Rosanne Haggerty
Rosanne Haggerty is leading the fight to end homelessness.
Josh Wool
Rosanne Haggerty
President and CEO of Community Solutions, she’s behind the ambitious Zero: 2016 campaign that’s partnering with 75 communities across the nation to end veteran and chronic homelessness.
The game-changing initiative follows the organization’s successful 100,000 Homes campaign, which recently housed 105,000 chronically homeless Americans in less than four years.
Community Solutions’ work is rooted in the belief that communities can house far more people with existing housing resources than they may realize by adopting best practices and using data to better organize local systems.
For the participating communities, keys to success include getting to know homeless veterans and chronically homeless individuals by name and their needs. “You can’t solve these problems in the abstract,” says Haggerty. “It has to be that level of specificity.”
A second key has been for communities to build a sustainable housing system by looking at how all their resources connect to provide housing instead of having a random collection of activities.
Earlier in her career, Haggerty founded and led Common Ground (now Breaking Ground), a pioneering nonprofit that’s restored old hotels and other residences for homeless and low-income residents in New York City. Her innovative approaches to housing the neediest earned her a MacArthur Genius award in 2001.
To have greater impact on the national level, Haggerty launched nonprofit Community Solutions in 2011.
“The key to our evolution has been to redefine the nature of the problem we’re working on,” says Haggerty. “Homelessness is not just a housing problem, a mental health problem, or an income problem. We’re looking at it as a complex [systems] problem that has all of these moving parts.”
In 2012, she was awarded the Jane Jacobs medal for New Ideas and Activism from the Rockefeller Foundation.
