1.4 million homeless students need critical educational & social services

We’re building a technology to optimize the delivery of social services and maximize impact.

Overview

**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.

Solution

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.

Goals

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.

Our Assumptions

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.

Our Theory

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.

Who are we?

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

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Let's Collaborate

This is a homeless systems change movement that focuses on youth and their families. We’re looking for people and organizations interested in creating an innovative platform to streamline how we connect social services to vulnerable homeless youth. Let’s chat: collaborate@fusechange.org

  • Schools and Districts
  • Subject Matter Experts
  • Open Source & Blockchain Technologists
  • Nonprofit Service Providers
  • Community
  • Business

Collaborators

Project Team

Sean Kvingedal

Danny Tekumalla

Advisor

Mike Hickey

Advisor

Mike Polizzi

Sean Kvingedal

Sean has been on a 20-year journey to leverage collaboration and collective impact to solve complex social issues. He has established student network in California to tackle environmental challenges. Been a US Peace Corps volunteer that fostered community partnerships to advance the European Union’s local sustainability objectives. Then went on to get an MBA in Sustainable International Development with a thesis on nonprofit collaboration and collective impact.

Eventually, he founded a social enterprise that raised $5 million to create a fundraising platform for nonprofits to collaborate with businesses. FuseChange was founded to place a pure focus on systems change founded with strong values, open, transparent, and collaborative with a simple mission; to accelerate social change through collaboration.

He lives in Portland, Oregon and enjoys skiing and mountain climbing with his family, while guiding aspiring entrepreneurs on their path to create technology that benefits social impact.

Danny Tekumalla

Danny has over 22 years of experience in IT across multiple domains including fintech, healthcare, and nonprofit. He is driven by new and interesting ways of leveraging technology for public good.  A career as a senior technology executive in financial services, his experience is in includes technology strategy, business alignment, solution delivery, and operations management.

Originally from India, Danny has lived in the Boston area for over 20 years. In his spare time, he travels, cooks, obsessively cleans and has weathered life during the pandemic by trying to improve his first-person shooter gaming skills.

Advisor

Mike Hickey

Mike is currently Executive Director of Students in Temporary Housing in the Office of Community Schools at the New York City Department of Education.  In this role he manages a team of more than 350 DOE staff members supporting all students affected by homelessness in NYC public schools – developing their leadership to build new partnerships, strengthen systems, and engage students and families in advancing student achievement.

Mike has worked for nearly two decades building corporate, nonprofit, and public sector partnerships on issues ranging from economic development to affordable housing, environmental sustainability, creative placemaking, social impact investment, and tech for good. Later, as an independent consultant to the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, he worked with his clients to raise and deploy capital, and create strategic cross-sector relationships.  He also co-founded Civic Consulting USA, a nonprofit specializing in public-private pro bono partnerships.

Mike lives happily in Brooklyn with his wife Ryan, a very snuggly cat, and a variety of guitars.

Advisor

Mike Polizzi

Mike is currently a Senior Director of Policy and Implementation at the College Board.  Over the last 10 years, he has delivered assessments to schools across the globe, developing a deep understanding of the student and educator experiences within k-12 school systems. As the program manager for the PSAT-related assessments, he has overseen the technological and operational systems that have connected more than 10 million students in over 20,000 schools to opportunities to prepare for college and connect to scholarships. Mike’s work is focused on scalable, efficient and data driven implementation solutions.  He has also worked in India on initiatives to remove access barriers to higher education in the US.

Mike grew up in Miami, FL and earned his BA from Oberlin College in Ohio .  He has worked in publishing, the arts and studied writing at City College. He lives in Croton-on-Hudson, NY with his wife and three daughters as well as their dog, Finn.