-zero work did not have a single published program price tag. The work combined existing federal grants and vouchers, city-administered coordination, nonprofit and agency resources, private landlords, and Built for Zero coaching.

Rockford’s Human Services staff responsible for outreach and coordination were supported almost entirely by federal block grants. The department absorbed most Coordinated Entry development costs, first with Community Services Block Grant funding and later with HMIS and Emergency Solutions Grant funding. Rockford, as Continuum of Care fiscal agent, could direct federal funds and housing vouchers to eligible providers and landlords under federal requirements. Nonprofit partners retained their own personnel, facilities, funding, and rules, so the effort was not literally 100 percent federally financed.

The Harvard case reports that the broader Human Services Department had a roughly $20 million budget in 2020, nearly 90 percent from federal programs. This was not a dedicated Built for Zero or homelessness budget and should not be presented as the cost of reaching functional zero. The same case notes a $1.6 million federal HUD allocation associated with the 2018 Point-in-Time count, after Rockford had reached its initial functional-zero milestones; this likewise was not the initiative’s total cost.

Housing First was incorporated explicitly. Built for Zero participation required agreement to Housing First principles, and Rockford’s federally administered housing assistance operated under rules that included Housing First. The approach prioritized permanent housing before sobriety, treatment, employment, or other services. Some faith-based providers did not fully accept Housing First for their own privately controlled funds, but they could still participate in the broader coordinated workflow.

Wrap-Up

Rockford concludes our detailed case studies. Before we close, let us look briefly at the remaining examples—but this time at a practical level. These are not interchangeable programs that a mayor can simply select. We need to know what each one actually delivers, who would lead it locally, and how it would be paid for.

Los Angeles Dream Center

The Los Angeles Dream Center is not a HUD model or a municipal system. It is a large faith-based nonprofit operating concrete programs from a physical campus. Programs such as food and clothing distribution, neighborhood outreach, transitional housing, residential addiction recovery and discipleship, foster-care intervention, support for veterans and former foster youth, GED tutoring, job preparation, mentoring, and help accessing benefits and employment. All or some of these programs make up the model known as the Los Angeles Dream Center.

To establish a Dream Center-style model, a community would need a capable local church or nonprofit to take the lead. That organization would develop, fund, staff, and operate services adapted to local needs—either through a formal Dream Center affiliation or independently under its own identity. It would remain accountable to its own board, funders, regulators, and community partners; it would not automatically become an agency or franchise of the Los Angeles Dream Center. The Los Angeles organization would not simply arrive and take over.

The Dream Center reports that its model has inspired 84 centers in 29 states and eight countries, with centers locally adapted and potentially separately operated.

Funding comes primarily from contributions, foundations, businesses, in-kind donations, fundraising, and volunteer labor. Recent foundation filings classified approximately 98 percent of revenue as contributions. Choosing the model does not automatically increase HUD funding.

The reason to consider it is straightforward: it offers a model for a capable community or faith-based organization to remain involved with people whose recovery and stabilization require more than brief emergency assistance. Its service numbers show large reach, but they do not prove citywide poverty reduction.

Our next topic is Dream.Org, a national nonprofit based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2014 as Dream Corps, it brought several reform initiatives under one organization so they could grow and increase their impact. Rather than operating shelters or providing emergency assistance directly, Dream.Org works primarily at the systems level. It helps local leaders and community organizations build coalitions, develop leaders with lived experience, pursue criminal-justice and reentry reforms, prepare climate and infrastructure projects, strengthen funding applications, connect entrepreneurs with financing, and expand pathways into technology.

A city or county would work with Dream.Org when poverty is being reinforced by policy barriers, weak project design, or a lack of community trust—problems that direct services alone cannot solve and they have no other outlet for assistance.

But Dream.Org does not provide direct assistance to people in crisis. It works upstream—helping leaders, coalitions, and affected communities change policies, remove barriers, and expand opportunity.

As we close Module 8, these examples remind us that no single organization, program, or method can solve poverty or homelessness by itself. Each addresses a different part of the problem.

Houston showed what can happen when a large region stops operating through disconnected programs and begins functioning as one coordinated homelessness-response system. Santa Clara County moved the work upstream, demonstrating that targeted, temporary assistance can prevent some housing crises from becoming homelessness. Rockford showed the value of beginning with a clearly defined population, maintaining a current by-name list, assigning responsibility, reporting progress publicly, and working toward functional zero.

The Los Angeles Dream Center demonstrated another role: a faith-based, direct-service organization combining immediate assistance with housing, recovery, education, outreach, and long-term relationships. Its work depends on a capable local operator, substantial private support, volunteers, and sustained community commitment.

Dream.Org works at a different level. Rather than primarily providing food, shelter, or case management, it helps affected leaders and coalitions change policies, remove barriers, and expand access to justice, technology, green careers, and economic opportunity.

These examples are not interchangeable. Houston and Rockford demonstrate communitywide coordination after homelessness occurs. Santa Clara demonstrates targeted prevention. The Dream Center demonstrates intensive, relationship-based service. Dream.Org demonstrates the availability of consultants to focus on policy reform and systems-level change.

Yet they share several lessons. Progress requires a clearly defined problem, trustworthy information, committed leadership, cooperation across organizational boundaries, adequate resources, and accountability for results. It also requires honesty about what each organization can—and cannot—accomplish.

The question is not, “Which model should every community copy?” The better questions are: What problem are we trying to solve? What resources already exist? Who is responsible for coordinating them? Where are people still falling through the gaps? And which principles from these examples could strengthen our own response?

That brings us home. In Module 9, we turn to Volusia County. We will examine the resources already serving our community, how well those efforts work together, the strengths we can build upon, and the gaps that still require attention. Our purpose is not to import another city’s model unchanged. It is to understand what we have—and determine what our community may need to do next.

I hope you will join us for Module 9 as we move from examining what has worked elsewhere to understanding and strengthening the response here at home.