Strat Plans are usually shelved after creation, because they don't really mean anything. People put them together kind of like I used to put Lincoln Logs together, when I was 5 years old, but at the end of playtime they all go back in the box. If you want to change that pattern, and God bless you if you do, you would start by having a COMPELLING VISCERAL VISUAL IMAGE at login, every time every staffer starts their computer. YouTube is full of motivational videos. Why the heck can't we have one? Get some compelling music, I don't know, Olympic marches, and walk through an ideal community. There are walking communities in this country now that would be a good place to start. Make the Strat Plan part of daily life. Let it infest every activity of the work day. Since the Outstandings are now rationed, you could take all that energy that no longer earns one Outstandings, and channel it into reporting useful data, anecdotes, whatever, into a main database, to support Strat Plan goals. I remember seeing that Coolio song used for HUD videos, years back, from Dangerous Minds. God it was depressing. How about something uplifting? Something that would make staff want to stand up and cheer? I hear Shaun described as a near genius. Genius counts for nothing, gentlemen, the only report card is results. Results start from people who have their hearts in what they do.

This plan is better than anything before it. As I look at it, it is just not big enough. Where is the project to create a Chicken Soup for the Soul book, of inspiring stories of people who overcame great odds to accomplish something great, in subsidized housing? People in subsidized housing are either ignored or demonized. Where is the plan to develop a simple course of training- using different modules according to need- to take someone with a 3r grade reading level, to being an entrepreneur? Pandora Patton was doing this kind of work all by herself, 14 years ago, in 3rd world countries with a lot fewer resources than this country has. The Mennonites do this kind of work, overseas. Where is the plan to take the VITA handbooks, and adapt the technology to American needs? Where is the detailed plan to invite public input, and develop the best web resources in the world? With all due respect, we live in AMERICA. America is the most creative country in the world. We need a Strat Plan to grow into. Mr. Sims, you want wow level service- we need a wow level strat plan. It needs to be a whole lot bigger than it is. Where is the plan to invite people like Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, and many others, to come up with ideas to help people transition out of subsidized housing into self-sufficiency? HUD has a unique position- it is the crossroads of many, many organizations that don't know about each other. Where is the detailed plan to have web-based networking? In the past, HUD's forums were so hard to use nobody used them. This forum broke that barrier. Mr. SIms, we need the equivalent of the speech the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King gave in DC, the "I have a dream" speech. We need an inspiring vision, in this plan. We need a plan that doesn't just speak to the head, we need a plan that speaks to the hearts of every citizen, that sets them on fire with the possibilities, and desire to do something for their community, now. You guys talk big. Good. Let's see a BIG strat plan. We need to shoot for the stars.

Look at these goals:
▪▪Reducing the number of households with worst case housing needs.
▪▪Increasing the proportion of HUD-assisted families in low-poverty and racially diverse
communities.
yy Ending Homelessness
▪▪Reducing the number of homeless families.
▪▪Reducing the number of chronically homeless individuals.
▪▪Reducing the number of homeless veterans to 59,000 by June 2012 (jointly with the Department of Veterans Affairs).
Good as they are, they are all negative. It's like losing weight. Are you inspired by the thought of losing weight? Most aren't. The way to release all that weight, though, is to quit thinking about the weight, and to generate an inspiring vision of what it would be like to be healthy, and coincidentally without the weight. Inspirational exercise videos, exercise toys, anything that turns on positive feelings. I read about a sales office, where when a significant goal was met, the person who met it got to ring a huge gong. The effect was electric, everyone wanted to ring the gong, and sales went up a lot. How do we celebrate success? Oh wait. We don't. How much sense does that make? And on those goals- they are fine- however you need to add another goal- fostering the creation of self-sufficient, vibrant, healthy communities that TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN PROBLEMS. Because that is what healthy communities do. Modern medicine manages and treats disease, which is why, outside of the emergency room, it is largely ineffective, and extremely expensive. A much more cost effective approach is healing. We need to spend more time healing, than managing disease. Many people don't like this idea, they think they will work themselves out of a job. You know, if I was good enough to work myself out of this job, I would be good enough to make 7 figures a year, and take a week's vacation every month. Keeping people dependent is an insult to their spirits. Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him and his family for a lifetime. This simply truth is so mundane it is invisible.

with feedback. The idea about improving educational outcomes, as one example among many, needs to be fleshed out a whole lot better. How are you gonna do that? Can you get President Obama to send a letter to any kid who pulls at least a B average, from the projects, the way he does for people on their birthdays? Hugh Price, formerly of the Urban League, had some absolutely wonderful ideas about how to do this- how are you going to pull in those ideas? I can think of at least 100 ideas, myself, and realistically we need at least 1,000 ideas to really make this happen. We need to stop reinventing the wheel everywhere, and start having real Business Intelligence, or well Community Intelligence, to give each other a leg up.

