I am returning to Person Centered Housing Options this fall. I will be presenting two 75-minute sessions at their annual conference, The Cost of Inaction: Who Pays the Price?, held October 6 and 7 at the RIT Inn and Conference Center in Henrietta, New York, just outside Rochester.
The keynote this year is India Walton, the Buffalo nurse and organizer who unseated a four-term incumbent in the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor and who now works on policy for the poor and working class as a senior strategist with RootsAction. She talks about the intersections of health, racial, economic, and social justice from inside frontline experience, which is not a common perspective on a conference stage.
About my two sessions
Both are 75 minutes, which is a real gift. It is long enough to work through something properly instead of racing to a summary slide.
Session topics will be announced closer to the conference. What I can tell you is the shape of them, because it is the same thing I have been working on all year: taking the data that homeless response systems already collect and making it explain itself, to the people making decisions and to the people those decisions are about.
That covers a lot of ground. How we measure a system that never sits still. Why the same numbers get used to call a community a success and a failure in the same meeting. What it takes for an assessment to give a person an answer they can actually understand. And the uncomfortable question in this year’s conference title: when we do not act, who ends up paying for it.
I will update this post with the session details as soon as they are set.
Why this conference
Last year I presented two sessions at PCHO on racial equity in housing data and on balancing system flow measurement against human realities. The rooms asked hard questions, and several of those questions changed how I built things afterward. That is not a courtesy I get everywhere, and it is the reason I said yes again.
Registration and conference details are here.
If you are going to be there, find me. If you want to talk before then, schedule a virtual meeting any time.
Hope to see you in New York this October.