Chipping Away at a Grand Challenge: Aligning Goal and Governance to Reduce Homelessness

Embassy Village Partnership: Closed Boundaries, Formal Contracts, and Relational Ties

Embassy Village ³⁸ exemplifies a local partnership between private firms, a nonprofit, and public agencies jointly pursuing a targeted goal: helping chronically unhoused people transition to independent living. When completed, the £5m village Embassy will offer 40 affordable assisted living studios in Manchester’s city center, where selected rough sleepers can reside for up to two years while benefiting from support services. To ease neighbors’ concerns, Embassy residents must have no criminal record, addictions, or mental health struggles and are restricted to male occupants to reduce management complexity. Residents will pay rent supported by housing benefits and commit to six hours a week of training in shopping, cooking, and budgeting. “We wanted to get away from the shelter model...the whole thing is a live ‘dress-rehearsal’ for running your own home” said the director of the nonprofit and an Embassy founder.

Developing Embassy required voluntary resource contributions from many independent parties, but decision-making authority stayed centralized among five parties: two high-end property developers eager to sustain their license to operate; the Manchester Mayor, an elected leader under pressure to deliver on his pledge to eradicate “rough sleeping”; a nonprofit struggling to acquire property to house rough sleepers; and, later, a private donor in search for an opportunity to further its charitable goals. Through a close-knit partnership, the five parties committed to providing mutually supportive contributions: one developer committed to lease land with a symbolic fee; the mayor’s charity—led pro bono by the second developer—committed to leverage its institutional clout and raise funds through the city’s businesses; the nonprofit brought know-how, authority, and credentials in helping rough sleepers; and the donor mobilized most of the capital needed to build the village. By leveraging in-house expertise in property development, the initial partners rapidly lined up around 50 businesses that were eager to help develop the planning application pro bono and build the village at cost, and they later managed to identify one donor that pledged to finance most of the construction costs.

San Rafael HOT Coalition: Open Boundaries, Relational Ties, and Shared Objects

Like Embassy Village, San Rafael’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) ³⁹ —a loose coalition of local public and nonprofit providers of homeless services led by the city authority—was established to pursue a targeted goal: aid the chronically homeless in transitioning into permanent housing. Unifying the HOT participants was their shared frustration with the lack of collaboration, stiff competition for funds, and accountability only for their own goals. “We were all mad at each other,” said one official. Despite the many nonprofits and public agencies providing homeless services and funding opportunities from government and private donors, chronic homelessness in San Rafael was a fifth of the local unhoused population and was taking a toll on the city’s resources. Worse, community members were turning against the nonprofits operating local health clinics, shelters, and kitchens, asking for their permits to be revoked. In 2016, this situation spurred the city authority to form a local coalition commited to eradicate chronic homelessness in the city by 2022. “We saw our job as that of creating a buffer between public opinion and nonprofits,” said one city official. Remarkably, between 2016 and 2018, chronic homelessness in San Rafael declined by 28%, with 95% of those housed remaining housed. This achievement was behind the recognition of San Rafael’s HOT as a “California state-wide best practice.”

Father Joe’s Villages Mission: Controlled Expansion Led by Managerial Hierarchy

Unlike the targeted goals of the Embassy partnership and the HOT coalition, Father Joe’s Villages (FJV) ⁴⁰ in San Diego set the much broader goal to never turn away any unhoused person, reflecting its motto, “preventing and ending homelessness, one life at a time.” Founded in the 1950s, FJV evolved to become the largest nonprofit homeless service provider in San Diego. By 2020, FJV was providing at least one service to nearly all the 7,000 homeless in the city and planned to grow its provision of affordable housing to 2,000 units (from 50 units in 1997).

MSTC Movement: Empowering Third Parties through a Participation Architecture

The goal of the FJV mission is broader than those of Embassy and HOT. Still, FJV is a bystander when it comes to policy debates. Pushing for policy reforms, side by side with providing permanent assisted affordable housing are, however, both integral facets of the goal pursued by the MSTC, or Downtown Roofless Movement, in São Paulo. ⁴¹ “Our aim is not to occupy for the sake of occupying, we’re fighting against leaving housing in the hands of the market,” said the main MSTC leader. This broad agenda made participation in local partnerships and coalitions a necessary but insufficient condition. MSTC also needed to fostercollaboration at scale through protests to pressure authorities into reforming housing policies, making São Paulo’s unhoused community the obvious group to engage. Thus, MSTC complemented its affiliation with local coalitions and partnerships with a participation architecture. This approach provides unhoused families with an opportunity to address their immediate housing needs and have a voice in strategic decisions in exchange for their commitment to volunteering time and effort to advancethe MSTC’s goals as defined by its leaders.