It is a fact that people living in poverty often suffer from poor nutrition. Community gardening is a good way to provide low/mod families with an extra source of food, increase their intake of healthy foods and teach children that food doesn't come from a bag or container. If we allowed communities to pay for community gardens with CDBG funds, or gave bonus points to Homeless projects which had a community gardening component, we could help to meet these two goals, as well as having an impact on the environment by locals not purchasing as much food that was trucked in from miles away. The impact on families would be large, with a comparitively small investment of funds. Additionally, many of the university agriculture extensions will work with people to help them get started with gardens and also show them how to can and preserve their food, so that they can enjoy nutritious foods during the winter months. Where necessary, programs could be tailored to include an educational piece about nutrition and cooking, for people who may not know how to cook some of the items grown in the community garden.

We need a detailed Web Resource List, to support this. HUD does not have anywhere near enough of staff formally assigned to do this, which is a major bottleneck. The resources list is a significant part of the fuel for getting to your goals, and it should be something that grows regularly, almost as if it were a living being of information. HUD needs to foster Interest Groups, including staff and clients, in areas from microenterprise, to community gardening/Permaculture, to doing youth programs on shoestring financing, to family reunification, to AA and addiction groups, to healthy food choices, to creating urban groceries and food cooperatives, to clothing cooperatives, to cooperative childcare, to a computer center interest group perhaps under the Neighborhood Network concept but additional to what is done now, to every other piece of the set of programs necessary to bring people into self-sufficiency. I will not use the word committee, because of the connotations that little gets done, let's use the word interest group, where people cooperate in sharing ideas and resources. If you are serious about this Strat Plan, and I think you are, you will need interest groups, to develop what needs to be developed. You don't have the time to do this yourself. If you are serious about what you say, this is absolutely essential, and furthermore at this time, you don't know what even half of the interest areas will have to be to accomplish the goals you state. This concept is not new to HUD; I have been part of such groups in the past, however management mostly didn't listen to anything that came out of such groups.

If you don't do this, you'll only have the current top down numbers addiction mentality, which will not produce the results you say you want.

Launch a Subject Matter Expert Program throughout the Department.
Too much government is built on technology and processes that aren't intuitive. Critical data is trapped in computer systems, people’s minds—or languishing in archives. Employes need instant access to the expertise, people, activities and content that matter. You need to engage constituents in an online community to better shape policies. Knowledge is proven in establishing trusted, secure online communities for government agencies. Reduce duplication of effort. Lower the cost of governing. Knowledge brings greater visibility of people, content, and activities, eliminating costly, redundant efforts. Find subject matter experts. Quickly discern who has the expertise to address critical issues. Knowledge not only connects employee to experts in the agency, but also all relevant content, no matter what type of work process.

Yesterday, we received the new approval for Supervisors and Managers to be allowed to telework. This is much appreciated and a very long time coming.
One of the items pointed out was that this was a measure to hopefully retain and encourage staff interest in moving into management. I believe this move is excellent but the actions need to go a step further. There needs to be a pay differential for managers and supervisor. Many of our staff grades are GS 13 or higher. They are receiving the same pay without the added responsibilities. I believe that a difference in pay scale would be a motivator for staff who has the abilities to be managers to step up to the plate and take on those added responsibilities.

HUD has several programs for creating jobs and housing opportunities with funds available for non-profits to achieve the desired objectives. What we are targeting is short-term problems and the program strategies are implemented with blinders focusing on correcting the situation instead of leaving behind the lasting milestone for continuous adaptability to the resolution for future stability. At present we share program funding with non-profits and assume that they cater to the needs of the target group. At any given time, housing and job-related problems are at both levels: upper and lower where we weigh needs vs income potential of the group. Though each vary in how we define the daily needs, overall the consumer index is affected and with zero income & higher unemployment rate in corporate America affects the economy much greater than comparable improvements by non-profit in the area where people live with poverty. Until now HUD has concentrated only for the poorest of the poor ignoring the poverty storm flowing from the top that is affecting the lower level of poverty and overall economy.
The need of the hour is to build an alliance corporate America in employment and housing conditions strategizing the partnership whereby HUD can access the demographics of the working class of each area, state and share programs with employers as motivation to enhance productivity and strengthen the work force morale for secured future. The target should be for the large corporations that controls large number of employment and general huge income locally and for the employees. As we have recently observed majority of automobile, and engineering industries were shut down it has created a huge drought in local economy where the affects were much louder than the efforts of small non-profits in the area trying to recoup the needs of few locals.

