In the late ‘90s, Theresa Silla, the executive director of the District’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, left her home in Ethiopia to study ecology and economics at Yale University.
But something happened while she was in school that changed the course of her life, and put her on a path that would lead to a career working on issues related to housing and homelessness.
Between her sophomore and junior year, Silla began an internship with a city agency responsible for planning affordable housing developments in her college town of New Haven called the Livable City Initiative. She became hooked on learning the complex dynamics of city development.
“I really got to see the fabric of the city changing around the developments,” she said. “It was so amazing.”
For Silla, the most fascinating part of this work was puzzling together pieces of a larger development plan and seeing how any small change could impact everything around it.
“If you’re going to do a development then you have to think through how things are going to work at that site with transportation, pedestrian flow and access,” she explained.
This experience has since led Silla on a path to a career in helping and advising federal and state governments on policies surrounding affordable housing development and homeless services. Street Sense Media caught up with Silla recently and asked her about her background and experience and about her new role at ICH. Here’s what she had to share.
Street Sense Media edited this conversation for length and clarity.
You went to college to study ecology and environmental science. How did you end up working in affordable housing development and homeless services?
During my time at school, I was extremely disappointed that conservation was so animal centric. It was just so centered on flora and fauna. And a lot of the conservation strategies that people were employing at the time were displacing people from what they identified as important natural resources. The idea was, “We need to protect the Amazon forests by removing people from the Amazon forest.”
My particular area of focus was West Africa and I did a little bit of research in Cameroon and just all of the national park plans that I was seeing that were created by the Cameroonian government with the support of the World Wildlife Foundation and other conservation agencies were all about removing people from the equation. And it just…it just did not resonate with me.
I did not want to participate in something where people weren’t at the center. And what you have with urban planning, what you have with affordable housing and homeless services is people are at the center of that.
How did you end up in D.C.?
I went on a training to dive into the details of some of the federal programs that we leverage for building affordable housing in the city of New Haven. It was interesting because the training was about how to take federal rules and regulations for funding and apply that to local needs. It was so fascinating to hear from all the other communities that were using these federal dollars.
At the end of the training, I went up to the trainers, and I said, “This sounds like such fascinating work, how do you get involved?”
And they were like, “You know, we were really interested in your questions and the connections that you were making as part of this training. If you’re really interested, we’re looking to recruit folks just like you.”
So that was how I was introduced to ICF International, an organization that provides technical assistance for HUD. I interviewed with them, and they brought me on board. I worked for them as a HUD funded technical assistance provider, supporting communities across the country on how to make use of federal funding for affordable housing and for community development. That’s when I first moved to the D.C. area in 2006. I worked with ICF until 2011.
What kind of work did you do when you first came to D.C.? When did you start getting involved in issues related to homeless services?
For the most part, I was working in community development and affordable housing until the housing crisis happened in 2007. And once the housing market bottomed out, there was a real fear of people being evicted out of their homes, losing their homes, and ending up on the streets and in our shelters across the nation.
In response to that, HUD started the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program (HPRP). It was a part of the Recovery Act at that time. And it was really the first time that a nationwide homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing program was made available. And that was really my entrée into homeless services.
Once program dollars for HPRP became available I worked with HUD in setting up a help desk to help grantees answer questions about the program. And then in 2015, I started consulting for the District’s ICH, working with the executive director, Christy Greenwalt, to pull together the city’s very first strategic plan for ending and preventing homelessness in the District.
After we launched the plan, I joined the District full time as a policy advisor, with a focus on singles and veterans. As I’m sure you know, we have three subsystems for veterans, singles, families and youth.
D.C. is far away from your hometown of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
Yeah, it is a long way from home. I also feel like this flips the usual dynamic of international development where people from the States or people from developed nations send individuals overseas to do international development work. Here I am doing the exact reverse. I’m coming from overseas and working on domestic issues and supporting affordable housing and homeless services. This really kind of turns that idea on its head.
How does your family in Ethiopia feel about your work?
Well, my mother definitely feels like I’m doing holy work. And I know when she’s here, she’s just so fascinated by my life and work here. She’s most fascinated about the fact I’m not interested in driving a car, that I walk everywhere and I take the bus.
I’m from the capital city of Addis Ababa where many people sleep on the streets. Very similar to here, people aggregate to the churches on holidays. Growing up, I remember watching my mom cook as much food as possible to distribute amongst folks that were relying on the church and staying there. People who are sick flock to churches, and stay on the church grounds. In some ways, it’s very similar to here where people find safety and refuge near churches. That was a big part of the landscape when I was growing up.
What is something you wished people better understood about the ICH and homeless services in general?
Homeless services are like the emergency room to a much larger problem. You offer very specific and limited services at the emergency room of a hospital. You have a different wing where you do your surgery. You have a different wing where you provide hospice care. You sometimes even have an entirely different facility for different kinds of medical attention.
It’s really important for people to understand it’s the same with homeless services. We are trying to be very focused but we are the ER to a much larger problem of the affordable housing crisis. We need a different set of solutions for the broader problem. And affordable housing is not the same as homeless services, and we shouldn’t try to focus on the services to deal with an answer to that broad problem.
What are your priorities as the executive director at ICH?
What I’m most focused on is the FY 22 resources. We have a huge influx of resources. As part of this, I’m looking at how we, as a system, are coordinating so that all parts of the system are working well with one another, so that we are matching those resources as quickly as possible.
And once those resources are matched, people are moving into that housing resource as quickly as possible. We are really trying to hone in on that data and identify the different steps and ask how do we speed up these different steps? How do we coordinate better with one another, to move people through these steps faster? And so I think what people can look to the ICH for is that we are focused on not just looking at the data but thinking through it as well.
We also ground the data in terms of feedback from providers and consumers to really understand what the data is telling us about the process that’s playing out on the ground.
Deputy Mayor Wayne Turnage once likened us to a “think tank” and that idea really resonated with me. We’re bringing together all the different perspectives and really thinking through the pros and cons of different approaches, so that we can help guide the community towards those approaches that will yield us the best outcomes.
