Special Report: Homelessness and what Salesforce is doing about it

Spring

2 0 1 9

SFSociety

MAGAZINE

T H E I N D E P E N D E N T V O I C E O F T H E S A L E S F O R C E E C O S Y S T E M

20 years of

Salesforce PAGE 5

Special Report:

Homelessness PAGE 22

The Vanguard have arrived! PAGE 28

Salesforce Partner

Events PAGE 52

SFMediaPartners @SFMediaPartners sf_media_partnerseditorial@sfmediapartners.com

www.sfsocietymagazine.com

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DREAMFORCE ADDRESSES GROWING

CHALLENGE OF HOMELESSNESS IN

SAN FRAN

On the opening day of Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce’s philanthropic branch, Salesforce. org, made the announcement that it would be issuing $18 million in grants aimed at addressing three of San Francisco’s most pressing social issues: homelessness, public education and cleanliness. The grants include $2 million dollars to address homelessness and hunger in the Bay Area.

The announcement was made at a press conference featuring San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Salesforce Chairman and Co-CEO, Mark Benioff, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, and Hamilton Families CEO, Tomiquia Moss.

‘Speaking as a fourth generation San Franciscan and somebody who grew up in this city, I’m excited that we can take the power of Salesforce and the power of all our customers and community, and give back to the city in a meaningful way,” Benioff said at the press conference.’

Salesforce.org is donating $500,000 each to Hamilton Families, an organisation that works to combat family homelessness in San Fransisco, and Larkin Street Youth Services, a nonprofit that helps young people transition to a life beyond homelessness.

While the number of homeless in San Francisco has declined over the past 15 years, the city’s increasing property prices and gentrification have displaced and pushed the homeless population out in to the public eye. In response, the city has doubled its expenditure on homelessness to more than $300 million, building four Navigation Centres in order to provide temporary accommodation, advice

and counseling as well as 1500 supportive housing units.

Mayor Breed would like to see thousands more of these units built around the city, a concept that enjoys a great deal of support throughout the Bay Area. While the city is responding to the issue, contributions like the one from Salesforce are increasingly important. With tech companies playing a significant role in the increasing cost of living in the city, many San Franciscans have expressed the belief that these same companies should play a larger role in helping to alleviate the problem.

Benioff has previously voiced frustration and concern with other tech billionaires for their perceived lack of charity that they have offered the city in which they operate.

‘I really believe, exactly as I’m trying to demonstrate, that business is the greatest

platform for change,” Benioff told the San Francisco Chronicle when speaking about the homelessness issue in October. “My goal is to demonstrate that businesses can be this kind of force for good in the world — that we can do well and do good.’

‘We want to thank Salesforce and its staffers, who show up at our shelters and make lunches with us,” Moss said at the press conference. “We couldn’t do what we do without organizations that partner with us and battle homelessness.’

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AN EYE-WITNESS REPORT… HOMELESSNESS IN SAN FRANCISCO.

NADIO GRANATA

MCIM,FHEA

Nadio Granata is managing director of SF Media Partners and co-founder of Partner Event Promotions. Here’s his hard-hitting account of the homeless issues he witnessed in San Francisco

Following the announcement made by Benioff at Dreamforce 2018, we thought it would be timely to add our own observations. What follows is an eyewitness account from SF Society Magazine founder, Nadio Granata, from his first-hand experiences whilst attending Dreamforce.

The message I received on 1st August, stating that our hotel rooms in San Francisco had been cancelled, came as a thunderbolt out of the blue. Planning our trip to Dreamforce had, until then, been perfect and now we were thrown into a last-minute panic to find something central, decent and affordable.

Reaching out to the Salesforce ohana was both helpful but also frustrating as we received countless recommendations but, when followed up, each and every hotel was either full or extortionately expensive. One recommendation did, however, bear fruit as we managed to book into the San Francisco City Centre Hostel in Tenderloin.

To the unfamiliar, The Tenderloin is a neighbourhood in downtown San Francisco, California, in the flatlands on the southern slope of Nob Hill, situated between the Union Square shopping district to the northeast and the Civic Center office district to the southwest.

According to some well-meaning accounts, it is “at the forefront of a cultural transformation, the spearhead of an artistic revolution, a cultural gem.”

