‘The work is so much bigger than it ever was.’ Our conversation with Bridget Alexander.
Posted July 15, 2022, by Mindi Wisman
Today we feature our latest conversation for the Foresight Initiative, an interview with Bridget Alexander, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Waking the Village, which provides housing and support to Sacramento’s homeless community, parenting youth, and their children. In these conversations we are learning how experts in the field of child and youth services faced pandemic challenges, innovated and adapted their services in response, what they learned from the experience, and what changed and will stay changed.
It Takes A Village
Bridget: Waking the Village was founded in 1999. That quote “It takes a village” was very popular, and we felt like we needed to wake up our village; that our children needed more opportunities to grow into leaders and be heard.
We run about 10 different programs including transitional communities serving parenting youth between 18 and 24. A lot of the youth programs in Sacramento won't serve parents, so last year when we opened a shelter where a young person with kids could be housed, it filled a huge gap. We've also launched three licensed preschools that serve the children of our clients.
The Creation District is our big drop-in center in downtown Sacramento. It has music recording studios, art spaces, classrooms, we have our employment program there, and our Prevention and Intervention program is there, which was launched in 2018, right before the pandemic. It was well-positioned to deal with some of the harder aspects of the pandemic. We work with four external partners as a team and we make sure that we’re there and stay there for youth.
Pandemic Challenges
Bridget: Our city, county, medical system, behavior health system; they were all different doorways and used different methods and it was challenging to stay up to date. Sacramento rentals have been at a 2% vacancy rate and have skyrocketing rents. We’re interested in transforming communities and making sure people can be healthily independent within their communities. But the housing prices in Sacramento have forced us to embrace and train people to be more system dependent.
We identify strengths and move people into careers as quickly as possible, so they don’t need to rely on systems.
The answer to a lot of problems has been for the government to funnel huge sums of money to nonprofits and we've had no time to ramp-up capacity; we've had no time to develop staff and plan. I think a lot of nonprofits are grappling with this right now. We’ve gotten Federal, State, and county funds, but we don’t get directives on what we can use the funding for. We have this pile of money that will probably be gone in a year, so we don't want to start anything new that we'll just have to ramp down when the funding ends.
In California we've had a ton of funding go to the medical system and behavioral health systems for homeless case managers. They’re offering bigger salaries than we can; I just lost one of our best staff to them this week. It’s brutal to not be able to compete against those agencies, and it’s giving us even greener staff which has a been a huge challenge and definitely pandemic related. I think the work is so much bigger than it ever was and the only folks that really get it are us, so we feel a huge responsibility to be very involved.
Unanticipated Pandemic Benefits
Bridget: The funding is worth it though, because we're keeping a lot of our youth housed. Whenever there's a funding source that bubbles up, we talk with our external partners and decide who's the best fit; we don't compete against one another anymore. We write a lot of grants together. The money has been amazing and it’s proved the worth of our Prevention and Intervention model, because it's been celebrated as a unique model of care and we're proud of that.
We started a Youth Homelessness Task Force in 2013 and we have developed a lot of strong friendships and connections. Anybody can be on the task force. We went to the city and county and said, we want an agreement that whenever there's youth money available that you come to our Youth Homelessness Task Force so the funding recommendation can come out of that Task Force. The city and county have honored that agreement and it's worked very well.
We now have a pipeline of housing options for youth. We're showing what it looks like when we have an integrated pipeline with clear entry points, and that use transition from logical housing choices to the next based on best fit with aftercare at the end to sustain the housing. Youth need interventions to succeed.
Adaptations and Innovations
Bridget: Our entire staff is vaccinated and boosted. We wear our masks. We’re proud that we haven't had spread in our communities. We've always had a community model with house meetings and co-created policies; that was already a strength and it's become more so. We talk daily about safe spaces and what safe space agreements are, so that was a big help. We slowly got buy-in, and we never fell into the mistake of criticizing people for having different opinions. We also became a state testing site. Everybody tests twice a week and we're able to give gift cards out for being tested, to incentivize it.
I think our model of leadership also helped a lot. We don't have a linear structure; our organizational chart just goes sideways. That helped, because we needed a lot of people to be able to lead and feel comfortable leading.
It is so much cheaper to stop homelessness before it starts. Prevention works.
There were all these youth that would have been evicted and homeless, but because of pandemic funding, they didn’t become homeless. Once the pandemic money is gone, that's a big question. But now there are medical dollars in play and contracts with service providers, which will allow us to expand the work.
Our Task Force case conferencing approach has had a huge impact. We get in a room with people from behavioral health, youth outreach organizations, schools, juvenile justice. We have a list of about 800 youth and have tried to find every single one to see who's experiencing homelessness. We update that list a lot so that when we get a bed opening, we can quickly fill it because we know exactly where the youth is or how to find them. We fill our beds quicker, which means we meet our performance metrics, and get refunded.
Case conferencing brings everybody together in the room. These systems did not understand each other. They complained about one another. Now they know each other. It’s no longer nameless systems competing, it's Rebecca, it's Tara, it's Laticia. The pandemic moved our case conferencing into Zoom, which improved attendance, I don't know if we'll ever go back to meeting in person. I know I can get on the phone with someone at the Housing and Redevelopment Agency, and they’ll take my phone call, which is amazing. I can say, ‘we have this application, what's going on with the voucher?’, and they'll move the case to the top of the pile. It makes a huge difference.
Impacts and Improvements
Bridget: We've been an agency that never had trouble holding onto staff. But as we grew, and as the pandemic hit, we started having turnover for the first time. So that made us formalize our lateral leadership model, but also made us look at supporting our new staff and getting them up to speed on systems.
We dramatically increased our wages; I think funders are tolerating higher asks for salaries and wages, and realize they're going to have to increase them, because we can't hold onto workers otherwise.
We got truly tested, but we've remained trusted by youth. We didn't pivot to only Zoom. We converted spaces at our sites to open air spaces, we met in parks, we quickly pivoted and I think wouldn't have been able to do that without the level of trust and community.
We got funding during the pandemic for something called the Teacher Brigade. We pay youth to train as preschool aids, which the preschools desperately need. We now have eight more preschool teachers and we probably wouldn't have even thought of it, except we were having a staffing crisis in our preschools.
We pay peer advisors working in the Creation District and they write songs and help other youth write songs about wellness and depression and trauma and addiction; all those things that are hard to do in the therapy office for most youth, but are not hard to rap about. We normalize the wellness conversation. A lot of those kinds of innovations came through the pandemic, and it was out of desperation, and it clicked. And it works and is going to stay.