Our Gallery at One Market just set up twelve new exhibits that come under the heading of Design in the Public Interest. These exhibits feature products, places, and processes where design is used for common good instead of monetary profit. In a series of twelve blog articles over a few weeks, I thought I would pick them off one at a time. So far I have covered ten of them:
- See Better to Learn Better Exhibit
- Laboratory to Learn Exhibit
- Reclaiming Public Space Exhibit
- Making Sanitation Safe Exhibit
- A Platform Worth Spreading Exhibit
- A Building That Heals Exhibit
- Citizen-Powered Change Exhibit
- Illuminating Possibility Exhibit
- Freedom to Move Exhibit
- A Place to Call Home Exhibit
Our penultimate one is Easing the Way Home.
People:
- Community Solutions // more
- Home for Good United Way for Greater Los Angeles // more
- City of Los Angeles // more
- Aguiniga Designs // more
Many people are homeless not because they can't or don't want to find homes, but because the agencies charged with helping them are rarely coordinated and force them through M.C. Escher-like mazes of complicated paperwork. Community Solutions, a national housing organization with an entrepreneurial approach, knows this in their bones. That's why they collaborated with Home for Good, a multi-organization initiative to end chronic homelessness among veterans in the Los Angeles area, to bring local officials working in housing authority and veterans' administrations together at "boot camp" to trim the fat from the process once and for all.
Here are some unfortunate statistics:
- In 2011, more than 630,000 people were homeless, including more than 67,000 veterans.
- Veterans are 50% more likely to be homeless than the average American.
Once they arrived, teams used a housing placement board game, created by Aguiniga Designs, to map the steps of their current processes, including every juncture when money or paper changed hands. Once teams identified their full processes, they began working together to identify and resolve hurdles. Before boot camp, it took an average of 47 steps and 237 days for a homeless veteran to get into permanent housing. Since boot camp, the average has dropped to 23 steps and 30 days. And harder to measure, but no less important, are improved relationships between agencies and communities that benefit those who have served our country and now deserve the dignity of a home.
Thanks to Global Content Manager, Matthew Tierney, and Brand Marketing Manager, Grace Hom, for content contained in this blog article. This is just one of the many exhibits in the gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays from 12 pm to 5 pm, and admission is free. Visit us.
Efficiency is alive in the lab.
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