For the cost of rent for a 1 to 3 year period these miniature homes can be constructed bought and paid in full. These homes would range in square footage from 94 to 350 sq. ft. They have all the amentities of a normal house and provide ample living space. When constructed with the mind set of maximising every square inch, its amazing what can be done with such limited space. If you dont think so, I urge yu to just take a look at http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com The featured house is 94 sq, ft, It's truely amazing what can be done with that little space and still be able to live in comfort. I dont know any homeless person who would turn down a roof over their head like this. I would suggest the 94 sq. ft. model for the homeless and then progressive larger ones based on income level, needs and what monthly payments a person could afford. The tumbleweedhouses.com site offers videos of them, as well as youtube. The houses can be constructed for far less than the site is selling them for. I am just using the site as an example. A development of 94 sq. ft. houses for the homeless. Then in each seperate development you could have progressively larger ones built. Each community / developement would have all the same size houses.

We need better measures of effectiveness, and even of community health. Human services are a large part of the budget. A lot of that is Medicaid. OK. How do we know the services work? Where are the measures?

People claim that the needs of our citizens require an even bigger financial commitment. How do they know? Duplication, a lack of coordination and simply spending money on approaches with no proven effectiveness is rampant. We can't afford this.

We need accurate, human-services yardsticks. Where is the agreed-upon way to measure the effectiveness of human services. When we build a bridge, we build it to engineering specifications to make sure it is adequate and no lives are lost by its failure. No such standards are consistently applied to services, yet even more lives may be at stake.

Programs funded could use long-term studies in peer-reviewed, scientific journals to help prove their effectiveness. We owe it to those being served to provide effective and proven care.

We need to pick one screening tool: Although effective treatment of persons with services needs begins with accurate screening, nobody really coordinates clinicians' or even social workers' assessment tools used to measure individual problems, leaving it up to the preference of each provider. This means agencies can use dozens of different measures that assess some problems while ignoring others. Misdiagnosing a mental illness or ignoring substance abuse can be the result, ill-serving the public and wasting taxpayer's money.

Washington state requires state agencies to use the same highly effective screening tool to measure mental health disorders and substance abuse dependency, including an assessment of suicide risk, for adolescents and adults. This forced clinicians who worked with widely varied populations in different agencies all to get on the same page. Washington has saved money, and lives, as a result.

We need to build communities to solve problems. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about "Million Dollar Murray," the nickname given to a homeless man in Denver who cost a million dollars a year in emergency and other services because the city managed his homelessness rather than solving it. There are tens of thousands of Murrays in our country, yet agencies and the federla government do little to exert the leadership to fix these problems.

Much good can be done when a strong, local human services department coordinates regional help for citizens. Some communities have gotten churches, the police department, local businesses, the hospital and even neighborhood pizzerias involved in providing help for the homeless on cold winter nights. Churches may take turns providing shelter while volunteers prepare the food. Each night, social workers interview individuals to help find the homeless permanent shelter, evaluate their problems and help them better their lives. The approach is practical, inexpensive and strengthens the entire community. Ignoring these problems, besides being shortsighted, is an expensive approach we cant afford.

We are not going to see a large influx of new dollars, which means we have to use what we have far more effectively. A Seal team of under 10, in certain situations, can do far more than a battalion of 600. We need to start thinking that way. This kind of thinking needs to infuse the Strat Plan and everything else we do.

I think before vouchers are given to families, they should sit down with a counselor and set a goal to accomplish while on Section 8. Rather it be finding a job, going back to school, ect, and give them a time limit to acomplish these tasks. And the reason I say this is because if they had the option to do these things for them-selves and become Self Sufficiant and move off of Section 8, than it won't be so many people just sitting around for years on Section 8 so other needie families would have the chance to get help and become self sufficiant aswell. As I say "This World Needs Change" and the only way we can acomplish change is if we change one family at a time.......Thank You