Partnership highlight: ASU Library and Crisis Response Network

Combining innovative data analysis and partner engagement to empower service providers supporting families experiencing homelessness in Maricopa County.

In a resilient community, periods of lack of shelter — whether experienced by students, families, veterans, elderly or others — are infrequent and nonrecurring.

In partnership with ASU Library and Crisis Response Network’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), KER helped to identify new data patterns that could give rise to solutions for individuals experiencing long-term or recurring homelessness.

Data experts from our organizations worked together to harness the power of data within the HMIS system, using machine learning analysis and visualization.

“From my own experience, it’s important to reflect on how people experiencing housing insecurity are homogenized,” says Michael Simeone, director of Data Science and Analytics for ASU Library. “It’s important to see that experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness are different for different people. And data can help us with that.”

The work has provided the initial framework for a predictive risk model that allows service providers to better design interventions for the different pathways individuals take through the continuum of care, based on patterns of vulnerability.

“One big a-ha from this process was that we’re able to understand this group of people by the services they use rather than their demographic characteristics,” says Simeone. “And we were able to see crosscutting trends across demographic groups that weren’t obvious before.

“Another big takeaway was that any person’s usage of services could predict their risk for falling back into housing insecurity.”

KER fellow Krickette Wetherington of the Valley of the Sun United Way has been working with our team to strategically convene stakeholders across the continuum of care in ASU’s Decision Theater. This monthly series of data convenings engaged additional ASU data analysts and human service professionals in exploring and interpreting the results from this research.

“In these convenings, we started having cross-sector conversations about what actually matters rather than just the indicators measured in HMIS,” says Wetherington. “We hadn’t been talking as a community about things like race, income, incarceration — about what’s causing people to move through the system in the ways that they do.”

The partnership has created not only insights on issues of equitable service provision and the programmatic context individuals experiencing homelessness encounter, but also interactive data tools that can help us predict from service usage patterns who is most at risk of returning to homelessness.

“This was a big challenge to start with, but we were able to change the direction of the ship,” says Wetherington.

In 2020, Simeone and Crisis Response Network’s Thaddaeus Gassie will join KER as resilience fellows to continue and deepen this work. In addition, Wetherington will join ASU’s newly launched Action Nexus initiative within Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.

It’s important to see that experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness are different for different people. And data can help us with that.

— Michael Simeone, Director of Data Science and Analytics, ASU Library