This past week I came across an article printed by the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “To End Homelessness, the Energy of Money Must Change.” I usually write about education and learning, but stay with me here as we use homelessness to inform us how improving learning for our young people could improve.
Daniel Heimpel, the author of the homelessness article, writes:
“The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that there were more than 580,000 people experiencing homelessness across the United States on the eve of the pandemic in 2020.”
“The cost to house every single person in interim and permanent housing – ranging from dorms to studios – at $200,000 a door is $116 billion, according to my back-of-the-napkin math. Remember, Elon Musk spent more than a third of that buying Twitter.”
Heimpel continues,
“In Los Angeles County, where I live, the last count found 66,436 unhoused people living on the streets, in vehicles, or in ‘makeshift dwelling.’ Using the same calculus, it would cost $13.3 billion to give them all safe housing.”
“What I am proposing may sound expensive, audacious, and impossible, but it is none of those things. While I will concede complexity, creating a financial ecosystem that draws in private capital is achievable and starts with the cash-stocked endowments of America’s charitable foundations.”
When I served as the executive director of Houston’s largest educational non-profit, I worked closely with private foundations, both corporate and family. The lack of focus exhibited by those foundations, their inability to come together to attack the real problems of a urban center like Houston, Texas, was striking.
What Heimpel argues, taking some of America’s charitable foundation’s endowments and targeting a problem like homelessness, demonstrates a strategy that wasn’t apparent to me while living and working in Houston. And it seems like other cities suffer from the same malady – the inability to focus money toward our most critical issues.
Heimpel plays out this idea of targeted funding when he writes:
“If one-tenth of U.S. charitable foundation wealth ($100 billion of the total $1 trillion) was invested in housing, we could move 500,000 people, 86 percent of this nation’s unhoused population, off the street.”
“Los Angeles’ charitable foundations hold at least $100 billion in their endowments. One-tenth of that sum could move 48,500 unhoused Angelinos into interim and permanent supportive housing, effectively ending street homelessness in the county.”
And that is without additional funders like banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds.
Heimpel concludes by writing:
“More than eradicating homelessness in Los Angeles, the commingling of deconstrained government funding and philanthropic investments will clear the path for a new flow of institutional capital. One where the energy of money is changed, moving from extraction to regeneration.”
Even though Heimpel focuses on homelessness in his writing, the idea of using a public/private partnership to take on our country’s most pressing issues is a compelling one.
What would happen if one-tenth of U.S. charitable foundation wealth ($100 billion) was applied to the construction of a new learning system for our neediest children – black, brown, and poor? Call it a piece of national action research, to see if a new learning system could make our most vulnerable children smarter and stronger than the current traditional system.
Add to the $100 billion of U.S. charitable foundation wealth the financial contributions from government, banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds and I think you would have a fairly substantial nest egg to use when creating a better system of learning than what we offer poor kids today.
Let’s imagine The Learning Center Project launches with $200 billion per year and runs for a 10-year period. Based on a per pupil expenditure of $7,500 per year, around 266,000 learners could be a part of the project. Learning coaches could be identified, hired, and trained. Learning cohorts could be formed, where young learners and their adult learning coaches both agree to work with each other. Learning plans could be created for each of the 266,000 learners. Families could be invited to play a part in their children’s learning journey. Communities, towns, and cities could become the learning cohort’s classroom.
After 10 years, let’s compare the reading, writing, problem-solving, and character skills of the young learners connected with The Learning Center Project with similar students enrolled in traditional U.S. public schools. If The Learning Center Project learners score better, more resource, usually kept for America’s public schools, could move over to support young learners and their learning plans, their learning coaches, and their fellow learners inside their learning cohort. If the traditional system out-performs The Learning Center Project, then, like all action research, we have learned something valuable moving forward.
Surely, especially for those kids currently trapped inside our worst schools, this idea would be worth trying. Right?
Right.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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