San Rafael: How Uncommon Stakeholder Alliances Reduced Chronic Homelessness
by Sara Beckman
In early 2016, San Rafael, California, created a new position - Director of Homeless Planning and Outreach. The goal was to solve this complex social challenge, particularly when it came to the chronically unhoused. The new employee, and UC Berkeley Haas MBA grad, applied systems modeling to view this old problem in a new way. A variety of public and private organizations began collaborating, formed the Homeless Outreach Team, and achieved a decline in unsheltered homelessness. How might such disparate stakeholders work together in this disorganized system to bring positive change to people experiencing homelessness?
Learning Objectives
The case will focus on how MBA learning or business thinking can be applied to a critical challenge of our times - homelessness.
- Application of operations and supply chain thinking to the systems problem of homelessness - Application of marketing thinking to segmenting the homeless population and identifying appropriate targets for intervention. Using customer journey mapping to understand the dynamics of the (dysfunctional) system they had to navigate - Application of organizational design constructs to managing the many stakeholders in the system and bringing them on board with new approaches to managing the problem
Generally, the case will provide an outline for a business model that allows one to facilitate sustainable change in a community by -
- Bringing stakeholders together - Comprehensively documenting the (systems) problem - Identifying points of entry for making change - Educating a community around a shared understanding of the systems challenge - Building capability in the system to iteratively tackle and change elements of the system to create overall improvement
The case can be used with the Father Joe’s Villages case to explore an alternative means of housing and caring for people experiencing homelessness.
Details
Pub Date: October 1, 2022
Discipline: Corporate Social Responsibility
Subjects: Nonprofit Organizations, Systems Design, Systems Theory, Complex Systems, Social Assistance, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Equality
Product #: B6013-PDF-ENG
Industry: Healthcare services, Social advocacy organization, Nonprofit sector
Geography: United States, California
Length: 8 page(s)
Berkeley Haas Case SeriesFollowThe Berkeley Haas Case Series is a collection of business case studies written by faculty members at the Haas School of Business. Cases are conceived, developed, written, and published throughout the year, on subjects ranging from entrepreneurship and strategy to finance and marketing. Each case includes a teaching note for use in the classroom.
