Clergy, congregations, homeless support and advocacy programs, and people who want to help end homelessness convened in Upland, California in San Bernardino County for "Faith In Action: Solving Homelessness Together," the launch of a new coalition of partners called OUR Homeless focused on the Inland Valley area. Round Table President Mangano was invited to keynote the faith-based summit, hosted by Don Smith of Urban Initiatives at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, and funded by Thrivent Financial. The less obvious meaning of OUR represents its geography, Ontario, Upland and Rancho Cucamonga and including Chino, Chino Hills and Montclair.

OUR invited local faith-based leaders and organizations to link outreach ministries to community service providers implementing solutions to homelessness, to infuse new vibrancy into local outreach and mission programs, and to connect the talent, energy, and resources in local congregations to innovative initiatives that work to prevent and end homelessness.

"No matter what we've accommodated, or acculturated, or legalized, or been in détente with, the moral common sense of the future may have other ideas," stated Mangano. "To the abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights activists, refuseniks, anti-apartheid activists, and others, the idea that you could own someone, discriminate by gender or color, limit speech, or oppress racially, the moral common sense of the future required prophetic thinking. It required bridging the gap between current reality and wrong to moral sense."

The great 19th century social activist Rev. Henry Beecher, Mangano noted, was one of those social reformers who wanted slavery abolished, suffrage expanded, juvenile treatment reformed. "All of which seemed difficult, or impossible to achieve, foolish, and naïve. But Rev. Beecher, as affirmed by Rev. King a hundred years later, had a remarkable insight. He understood that the long moral arc of history bends towards justice."

"An extraordinary conclusion for a man who was maligned, impugned, and incarcerated. For whom, undoubtedly, sometimes that arc seemed bending anywhere but to justice. Yet he found in our history the reasons and evidence to affirm the trajectory of that arc.

"Our work together in faith communities is to reach up our arms to that moral arc and bend it down into the lives of our poorest and most disadvantaged and disabled citizens, homeless people, to ensure that every citizen of our city, our nation, is known by a single name - Neighbor - and treated as one and given the opportunity we would want extended to ourselves.

"It is a goal attainable through overcoming the moral and spiritual wrong of homelessness, a human tragedy unfolding on our streets and in our shelters."

TRANSFORMING FAITH-BASED PRACTICE TO END HOMELESSNESS

At Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, Round Table President Mangano recounted for students and faculty the 20 years of homelessness history marked by increasing numbers, decreasing morale, expanded funding, and limited results.

"What's not working?" he asked attendees in Dr. Joe Colletti's class, Homelessness, Congregations, and Community Partnerships. "Good intentions, well meaning programs, humanitarian gestures, which, if they could have ended homelessness, would have done so long ago. The 'if we just had more money to spend on what we're already doing' syndrome."

Dr. Colletti's class seeks to have attendees transform their ministry on homelessness by reading, hearing, and learning in ways that cause them to abandon their past practices. Mangano noted that the "desert" experience expected of them might lead to moving and changing their understanding and perspective about serving versus solving homelessness.

"The intent is to end the moral wrong," stated Mangano. "You can't find in any faith tradition a God who is content with simply managing a wrong. The reading from Luke for this class clearly states our charge to end wrongs, to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoner and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed."

"We now know how to reach the moral common sense of the future on homelessness, so that none of our neighbors should be without a place to live. That's what our grandchildren will know as common sense as plainly as we know today that you can't own another person or deny suffrage based on skin color or gender. The end, the abolition is within our creative reach."

Dr. Colletti is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Urban Initiatives and an Adjunct Professor of Urban Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He has worked with communities including Pasadena, Long Beach, Merced, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and Ventura County on their homeless plans and initiatives.      

NEW FINANCIAL STRATEGIES TO END HOMELESSNESS ARE TOPIC IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS

At Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy recently, Round Table President Mangano addressed graduate students in Professor Kim Wilson's course, Market Approaches to Economic and Human Development: Reaching the Base of the Economic Pyramid Through Social Enterprise, on Social Impact Financing. Fletcher, the nation's oldest exclusively graduate school of international affairs, offers coursework in micro-financing and financial strategies to end poverty. Professor Wilson is Lecturer in International Business.

"Field-tested, evidence-based interventions that save lives and save money already exist," Mangano indicated to the students. "Study after study has documented costs and cost avoidance that stand up to any due diligence. Social Impact Financing scales the housing that provides the antidote to chronic homelessness, since government is not entrepreneurial and philanthropy is slow to innovate. Second, Social Impact Financing simplifies the source of financing, taking implementation from the chase for 20 sources of funds to just one, and selects the partners and population to achieve the performance." Mangano noted that the new mechanism, being piloted in the areas of chronic homelessness and juvenile justice in Massachusetts, is also being adopted to address health outcomes, asthma, recidivism, and more.

Mangano described the stages of the Massachusetts initiative that led the Commonwealth to being the first in the nation to issue a Social Impact Bond focused on chronic homelessness. Armed with data demonstrating cost effective interventions in permanent housing and services from the Home & Healthy for Good initiative of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA) led by Executive Director Joe Finn, the Patrick Administration first issued an RFI and then an RFP in 2012, focused on chronic homelessness and juvenile justice. At the same time, the Obama Administration was initiating two small scale efforts on prisoner reentry and workforce issues. New York City and Minnesota are examples of other jurisdictions pursuing Social Impact Financing.

Massachusetts's RFP brought two intermediaries to the table, Social Finance US and Third Sector, along with programmatic partners in MHSA and ROCA, a Massachusetts non-profit focused on youth at risk. MHSA and ROCA were selected as the Massachusetts awardees that are now moving towards contract for their initiatives.