Public Service Design Brings Fresh Eyes to Old Problems

very year, when temperatures fall, the urgency rises for Erica Strang and her team of street homeless outreach workers. Around 4,000 people sleep each night on New York City’s streets, subway platforms and entrances, or other public spaces. The cold months bring the threat of hypothermia, frostbite, and other cold-weather maladies.

As street outreach director at the Center for Urban Community Services, Strang’s team is part of a citywide network of outreach workers tasked with knowing where those 4,000 sleep every night, checking in with them as often as possible, getting them emergency medical care when needed, and eventually getting them into stable and hopefully permanent, supportive housing. Strang started out in 2006 as an outreach worker herself, and now oversees a borough-wide team of outreach workers in Manhattan.

This winter is different. For the first time, the citywide street homeless outreach network went into the tough winter months with a single, unified, custom-built case management system. It’s called StreetSmart, and it was put in place this past July.

“Being able to have a system that is catered to our needs is really great, and so is being able to have a say in how it works,” Strang says. “If we think there needs to be an improvement or to do something differently, [NYC’s Department of Homeless Services] is able to incorporate that into the system. ”

The process that led to that customized case management system also resulted in a series of changes in the way the city’s street homeless outreach network works.

That process is known as public service design. A growing number of cities — like New York, but also Philadelphia, Louisville, Denver, and others — as well as federal agencies are making use of the tools, methodology, and trained professionals that are part of the emerging field of public service design. It’s helping agencies and governments become more efficient, reforming or replacing old ineffective programs with evidence-based, user-tested solutions. It’s helping agencies become more responsive to changes on the ground as they arise. It’s opening up new conversations about how government works, bringing fresh eyes to old problems, and even fostering new relationships that are starting to result in key policy changes.

Mapping the way home

When Ariel Kennan first came to work at the Center for Economic Opportunity, part of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations, she found herself feeling a little lonely. There were only a few other graphic and user-experience designers scattered across NYC’s 300,000 city employees. She didn’t have her trusted digital sidekick—the design software she had grown accustomed to using as a student at Parsons School of Design.

“We didn’t even have [Adobe’s] Creative Suite when I started. None of the tools were here in order to work this way,” says Kennan, now director of design and product at the center.

Things started ramping up, and fast, in December 2015.

A couple years into Mayor de Blasio’s administration, the city’s homeless numbers were at record highs. While the vast majority of the city’s 62,000-plus homeless individuals are in city-funded homeless shelters, the 4,000 or so street homeless persisted even as the city ramped up funding for shelters to over a billion dollars.

What was going wrong? Why were so many individuals remaining outside? Nobody really knew. A lot of folks had a lot of opinions, but no one had mapped out the entire process of identifying a street homeless individual all the way to getting them into permanent housing.

That December, the mayor announced the Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement Street Action Teams (HOME-STAT) initiative. Then he turned to Ariel Kennan.

“We got called in immediately after that press release,” Kennan says. “As we started talking to people, we realized that people knew a lot about what their agency did as part of the process, or their particular program, but not the whole service from end to end.”

DHS contracts with seven nonprofits to manage homeless outreach. Kennan’s team eventually did interviews or focus groups with 37 government staff, 28 program staff at partner organizations, and 7 homeless clients. They shadowed street outreach workers to understand their processes and observe their interactions with homeless individuals and city agencies — including accompanying some workers on overnight shifts. They also spent time at the city’s social safety net agency to observe part of the process homeless clients and their case managers may go through to place them in permanent housing.

And they were doing all that through the busy winter months for street homeless outreach workers.

“We’re finding that design is incredibly empowering to a lot of people who might not have had as big a voice in making decisions or fighting for their program and getting the attention it deserves,” says Kennan. “We do not enter that space as if we know everything about this, we enter it with a different skillset.”

That skillset is the design skillset. Design is about more than just how things look — it’s about how things work. It’s about making things operate so smoothly you don’t even notice when you’ve spent a whole day binge-watching episodes of a favorite TV show.

The design skillset is more often applied to things like building the next billion-dollar app, but a growing number of designers have been looking for projects, clients, and positions outside of the usual corporate powerhouses.

“I think there’s been a migration of interest and a re-orientation of what people want to be doing with design that’s actually meaningful, not just delivering products to consumers but actually solving complex problems,” says Emily Herrick, the newest designer on Kennan’s team, hired as a fellow in September. “Designers are attracted to complexity, and the public sector is full of it.”

There’s another reason designers are so powerful. With no clear stake in the outcomes of the discussions, designers can more easily push back or push forward with less chance of being accused of bias. “One of the things we heard was the outreach workers need to do a better job, they must not be doing as good outreach work as they could be doing,” Kennan says. “So we went to spend a lot of time with outreach workers, who were amazing people, absolute heroes working on the street everyday. Their job is very hard, and it’s just simply that there were not enough of them.”

In response, the city doubled the funding for outreach workers, upping their numbers across the five boroughs from 191 to 387. It wasn’t exactly a new idea; the nonprofits that do this work are chronically underfunded and understaffed. But when the city responded to that call, the response came as part of a broader, comprehensive narrative.

“We were able to change the narrative, to be less focused on [the outreach workers],” Kennan says. “We got increased funding for more outreach workers, and then we started looking at where are people actually getting stuck in the process.”

The case management system, known as StreetSmart, was also part of the new narrative. StreetSmart allows the nonprofits doing outreach to homeless individuals on the streets or in the subway system to track every person whom they’ve contacted in one system across all seven nonprofits. If someone moves from one borough to another, the nonprofits can easily coordinate using the first ever “by name” list, a list of names that each street homeless individual goes by. (It’s closely guarded for privacy reasons.)

The shelter system isn’t a good fit for some, and many homeless individuals openly avoid the shelter system at all costs for reasons like its spotty track record on physical safety and humane conditions. The city has developed other pathways into permanent supportive housing for such individuals, and it’s also on the street homeless outreach teams to guide those individuals along that path. For the first time, thanks to the service design process, the street outreach teams have multiple ways in digital form and in real life to track client progress along that path and hand off clients to each other seamlessly as needed.

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