Over the years many groups and organizations in East King County have been working hard to address social challenges like homelessness and affordable housing. Despite all these efforts housing affordability, homelessness, and the wide-ranging impact on the community have only gotten worse. There are no simple answers to successfully address these challenges, but there are steps that can be taken if we truly want to address homelessness and affordable housing challenges.
A few years ago, community leaders from the business and non-profit sectors who have been dedicated to successfully addressing homelessness and affordable housing challenges observed that the organizations and funders working to address these issues were operating in siloed and fractured ways. This siloed and fractured way of operating has resulted in disconnection among providers leading to burnout, lack of innovation and collaboration, and the community settling for inefficient and less effective interventions. In addition, the voice and resources of the business community have often been completely absent from the table when it comes to addressing homelessness and affordable housing in East King County.
These community leaders came together to create a more effective plan and path to address these complex social challenges leading to the creation of the Eastside Community Development Fund (ECDF) whose mission is to address our community’s social needs through engaging, connecting, and mobilizing businesses and civic organizations through funding, convening, and advocacy. ECDF operates as the connective tissue bringing diverse sectors of our community together to successfully address complex social challenges.
Over the last couple years ECDF has mapped out the organizations and programs in East King County providing shelter and services, street outreach, and mental health and addiction supportive services to people experiencing homelessness. There are close to 50 different organizations and cities involved in this work, often in isolation from one another. Through this work ECDF has been able to identify gaps and challenges that disrupt a person’s path to personal and housing stability.
ECDF has adopted an ambitious set of goals to improve the outcomes of people needing shelter, supportive services, and access to affordable housing. A top priority ECDF is working on is to have our region adopt shared metrics and a database that allows us to track who is experiencing homelessness in our community and what their barriers and needs are to get back to stability. Currently people get stuck on our streets with little to no data being gathered and used to help create a path and plan for housing stability. ECDF believes significant efficiencies and program effectiveness can be achieved through enhanced data collection that is used by decision makers to make strategic funding investments and direct program creation plans that fit the needs revealed by the data.
ECDF is also working to improve access to the affordable housing options in East King County through connecting different parts of the system and using technology to improve access. Other goals include, building a Shelter & Resource App to help more effectively and effectively connect people to these transformative resources, creating an interconnected outreach and housing hub, and improving the mental health and addiction support landscape to better serve the wider community.
Another exciting arm of ECDF that is currently being advanced is the creation of the Bellevue Fund. The Bellevue Fund will provide the first ever place where all sectors of the Bellevue community can collectively invest in social impact initiatives that maintain and strengthen the social fabric of Bellevue. This will be an avenue where businesses and community members can learn about social challenges and invest in best practice solutions to address these complex social challenges.
There are many impressive operations working hard to address homelessness and affordable housing in our region, but we all lose when these efforts are fractured, siloed, and often working at cross-purposes. ECDF is helping to make real and lasting progress on these longstanding social challenges through inspiring collaboration, innovation, and collectively adopted solutions. It takes all of us, with diverse viewpoints providing input from every sector, to achieve real progress on these issues, and this is the work the Eastside Community Development Fund is leading.
By David Bowling, CEO for Eastside Community Development Fund
