Philip F Mangano is Executive Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH, which component of the Domestic Policy Council with the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It is charged with coordinating the response of 20 federal agencies. The goal is to end homelessness in America in 10-years by 2012. Initially, established in 1987, ICH was reconstituted after a period of dormancy.
Mangano earned an education degree from Boston University and a graduate degree in theological studies from Boston Theological Institute. Mangano’s advocacy to reduce or end homelessness spanned two decades prior to his appointment by President Bush (March 2002) as ICH head. His work includes the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance (MHSA), a Massachusetts-based coalition of 80 agencies operating over 200 programs serving the homeless. Additionally, he has contributed to the work of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
In this first part of a candid Street Sense interview Mangano discusses ICH’s role in eliminating homelessness with reporter M.J. Langley.
Street Sense: Please describe for our readers your role with the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) and ICH’s function: its mission, objectives, and its design?
Philip Mangano: Our work is to coordinate the activities of the federal government and create the strategy to begin to reduce and end homelessness in our country. To make those resources more available and more accessible to homeless people. So, that is a partnership that is formed in the federal government. We haven’t stopped there. If there is one thing we learned in the past twenty years is no one level of government can get this job done alone. We’re working to create a partnership that literally extends from the White House to the street. The states need to be a part of the activities because they have many of the resources necessary to respond to homelessness. So, we’ve extended that partnership to states. We’ve been working with governors across our country. There are now forty-three governors who have established state interagency councils on homelessness that mirror the work of ICH.
But that, of course, isn’t enough either; because as my old friend Mayor Minino of Boston constantly reminded us, there are no national streets there are no state streets- there are only local and city streets. And we need to be extending and ensuring that the partnership goes to those streets. We have partnered now with cities all across our country. We now have eighty-four mayors and county executives who are working with us to create 10-year plans to end homelessness in cities.
We have also reached out to nonprofit organizations and faith-based organizations who have been on the frontlines of this issue for many years for the last couple of decades. They need to be involved in the partnership so we are reaching out to include them in the partnership. But as I said, the partnership needs to extend literally from the White House to the streets.
Again the partnership passes through federal agencies, state houses, city halls, counties, to the private sector; but that is not enough. Because homeless people themselves need to be involved in partnership across our country. So we have been encouraging cities and states to involve homeless people in all of those planning partnerships because our feeling is ultimately homeless people are the customers. They’re the consumers of the efforts that we are attempting to make. If they are not involved, if their voice is not heard then our plans will go in the wrong direction. No business would establish itself without first talking to its customers and its consumers to find out what they want. What we are doing around the country is we’re stopping, we’re talking to homeless people to find what they think are the important ingredients to end their homelessness.
Whenever I go out across the country I take time in every city to talk to homeless people and I have to say in all of the places I talk to homeless people they speak with one voice. They never ask for a pill, a plan, or a program. They always ask for a place to live. And that then has to become the objective, the goal, and mission of our efforts of our planning partnerships across the country. We need to be creating places for homeless people to live.
SS: How are you talking to homeless people? Is there a structural of organizational way you are reaching out to them?
Mangano: When I talk to a homeless person for me that’s structural. When I think of the work of ICH, some people think our consumer is the administration, some people think our customers are federal agencies, some people think it is other kinds of government. I know who our customers are. Our customer is the homeless person.
So to the degree I’m informed directly by a homeless person that is important structurally because that information is brought back to the interagency council to the twenty federal agencies meeting together. The other way in which we are structurally doing it is we’ve been encouraging cities and states in the planning processes that they are developing; the formal state interagency councils that are being created to involve homeless people directly in terms making them part of the planning process asking for their participation ensuring that the consumer is at the table.
SS: Where is the Administration in its 10-year plan to end homelessness? How realistic is this plan?
Mangano: During the last dozen years of my work we worked very closely with the National Alliance to End Homeless here in Washington, DC… The National Alliance really deserves credit for launching the notion of the 10-year planning processes.
[ICH] joined in a partnership with them so much that the President in his 2003 budget proposal put a marker out there that was unprecedented in any budget ever in the history of our country. He asked us to end a profile of homelessness. He asked us to respond to people being on our streets; people who were disables; people who the researchers told us were people who were experiencing chronic homelessness. The President called on us in his 2003 budget message to end that profile. Needless to say, the Council took up that charge we wanted to move forward in the President’s initiative to end chronic homelessness. The clock started ticking in 2003. We are in our first full year of moving forward.
During that first year we’ve actually dedicated and targeted some resources specifically to that initiative. Last year we put out a modest $35 million initiative, which is now at work in eleven cities targeting people who are on the streets in our community and long-term in our shelters. We have also put out a variety of smaller initiatives, an initiative between HUD and the Department of Labor that invested in both housing and employment resources, specifically for people experiencing chronic homelessness. There is right now a determination being made around the Social Security Administration initiative to do more outreach to enroll more people experiencing chronic homelessness and social security benefit. And that’s very important because through the social security benefit homeless people get access to both healthcare – they have insurance, that is – and income.
So we’re moving forward. As an advocate, of course, things never move quickly enough I have to admit. So we’re working with Washington.
How realistic is it? We could be easily demoralized when we look around our country and recognize that all of our efforts in the last twenty years have not been enough to stem the rising tide of homelessness. We know from the research there are more homeless people in our country than ever before. There are more homeless programs than ever before. Even though things are still going in the wrong direction I believe that in constellating the political will and in some of the investments that we are focusing on this issue we will accomplish our objective: we will eliminate chronic homelessness in this country in the next ten years. It may seem unrealistic now but it is no more unrealistic than the work that the abolitionists, the civil rights activists.
Look for Part 2 in the March Issue of Street Sense