From a strict legal perspective, MSTC is a centralized nonprofit governed by a set of bylaws. Its modus operandi hinges on rallying large numbers of unhoused families to occupy buildings that have been abandoned for several years in São Paulo’s city center. “When dwelling is a privilege, occupying is a right,” MSTC claims. ⁴² The organization relies on the constitutional principle that all property must have a social function, itself a conquest by the housing movement in the late 1980s. “We’ve never positioned ourselves against the authorities,” says an MSTC founder. ⁴³ To identify buildings suitable to occupy, obtain grants to retrofit the organized squats, and help the squatters fight judicial attempts to evict them, MSTC mobilizes resources from local partnerships with ideologically aligned professionals (e.g., engineers, architects, and lawyers). “Things will only be all right if we draw on our partners,” says an MSTC leader. ⁴⁴ To pressure authorities to change housing policies, MSTC is part of coalitions with other likeminded movement organizations such as the Centre for Popular Movements (Central dos Movimentos Populares) and Housing Struggle Front (Frente de Luta por Moradia). In addition, to help squatters reach their potential and self-actualize, MSTC engages in local coalitions with civil society (e.g., academics, artists, chefs, and social workers). These range from running onsite open kitchens, art galleries, computer labs, and nurseries to hosting school visits, arranging for doctors to visit the squats, and advancing an inclusive culture to protect minorities. “MSTC allows us something beyond the house key . . . to become someone,” said one squat resident. ⁴⁵ The fact that MSTC has existed for more than two decades—with a positive impact on reportedly over 2,000 families, 600 of which are currently clustered across six organized squats—suggests effective alignment between its broad goal and governance. “We’re not landlords . . . we work collectively, and the collective must function,” said its founder.

In sum, each goal-governance alignment requires building both common understanding and mutual accountability in the absence of task predictability. As the stated goal broadens, the task structure becomes more complex, demanding greater care in both organization design and management. Table 1 summarizes the mechanisms enabling coordinated collective action across the three basic governance arrangements that underpin the alternative goal-governance alignments.

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Table 1.

Partnership, Coalition, and Participation Architecture: Mechanisms Enabling Coordinated Collective Action by Integrating Conditions.

	Common Understanding	Mutual Accountability	(Lack of) Predictability
Partnership	Closed boundaries and socialization build credible commitment to clearly stated shared goal	Shared hierarchical command, formal contracts, and high interdependence enact accountability. But relational ties matter	Unity of command and centralized planning make enterprise enticing to select others despite inability to predefine tasks and routines
Coalition	Socialization, no status differences, shared objects build common understanding of goal albeit open boundaries	Democratic decision-making, MoUs and shared objects facilitate accountability, but someone must play a lead role to steward collective resources. Some government enforced shared accountability	Socialization and shared objects allow understanding to emerge of other’s capabilities and ability to adapt to an unpredictable process
Participation Architecture	Selection and socialization homogenize norms, behaviors, values, creating common perspective and enabling boundaries to stay open	Simple rules, democratic decision-making, task self-selection, and self-managed structures provide scaffolding that builds mutual accountability	Selection, socialization, simple rules, and authority of the apex enable to anticipate individual behavior under high uncertainty

In the Pursuit of Targeted Goals: Partnerships or Coalitions?

A targeted goal can be pursued by either a stand-alone partnership, relying on closed, contractually enforceable mechanisms and strong relational ties, or by a stand-alone coalition that gives participants greater decision-making authority and flexibility and keeps the organizational boundaries porous. In a partnership, the participants are not “co-opetitors” vying for a greater share of the value but share a common understanding that they control complementary resources that need to be pooled into a legal entity, and that these resources exist in a well-defined regime of property rights. The tight-knit lead group of actors believes that order is best created if decision-making authority stays centralized and participation is restricted to trusted networks. Local partnerships like Embassy Village or San Diego’s Operation Shelter to Home (to which FJV belongs) are thus “club goods” in that strategic interaction between the selected participants is non-rivalrous. ⁴⁷ In these closed environments of mutual interdependence, the participants’ competences tend not to overlap, and conflict over benefits distribution is low, which facilitates agreeing on a division of labor and on how to integrate effort. Complementing this closed voluntary association are strong relational ties, which give the participants confidence in handshake agreements and create peer pressure to ensure everyone keeps to their word. Together, these mechanisms enable the partnership to form a “sub-society” where everyone, albeit coming from different sectors of the economy, shares similar moral principles regarding “right vs. wrong” and “good vs. bad” and stays identified with the partnership rather than feel alienated when difficulties arise. ⁴⁸

In marked contrast, coalitions are the outcome of a choice to govern coordinated collective action through a loosely coupled strategic effort. As in a partnership, the participants in a coalition seek social connectedness, dialogue, and collaboration within geographical boundaries, but they may also try to find consensus among divided conflict-laden spaces within political boundaries. Participation in a coalition is voluntary, and the self-interested participants are likely to disagree on their shared goal and how to pursue it. However, a coalition becomes more tempting than a partnership when the nature of the targeted goal would frustrate efforts to centralize decision-making authority and deploy formal contracts. ⁴⁹ Specifically, coalitions pursue targeted goals that require assembling resources controlled by many parties that operate in an ill-defined regime of property rights and where competences may overlap. This is true for HOT in San Rafael, as it is for the many local coalitions that FJV and MSTC belong to.

