Community Solutions

Community Solutions works towards a future without homelessness, in which poverty never follows families beyond a single generation.

We aim to achieve our goals by helping communities become better, more adaptive problem solvers so they can tackle complex challenges as they emerge. As teams learn to work differently and optimize their existing resources, they find that they help far more people escape homelessness and poverty than they ever expected. 

We work from 4 locations and via virtual teams to assist communities throughout the United States and internationally. Our approach has been featured on 60 Minutes, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and other media, and recognized with the World Habitat Award and the Jane Jacobs Medal, among other honors.

CS's cornerstone initiatives include:

• The 100,000 Homes Campaign, an unprecedented effort to support and coordinate 186 communities to collectively house over 105,000 homeless Americans in 4 years, transforming the way these communities organize their housing and health resources;
• The Brownsville Partnership, through which we coordinate partners in Brownsville, Brooklyn - a neighborhood with massive unemployment and the highest concentration of public housing in America - to pioneer strategies for addressing community problems, such as developing a model that successfully prevented 900 families from entering homelessness in less than 5 years;
• Zero:2016, which builds upon the success of the 100,000 Homes Campaign by supporting 75 communities to end veteran and chronic homelessness by the end of 2016;
• The Northeast Hartford Partnership, through which we coordinate partners from our office in Northeast Hartford - one of the poorest neighborhoods in Connecticut - to redevelop an abandoned factory as a neighborhood hub for job creation and health promotion