Notes from LBF Convening with Greg Harms
The Little Big Fund Convening on September 15, 2021 with Greg Harms.
Greg Harms recently retired after twenty years leading the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. Its mission is “to create avenues to stable housing for our community’s homeless adults from a foundation of supportive and safe shelter.” The shelter provides opportunities for housing solutions, safe shelter, food and support services for up to 160 individuals year-round. Under Greg Harms’ leadership, the shelter moved into its current facility, built permanent supporting housing for chronically homeless people and shifted its focus toward permanent housing rather than emergency shelter alone.
Upon announcing his retirement last fall, community members agree that the work Greg did over the past two decades “demonstrated a deep commitment to public service, it was a legacy.”
Over the course of the hour-long LBF Convening, Greg shared great insights about tenacity, resilience, fundraising, and serving the most vulnerable people who represent a contentious community issue—homelessness.
Highlights from our conversation with Greg:
On the experience of building a new facility for Boulder Shelter for the Homeless
As with many homeless shelters in the US, especially 20 plus years ago, our shelter was an old motel. It was a building that was past its useful life. We had a really big push to build a new facility that would be able to accommodate a lot more people and in a more dignified way. That was my first piece of inspirational work--to push that project through, despite a lot of pushback from the community, especially the local neighborhood. But we prevailed and the facility has 160 beds and has served the community for almost twenty years.
What was hard about that project?
I think there are really two things that people gravitate to when they see change in their neighborhood. One is fear. The other is control. There's really a deep fear, especially of the homeless population. People don't understand the population. They don't spend time with the population, so it's scary to them to think homeless people will be living in their neighborhood.
We are often afraid of things that we don't understand. What I’ve always tried to do is address fears, real and perceived, about what’s happening, and hand back as much control as we can and still make the project work. For example, inviting the community to help design the exterior of the building is one way we handed back some control of the project.
And fear can be countered with data. We pay attention to evidence. We look at our data in a very critical way, and get information from others that’s been proven, that’s evidence driven, information about what works and doesn’t, what is the most efficient and most effective way to serve homeless people.
On changing the mission statement:
Over many years we learned that the way to end homelessness is with housing. Today, our mission statement is first and foremost focused on housing. We understand that shelters are still needed, and people will always need that short-term intervention. But the shelters don’t end people’s homelessness. We changed our mission statement five years ago from providing shelter to providing housing. It was really a reflection of our experience over time and of the evidence that has, over decades, been pointing to the fact that people stay off the street when they have permanent housing.
There is so much need out there, and all of you at this Convening are working in places where there’s great need. The challenge to you is to decide: what are you going to do to address that great need and what are you not going to do? We had to come to the decision that there are a lot of things we could do (and had done) to make life for a homeless person more comfortable, more tenable--such as temporary shelter, addiction and mental health support, for example. But those services don’t end homelessness. We decided to use our limited resources for the best solution, not just a number of good solutions, to provide permanent housing.
On fundraising:
It helps if people identify with what you’re trying to do. For us, there’s little ambiguity about who we serve and about what we’re trying to accomplish. Fundraising is easier when people have empathy for the population you are serving, and the goals you are trying to meet. When looking for donors, we first focus on who already has affinity for our organization (like a current volunteer) or who has affinity for an organization that does similar work.
I found that fundraising is best when it’s personal, more one-on-one rather than in front of a large audience. And it helps to be prepared with evidence and stories, for example. In-kind donations are very important to us, too, that is, pretty much everything that’s given to us except actual financial contributions. For us, in-kind contributions happen regularly; somebody is leaving something at the doorstep every single day. A lot is usable but a lot of it is not. We try to encourage people to go to our wish list on the website to see a list of things that we really can use to encourage people to bring us those items.
On sharing client stories:
Our very first concern is confidentiality. We know that personal stories are the best way to raise money and people identify with individual stories. Yet we also know that people come to us in confidence and don’t want others to know that they are in a shelter. So how do we tell stories that are authentic, that are moving and relatable in a way that doesn’t jeopardize confidentiality, and in particular, doesn’t go public and appear in the press.
We can be reluctant to share stories with the public because we know that our clients are exposing themselves to great risk, to significant personal downside by sharing their story publicly. What we do is de-identify the stories so the person can remain anonymous. We try to share stories that are general enough that they don’t lead to particular individual identification. We also try to share stories that are not the conventional success stories. We have a lot of people who are not successful and being honest and real about that is important.
In our fundraising, we know there is power in being authentic. We say to donors: Look at our clients, not just at us, or just at the organization. Look at our residents, at their stories. When I meet with donors I tell stories about successes and balance those with stories of people who continue to struggle.
Since leaving the Boulder Shelter, Greg has continued his efforts to address homelessness by starting a consulting business, Domos Consulting. Domos being the Latin word for houses or housing. Greg is now working with smaller, rural communities in the western United States in their efforts to implement housing-based homeless strategies.
