Alice Tousignant is the Executive Director of Virginia Supportive Housing. She holds a Masters degree in Social Work Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Rhode Island. Alice has over 30 years of experience in the fields of housing, homelessness and social services. She is the past Director of the Virginia Housing Coalition and the Associate Director of the Division of Housing at the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. She is a founder and past President of Emergency Shelter, Inc. and past President of the Richmond Community Development Alliance. She is a graduate of Harvard's NeighborWorks Achieving Excellence in Community Development Leadership program, and a recipient of the Fourth Annual Virginia S. Peters Housing Award. Alice currently serves on the Board of Area Congregations Together in Service (ACTS) and is the Board Chair of the Virginia Collation to End Homelessness.
There is always room for improvement
National research shows us that supportive housing works. It keeps people stably housed and helps them become more independent.
Since VSH has been operating supportive housing for 18 years, we can proudly say that over 90% of the folks that we house and serve do not return to homelessness. And some of our housing options have an even higher percentage.
We believe that one of the reasons for this success is our organization’s ongoing efforts to examine ourselves critically—looking for opportunities to improve our services and programs in order to create even stronger results. We know that even though we have nearly two decades of experience, we still have countless opportunities to learn.
Here’s a very concrete example. We opened 60 supportive studio apartments in Norfolk, Gosnold Apartments and fully leased them in March of 2007. Over 80% of the individuals were chronically homeless—extensive history of homelessness and severe disability. We had never had such a high population of people in need. Many people had lived on the streets for years and had all sorts of health, mental health and substance abuse issues. They also were underemployed or not employed at all. And, they were not used to paying rent. We had one case manager to start with and then hired another to provide much needed services.
One year after we fully leased Gosnold, our success rate for keeping people in housing was not up to Virginia Supportive Housing’s high standards. We were forced to legally evict 10 people, and another 10 people left for other reasons. Nobody was happy about this, including our valued community partners.
I asked staff to work with me on a corrective action plan for Gosnold. We took a very hard look at everything we were doing there, and determined that major changes were needed in the way we were handling this new and challenging population. We replaced staff that were underpeforming, had special training for both property management and services on how to work better together and communicated our progress to our community partners on a bi-monthly basis. We established a goal of reducing negative turnover (evictions) by 10% in 2009.
I am happy to report that our negative turnover at Gosnold Apartments in 2009 was zero. That’s right—we did not evict a single person.
The main reason for this great success is that our staff, both property management and services are now better trained and are working very closely together on the joint goal of keeping people in housing. It’s a lesson we’re glad we learned. And one we’ll continue to examine, evaluate and enhance in the years ahead.
Tags: Gosnold, homeless, homelessness, housing, Virginia Supportive Housing, VSH
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