Strategy
Strategy
The consultants at HJC bring decades of experience leading strategic planning efforts ranging from local community initiatives to national-scale systems change efforts.
We offer deep subject matter expertise across federal, state, and local policy landscapes and understand the complexity of navigating cross-sector systems.
HJC helps organizations develop clear strategies that align vision, policy, and implementation to achieve long-term impact.
Client:
Project:
Transitional Age Youth (TAY) System Expansion
Services:
Facilitation | Implementation | Strategy
Description:
HJC partnered with the Los Angeles County Department of Homeless Services & Housing (HSH) to lead the community design of a large-scale (up to $100 million over five years) philanthropic investment to expand youth interventions across LA County.
The community design process engaged young adult leaders, providers, and system partners in a series of community workshops to set the goals and interventions of the funding application; established a workgroup, co-led by a young adult leader, to provide a deeper level of program and policy design; and established an ongoing design loop to integrate community input and shared decision-making into the implementation of any intervention funded under the expansion.
HJC will partner with HSH throughout the implementation process to ensure young people, providers, and system partners play an active role in the county’s work to prevent and end youth homelessness.
Client:
Project:
Learning Community Facilitation and Design & Implementation of Resource Website for Lived Experience System Partnerships
Services:
Facilitation | Implementation | Strategy | Tool & Resource Design
Description:
HJC worked with Lived Experience Grove to conduct a community-driven learning tool development program, and hosted a national convening of partners and legislators to share the results.
Our team created and launched a year-long Learning Community program with four communities across the country. This included facilitating monthly topic-driven all-community calls, as well as monthly community-specific coaching calls. The goal was to generate content for a web-based learning tool that can be used by any community to access relatable community examples, dynamic learning activities, and resources to facilitate learning. Eager to learn from one another, the all-community conversations led to a deeper and more robust outcome for each community.
Topics covered over the course of the year included:
Culture Shifts that lead to Equity
Vision Setting and Co-Design
Recruitment and Onboarding
Naming and Navigating Conflict
Compensation and Supports
Navigating the National Landscape
Power Sharing
Once the program completed, we convened over 50 national partners, as well as Minnesota representatives, for a three-day Lived Experience conference in Los Angeles. We presented the program and process, and launched the digital learning tool that was designed by members of the communities that will use them.
Their impact goes beyond local work. They have been intentional about connecting us to broader learning communities and helping build spaces like the Lived Experience Grove, where people with lived experience are not just present, but leading and shaping systems. Because of that, our work is more grounded,
more connected, and more effective.
LaQuita Love-Limo
Stable Housing is the Priority (SHIP)
Client:
Project:
Chicago CoC Equity Action Plan & Impact Implementation
Services:
Coaching | Facilitation | Implementation | Strategy | Tool & Resource Design
Description:
HJC worked with All Chicago and in partnership with CoC Impact Team (a workgroup of the Continuum of Care) to facilitate the co-design and implementation of a Racial Equity Action Plan based on the findings of a landscape analysis provided by Arc4 Justice.
The action plan provided an accountability structure for moving the work forward, including definition and consensus on goals and metrics, timelines and benchmarks; identification of key decision makers within the CoC; assessment of tools and resources needed; anticipating and troubleshooting bottlenecks and blindspots to build trust and transparency across teams.
HJC also worked with All Chicago to implement priority strategies identified in the action plan, including co-designing tools and resources, facilitation, and coaching.
Housing Justice Collective has partnered with our community to advance more equitable and just practices within the Chicago Homeless Response System.
Through their coaching, our community team examines the homeless response system with greater curiosity and accountability, identifying areas for improvement and pursuing necessary structural changes.
This work has challenged us and propelled us toward real change—not merely good intentions. HJC consistently encourages growth, grounding their approach in a shared commitment to making this work not only impactful, but irresistible.
Elizabeth Perez, All Chicago
Client:
Project:
Organizational Strategy & Development, Program
Building & Resourcing Support
Services:
Coaching | Facilitation | Policy Design | