SPRING 2025
Introducing All Roads Works
For the majority of people who lose their home, the most obvious way out of homelessness is through work and finding an affordable place to live.
While homeless shelters often see folks with too much bad luck and too many pathologies for that approach to be reliable, we also see folks who are working, sometimes underemployed, or able bodied and simply facing too many obstacles to create opportunities for themselves. We have a long history of supporting working exits from homelessness, and this past fall we decided to take what we have learned from our clients and approach working exits from homelessness with even greater purpose. That effort is called All Roads Works.
One of the central things our clients have taught us over many decades is that solving homelessness can be quite simple. The complications that make homelessness such a stubborn problem to solve are often of our own making, often imbedded in how, as a country, we have decided to react when people end up without a home.
Not having enough resources to properly address the problem certainly makes things complicated.
Attempting to cure incredibly stubborn and often chronic pathologies (in a system that does not adequately address the health needs for those with the least) as a way to solve homelessness is very complicated.
A gap-filled social safety net combined with a dizzying maze of benefit applications and recertifications intended to aid the needy is remarkably complicated.
A 6-million-unit deficit of affordable housing nationwide is a whole other layer of complication.
And yes, even non-profits complicate things by creating programs with a long list of layered, incremental steps needed to “climb” out of homelessness, coupled with long shelter stays where every day and every step is another precarious moment that might result in failure.
About a decade ago, All Roads, in partnership with our local government and non-profit community, saw how we too had been making things too complicated in our efforts to end homelessness. When we decided to focus on housing to reliably and quickly end homelessness, we really started getting results.
All Roads Works
That’s why we are excited about All Roads Works, a renewed focus on our clients who are able-bodied. Unlike complicated, traditional shelter work programs, All Roads Works is an approach to creating “working exits” that reduces the number of steps and the amount of time needed to climb out of homelessness. With All Roads Works, we apply four steps in a new way to encourage working exits that honors what we know works best: keeping it simple.
Step One: We identify able-bodied clients who have expressed a desire to exit homelessness through work.
Step Two: The client volunteers for chores at the shelter in order to quickly “earn” a program referral by demonstrating reliability, effort, and strong interpersonal skills.
Step Three: With a referral in hand for the client, we help with the job search, or the program connects the client to one of our community partner employers.
Step Four: Income is secured and the housing search begins, with All Roads helping with deposit assistance when needed.
The innovation is in the simplicity: Identify program participants, reduce the friction to employment/income, help secure housing. Simple
How do we support these clients while they are with us? They mainly support themselves! We are deemphasizing a top-down case management approach and bringing participants together to create a group, peer-to-peer learning and supportive environment. Together they talk about what it means to give back and volunteer at the Shelter, they conduct mock interviews with each other, and they talk through the barriers that prevented them from thriving in the workplace in the past. They talk about their goal of ending homelessness and the challenges they might face when that happens.
Do the participants need training? Everyone can benefit from training, but our most proximate goal is to get them working with the skills they have now in real work environments, with actual bosses, co-workers, and customers. We partner with one of the 20,000 registered businesses in Boulder County that regularly need staff, such as grocers, facility maintenance, restaurants, and so on. Speed is our friend. Things are likely to get worse the longer you experience homelessness. For those who can work, we want to act fast.
Where do they find housing? We want to avoid investments in hard-to-build, hard-to-fund transitional housing. There are 180,000 homes in Boulder County. All Roads Works can help find housing, co-housing, or family reunification that is affordable and sustainable based on their earnings right away, so they exit homelessness into stability and don’t return.
In just 5 months, by utilizing our existing resources (and avoiding additional costs), we have seen 15 people work their way out of homelessness! Another example of how, at All Roads, we use our compassion, experience and innovative spirit to get results.
Ultimately, we simply ask, “What road are you on?”. If the answer is, “I’m trying to find a home through work”, we move you down that road, quickly.
All Roads – whatever road you are on, we are leading the way home.
Michael Block,
CEO, All Roads