Dear Friends,
When your mission is to help those in crisis you don’t have the luxury of wasting precious limited resources and time on services that aren’t proven to work. Similarly, it would be brazenly foolish to operate on ‘good intentions’ without contemplating existing pragmatic approaches and data that show consistent positive outcomes for your charitable investment and efforts, especially when real lives are hanging on the balance. Our clients depend on us to help them make good solid decisions based on experience, facts and data in their urgent time of crisis.
I frequently say one of my greatest strengths is my heart of service paired with my pragmatic approach. My formative experiences with money matters as a child of immigrants relying on a single income while my mom focused on raising seven children followed by my professional financial training in adulthood have informed a model of using decision trees and relying heavily on data to stretch and maximize our resources to achieve our goals at ASHF. While we are creative and entrepreneurial we are also risk averse.
It takes all kind of talent to make A Safe Haven work and our unconventional homeless transformational program doesn’t fit the traditional mold. From the start we have been a growing and evolving organization willing to try dynamic non-traditional approaches and always learning from challenges that may arise. We have always been customer-service oriented and data and performance driven in a field that didn’t understand our approach; we persisted despite our nomenclature not “sinking in” with everyone. Today we have set ourselves apart and thankfully the field is evolving towards our way of doing business.
I am excited to be in a position to attract, hire and retain the best and most committed social workers, accountants, and multi-disciplinary experts in the field to allow them each to play a huge role in our shared big-picture vision to innovate, implement and coordinate state of the art systems while documenting tons of valuable data across the agency and focusing our expertise on doing our part to contribute to rebuilding lives holistically and to producing consistent and successful outcomes. Without boasting, I submit to everyone that there is no better place in the world to be than on a team where you are in the business of rebuilding and transforming a life from homelessness to sustainable independence and reuniting families. It’s like witnessing a joyous miracle happen every day! Ok, sometimes it is more than just about the numbers.
As for me, I am proud to work with a leadership team that moves ahead with passion and compassion while allowing the numbers to truly guide our decisions to serve in the best interest of our residents. We let the data drive our decision-making in all that we do, so we never have to guess or rely on arbitrary good intentions that may turn out to be missed opportunities due to misguided gut reactions. Fueled by the need to do ‘something’, it’s human nature to feel frustrated and demand quick fixes due to the high emotional nature that is often associated with our work. As we are in the midst of responding to the opioid crisis and overall homeless epidemics, good decisions grounded on solid data have never been more important.