Not words I would associate with Tenderloin. It is the epitome of innercity deprivation. A confused symbol of 21st century destitution and degradation beyond anything else I had ever seen. Yes, I’ve seen homeless people on the streets of Cairo, Istanbul, London, Dublin and other infamous landmark locations with reputations for double digit growth and yet progressively deteriorating problems of homelessness. I’ve drunk port in the dry riverbed in Alice Springs with the castaway Aborigines and listened to their fight for land rights and dignity whilst squandering their extortionate recompense on drugs and alcohol. I’ve shared benches with failed businessmen (never women), who have graphically and willingly described the all-to-familiar tale of a bad business decision leading to losing their job, their marriage, their home and inevitably their mind and with it, their dignity.

But not on this scale. Not so deeply entrenched into the very fabric of the hitherto yet to be ‘gentrified’ fabric of this amazing, iconic city.

To say I was ‘appalled’ is an understatement. How could a civilisation of any denomination, never mind, affluent, goal-seeking and liberated Californians, allow such desperation to exist within its reach, both shocked me and appalled me.

These are not children begging in the street and pestering for backsheesh, or disabled returning from a recent war, no, these are people like you and me, of an age that should be looking forward to enjoying the pleasures gained from a lifetime of toil. These are brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles and mothers and fathers who have no doubt let themselves down and let down many

others on their messy, unconventional journeys, but nonetheless do not deserve to be punished to this extreme.

To describe them as ‘the walking dead’ is to imply a functionality beyond even some of the more lucid victims. Most people I witnessed were beyond ‘walking’, were beyond most functions you and I take for granted. Many appeared to be long-term, perhaps even life-long, suffers of mental health issues. Issues which, in any other respectable, caring society, would not punish so severely, surely?

Some survive in clusters, amid others at the very bottom of Maslow’s theoretical hierarchy, whilst others lay alone in distant doorways of rat-infested puddles surrounded by a toxic sewer of human waste pungently distinctive from that of the savage rodents that wait in line.

Along some streets and alleyways, the bodies literally spill out across the infested walkways into the gutter, at which point the authorities seem to be instructed to intervene ... if only to drag the dying carcass back onto the walkway, out of the ‘harm’ of passing traffic, to live a miserable moment longer.

The mornings are the worse. As the sun comes up, the cardboard corpses come alive ... perhaps, that’s something of an exaggeration as surely not every desperate, filthy, lonely corpse makes it through the night. Urine and diarrhoea stain the cardboard hovels as they get pushed out for the road sweepers to ‘clean’ up before the baking sun cements the discharge to the ground.

I’ll leave it for another time and place to argue the facts, rationalise the reasons and justify why we can witness such inhumanity and yet still leave Dreamforce feeling a sense of achievement.

Watch out for our update on Homelessness in San Francisco in our Dreamforce edition

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COMBATTING HOMELESSNESS AND ROUGH SLEEPING WITH SALESFORCE

TECHNOLOGY

BY GUEST AUTHOR JUSTIN HALFPENNY

JUSTIN HALFPENNY

Ceo MobileCaddy

With the number of people sleeping rough in England increasing 169% since 2010, homelessness is one of the greatest problems facing our society today.

One of the key challenges to ending homelessness is a lack of data and information about people who are sleeping rough. Better data intelligence

would get them help faster and could prevent further rough sleeping in the future.

Additionally, the homelessness sector needs to enable the public to take action more easily to help rough sleepers, and improve communication regarding ways they can do so.

These gaps are made even bigger when, as Matt Harrison, Director of StreetLink, explained: ‘People who face a homelessness crisis in their lives and see no alternative but to sleep rough on our streets have rarely prepared for homelessness. Evidence also shows that when people first reach the streets, they often don’t know who they can turn to for help.’

This is where technology has a crucial role to play, and, in particular, StreetLink.

‘StreetLink is a simple way for the public to take positive action, putting people sleeping rough in touch with services that can help them,’

said Matt.

‘This means the time people are sleeping rough is shorter, which has a positive impact on their safety and wellbeing’.

‘To make StreetLink accessible to everybody, we offer an omni-channel approach, with a mobile app, a website, and a phone line to

receive alerts from the public. We collate all this information into a single database on the Salesforce Service Cloud.’

