**NOTE** This document is living and in BETA 1.0. We will update it with a Phase 1 approach focusing on collaborative systems designs events to identify root challenges for Data Sharing Policy and Best Practices.  This step is critical to bringing together the right stakeholders both lived experience, experts and policy makers. The events will take place across 10 school districts and their city counterparts. The results will be a combination of best practices that can be shared across districts, policy changes to remove some of the data sharing barrier. Additionally, create a more exact set of open source technology requirements, which is targeted to a common set of requirements across the participating districts. Any technology developed will be piloted inside the 10 districts and cities. – To be updated on April 17th 2022

Sean Kvingedal – President of the Board at FuseChange.org

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1.4 million children in over 13,800 school districts across the US are homeless or living in temporary housing. It is estimated that 87% of those children will end up homeless in the future, if they do not graduate from school.

In the New York City Department of Education (DOE), 1 in 10 students are homeless or living in temporary housing. To improve the situation, the DOE invests $60 million annually in a program called Students in Temporary Housing (STH) with 350+ DOE employees dedicated to supporting homeless students.

Their case management system consists of 20,000 cases annually maintained on paper and in disparate, dated computer systems. As a result, some of our most vulnerable youth are impacted due to manual, slow, and challenging access to supporting services. This also challenges STH staff with limited real-time access to key decision making data, which is spread across 200+ shelters.

We are kicking off a program with New York City DOE, seed funding from the Deutsche Bank Foundation of America, and Microsoft technology.

FuseChange is prototyping an open source system that can be used by McKinney-Vento programs, School Districts, Government Agencies and partners homeless service providers. It enables them coordinate services to homeless youth with more accuracy and speed, while freeing up time to focus time on the solution, not operations. Think of it as engine with a dialed-in user interface, which is connected into service provider data systems. The engine facilitates the delivery of both social and educational services to homeless youth inside the city

For example if a city has 100 homeless service providers, imagine the ability to rapidly connect target services to specific people impacted by homelessness automatically.  You can also imagine being someone who is homeless or fleeing a traumatic situation. When you need services, you retell your story and provide the same data over and over again.

If this solution is used nationally by over 13,000 School Districts, we are creating a foundational technology system that re-architects how we coordinate and collaborate across cities. In our opinion, the only way we are going to create the impact we are seeking.

1. Eliminate paper-based processes with a modern data-driven case management system so schools can move away from manual processes and embrace automated solutions.

2. Establish system integrations across government and social service providers in local communities so that homeless data systems can communicate easily.

3. Enable cross-organizational collaboration to coordinate social service resources across local organizations working to address youth homelessness.

4. Target McKinney-Vento funding to be directed to specific student needs, working to ensure millions of federal funding is spent appropriately.

Build it open source and make it available to any school as a nationally scalable platform at fractions of the cost.

ONE. We believe other districts across the U.S. are experiencing a similar challenge.

TWO. Support for youth living in temporary housing is more critical and challenging than it has ever been before.

THREE. The systems that facilitate support to homeless students are not optimized, requiring new innovation and change.

FOUR. Schools have limited resources to invest in technology that could ultimately improve the situation.

FIVE. The homeless epidemic is not shrinking, it’s growing in almost every city we talk to.

The door is open and everyone knows we need to tackle homelessness. In cities across the country we see it’s exponential growth, we have limited resources, finite time, and were doing what we can to push the limits.

It’s going to take a new level of collaboration and coordination that we can’t see right now. One that interconnects and coordinates social services inside cities and across cities, weaving impact. A solution that will be owned by the districts that wants to participate vs hundreds of siloed, costly, and segmented systems.

Our theory. There are strategists and thought leaders who see past the impossible and realize the opportunity we have to make a systems change. Together, we can facilitate this change.

We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit, on a mission to accelerate social change with open-source technologies that bring communities together to collaborate on pressing social issues. Learn More

Contact: collaborate@fusechange.org