Community Solutions

Location: Nationwide

Website: www.cmtysolutions.org

Community Solutions (CS), led by President Rosanne Haggerty, is a newly established, national not-for-profit organization whose mission is to strengthen communities to end homelessness.

Based in New York city, CS partners with community leaders, public agencies, non-profits, property developers and health and human services organizations to create practical, scalable, cost effective solutions to homelessness.

Our approach has been featured on “60 Minutes,” in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other media, and recognized with the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation, the World Habitat Award, and the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, among other honors.

As the national spinoff of Common Ground, a pioneer and leader in the field, our perspective is based on twenty years of experience ending street homelessness, developing and operating permanent supportive housing, and bringing a range of community stakeholders together to create and share cost-effective solutions to support our most vulnerable neighbors.

We’ve proven, time and again, that investing in effective housing strategies costs taxpayers far less than maintaining the status quo, where isolated, often sick people shuttle between the streets and shelters, hospitals and jails.

What others might see as the toughest problems, we see as the highest-leverage opportunities. We focus our efforts where homelessness is most complex, developing effective solutions with the widest possible impact on health and housing outcomes, practices and policies.

Our goal is to accelerate change by bringing proven, replicable innovations that end homelessness to a national scale, working with what we call “tipping point” communities, as well as to advance new models of homelessness prevention and community development.

CS’s cornerstone initiatives include:
The 100,000 Homes Campaign, an unprecedented effort to support and coordinate a multitude of national organizations and local communities to collectively house 100,000 homeless individuals and families by July of 2014;

The first supportive housing projects in post-Katrina New Orleans, where homelessness rose by 70 percent in the wake of the storm; and
Community partnerships with neighborhoods struggling with high rates of homelessness, including Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Northeast Hartford, CT.
Rosanne Haggerty, who leads a multi-disciplinary team of 30 professionals, is an internationally recognized leader in the arena of resolving homelessness.

She founded Common Ground in 1990, and presided over its growth into the largest developer of permanent supportive housing in the country for more than 20 years. Haggerty is a 2007 Ashoka Senior Fellow, a Hunt Alternatives Fund Prime Mover, and a 2001 recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Genius Fellowship.