What does it mean to be “accountable” to you when it comes to the City’s response to homelessness?

This post was originally published on November 19, 2022.

Over the past year, as the newly constituted Mayor’s Office of Innovation (or “i-Team”) has come together with a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, we’ve narrowed our focus to one of Mayor Breed’s top priorities: “Accountability in the Homelessness Response System.”

Our work has already started to focus several aspects of the City’s response to homelessness (including the Scattered Sites program) and will expand to several more.

However, in addition to working directly with City departments to improve service delivery and create new programs, we will build a website aimed at explaining various aspects of the City’s response to homelessness, it’s goals in tackling the issue, and the progress being made towards those goals.

So, how do we do this?

We could sit in our office in City Hall and just decide what to show you. Or we could ask you.

We choose the latter.

Over the next 12 months, we’ll be out and about running surveys and workshops at public libraries, street fairs, farmer’s markets and community associations around the City.

What do we want to learn?

Here are some questions that we’ll be asking participants:

• Describe the City’s response to homelessness in 1 word.
• What does progress on the issue look like to you?
• What does accountability mean to you?
• What do you think the City is trying to accomplish in its response to homelessness?
• How is it doing? And how do you know?
• Where do you find information? Is there specific info you can’t find?

And much more.

Want to join us?

Email us at innovation@sfgov.org if you want to join a workshop!

This post was originally published on November 19, 2022. That blog has now been deprecated and is republished here on Medium in its entirety.