At Viam Advising, we pride ourselves on forming strong, lasting relationships in the communities where we work. Our clients know that we come from the boots on the ground work of making homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring. That experience shapes our partnership with service providers and people who have been through a housing crisis.
With a history of working with federal and state agencies as an advisory firm, we decided to expand our footprint into local jurisdictions last year. We want to go beyond large-scale technical assistance and training to lean deeper into our calling to meet communities where they are as a catalyst for change.
As we reached out to share who we are as an organization, we had to reckon with the fact that the landscape of our work was starting to look very different than it did before. Among the many evolutions, the supreme court ruling from Johnson Vs. Grants Pass opened the door for jurisdictions to leverage punitive measures that prohibit the live-sustaining activities in public spaces for those experiencing a housing crisis, which fundamentally changed the ways that communities respond to the unhoused.
When addressing homeless encampments, it has become increasingly important for us to clarify who we are and how we work. We’ve since updated our brand, launched a website, and established core values that encapsulate who we are and what we do as housing relocation consultants:
- Experience fuels transformation: We bring decades of experience and expertise to catalyze change and transform systems for our clients.
- Walk together with empathy: We value differences as strengths and lived experiences as gifts.
- Disrupt with Purpose: We benefit the people in the systems we serve by challenging the status quo through measurable, data-driven strategies.
- Cultivate leadership: We develop leaders by illuminating blind spots, fostering collaboration, and equipping clients to independently affect lasting change.
- Steward with Integrity: We honor our role as stewards of responsibility and resources and strive to uphold a sense of accountability among ourselves and those we serve.
Walking with individuals and families through a crisis is no simple task. That’s why we are in this work. We help make space by cultivating the vision for how local resources and partnerships can come together to maximize the impact of this work, so that those on the ground can focus on the critical work in front of them. Too often, service providers are expected to respond to the requests of funders and political will (or, as we use to say, “do everything for everyone”), which pulls them away from the mission of their work. When we help communities arrive at a systems-level approach, we are helping free service providers to do what they are meant to do.
Currently, we are accompanying communities in Oregon, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, and Texas in this process. By centering planning around people who have been through a housing crisis and the people actually doing the work, we build a vision for system transformation from the ground up. We also understand the needs of local government and the balance that is required for building consensus in a community. We work with our city councils, county advisory boards, development districts, and law enforcement leadership to help educate and orient communities around what it takes to foster change.
Here at Viam, we have experienced what is possible when communities are aligned, and we are energized when our clients arrive there. This year we will continue to provide those advisory services as we’ve done in the past, but we are on a mission to get to know you and to share what we’re about. In the coming months we’ll be talking about how we help clients navigate the tenuous paths of change through modalities adopted from Motivational Interviewing and the Transtheoretical Model of Change, the blinders we all experience when it comes to the potential for Collective Impact, how to overcome organizational dysfunction like staff burn out, and what is really behind the housing crises in our communities.