Unlike a partnership, a coalition is not a “club” but rather a “commons” that brings together non-excludable actors with rivalrous preferences. In this governance arrangement, the organizational boundaries are porous to encourage actors that control valuable resources to join, and efforts to build mutual accountability occur by specifying what each participant is expected to do through non-binding MoUs. The lead actors struggle to exclude others from decision-making processes once they join. Were the leaders to exclude someone, they would be seen as reneging on their word to make decisions by consensus, eroding their accountability to the others, who could defect. As such, the sustainability of a coalition relies on democratic decision-making processes and rules ensuring no status differences, including proportionality between costs and benefits, graduated sanctions, independent monitors, and no interference from outside authorities. ⁵⁰ By using socialization and shared boundary objects to develop a degree of homogeneity in values, beliefs, and social norms, a coalition can avoid being trapped in a tragedy of the commons and lower the transaction and monitoring costs. Furthermore, a targeted goal increases the likelihood of the participants sharing moral and ethical standards, reducing the risks of free riding. Still, the porosity of the boundaries of a coalition makes its governance a struggle. ⁵¹ Coalitions are also unlikely to scale up well because democratic decision making can bog down in conflict if many parties have a say. ⁵² Since peer pressure is an informal sanction that induces cooperation but dissipates in large commons, the enlargement of a coalition can lead to goal displacement as the participants revert to fulfilling individual, short-term goals in the interest of their own efficiency and effectiveness.

In the Pursuit of Broad Goals: Missions or Movements?

As an organization chooses to commit to a broad goal, it can evolve to become a mission by restricting adaptation of its managerial hierarchy to simultaneous participation in multiple local partnerships and coalitions, while allowing top managers to retain decision-making authority and control over strategic choice. A centralized structure sets and controls the mission’s overall goal, informing the raison d’être for affiliation with local partnerships and coalitions, while selective outsourcing of activities facilitates acquisition of resources when transaction costs are low and rapid adaptation to changing conditions. Alternatively, the organization can choose a movement structure by joining and setting up not only multiple local coalitions and partnerships at the same time, but also by adopting a participation architecture to encourage collaboration at scale with autonomous third parties. In the case of a movement organization, management keeps the organizational boundaries open and allows third parties to see themselves on an equal footing. The more the organization broadens its scope, the more adopting a participation architecture seems necessary. Differentiating missions from movements is therefore the degree to which top management is willing to share decision-making authority to encourage collaboration at scale from actors across different sectors.

If top management is keen to control the overall strategy and core resources, the organization can evolve toward a mission by adding multiple, mutually reinforcing local partnerships and coalitions to its administrative structure. Limiting the scope of intervention of the managerial hierarchy at a local level fosters welfare-oriented intersectoral collaboration to pursue contributory subgoals. In a mission, the organization’s top management retains authority to instruct subordinates on their tasks and resolve disputes and flexibility in adapting the organization’s governance to best enact its mission. The mission’s architecture also shows a degree of self-containment, in which interdependence between partnerships and coalitions can be minimized to reduce conflict and let each local structure independently pursue subgoals algined with the mission’s statement.

When the nature of the broad goal is such that its pursuit in earnest requires going beyond sharing local decision rights, the option left is for the organization to evolve into a movement organization. In addition to subsuming a mission’s architecture by joining multiple local partnerships and coalitions, the movement organization adapts its own administrative structure by also adding a participation architecture. Through predefined pathways for engagement, rules and incentives, the movement’s architecture creates an opportunity for third parties to pursue their own individual goals while giving them a voice in strategic decisions. In exchange, the movement asks third parties to contribute time, effort, and resources to the organization’s cause—a bargain that third parties need to see as fair to sustain collaboration. To build a common understanding of the stakes, tasks, and subgoals, the movement’s participation architecture relies on selection and socialization to create homogeneity among third parties regarding norms, values, and belief systems and invests in collective sensemaking created through leadership, culture, and networks of interaction.

To prevent chaos in the movement’s participation architecture, the third parties need to be clustered into low-conflict, self-managed groups. ⁵³ Mutual accountability is enabled not through formal contractual obligations and/or strong relational ties to a managerial hierarchy, but rather by: first, a system of simple rules designed to minimize inner-group conflict and reduce interdependency between the self-managed groups; and, second, willingness to share rule-making authority with third parties to ensure the system and its rules can adapt to exogenous shocks (environmental, political, institutional, technological) and manage exceptions. A movement’s participation architecture therefore relies on creating interdependences between the subgoals that drive the coalitions, partnerships, and self-managed structures. While simple rules enable self-containment between the differing local structures, the very same rules unify all self-managed groups of coordinated collective action under a broad goal to flatten collaboration at scale.