StreetLink was started in 2012 on a shoestring budget, with a website, a database, and a phone number, based in one office, and with some simple mobile apps. These were all managed separately for a few years, which worked at first, but as the systems developed and became more sophisticated, the limitations began to affect the quality of service. Matt added, “When we first started StreetLink, we expected most alerts from the public to come via the phone line, but even in the first winter of 2012/13, about half our alerts came via digital channels. We had lots of manual processes and systems. Reporting was a particular challenge, as we had to integrate data from multiple systems at the end of each quarter.”

And by 2016, three quarters of their alerts were digital, mostly from the website, and alerts from the old mobile app had also caught up with the phone line. Use of the service had doubled and they were under immense pressure to keep up, so it became clear they needed a better digital solution.

Matt continued, “We decided our priority was to have a single platform that would integrate all our alert channels, incorporate the learning from the first four years of running the service, make our processes more efficient and less costly, and improve our reporting. This is why we were delighted to be awarded a grant from the Salesforce Foundation to rebuild StreetLink on the Salesforce platform.”

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The two charities that run StreetLink, Homeless Link and St Mungo’s, have both used Salesforce since 2010 with much of their operations on the platform, and Homeless Link is actually an ISV partner of Salesforce.org.

So Matt and his team knew that the rebuild of StreetLink would be a complex challenge involving integration of different tools and technologies, but they were able to call on a great deal of support along the way.

“We knew about the ecosystem, both in terms of what was possible, but also knowing that most of the ecosystem is aligned with the philanthropic mission of Salesforce. When we reached out to several partners across the ecosystem, all the partners we worked with were delighted to help, and offered us some pro-bono or discounted services and licences to enable us to use their excellent offerings.”

A key part of that was a new, custom, offlinefirst mobile application, capable of handling the large volumes of engagement with the public. So StreetLink sought the services of us here at MobileCaddy to help develop the app, but we’re proud to say they found much more than that through the partnership.

“All partnership working is based on shared value and good communication, but working with an ISV partner like MobileCaddy adds another dimension,” Matt explained. “At StreetLink, we’d built one mobile app, but MobileCaddy had built hundreds. So it wasn’t a simple case of us coming up with requirements and they’d build it. It was really important for them to listen to us, our users, our staff and volunteers, and then to show us the art of the possible without driving us to a solution that doesn’t meet our needs.

“This required trust on both sides. MobileCaddy were open to listening to us first, then come up with great suggestions for improvements, and committed to making this a success. For example, only three months after we launched the new StreetLink, we experienced the ‘Beast from the East’ severe weather, and use of our app went through the roof with 50,000 downloads in a couple of days. MobileCaddy were really responsive to work with, and managed to keep our systems running at this critical time.”

We optimised the design of the new StreetLink mobile app to collect more data with greater

accuracy, and allow users to provide extra information and feedback. Its offline-first functionality is much better suited for busy city centres and rural locations with patchy coverage, and it’s fully integrated with the StreetLink Service Cloud system.

Collection of all the information through their digital services allows StreetLink to geocode and map all the data to make sure people are connected to the right local services and maximise their chances of receiving support.

Matt said, “We’re also pleased that the new app allows us to be more agile and use an evolutionary approach to development. We’re able to release updates and new versions with a flexibility that we didn’t have before.”

Naturally, winter is the most important time of year for StreetLink, as sleeping rough is not just dangerous and bad for health in cold weather, but a matter of life and death. And with the power of the Salesforce platform, and the support of the partner ecosystem behind them, StreetLink was better equipped than ever to battle the critical issue of homelessness in the UK over the last winter.

‘We know that when the weather is really cold, with snow on the ground, then we’ll see huge public attention and high use of StreetLink. We have to be ready for this, able to respond to the vital alerts from the public, and get them acted on by local services in minutes and hours, rather than days.

This means having trained staff and volunteers, but also having systems that are rock-solid and reliable when usage can spike overnight by ten times its normal amount,’ Matt concluded.

If you see someone sleeping rough, visit www.streetlink.org.uk.

Download the free mobile app for Apple and Android, or call 0300 500 0914.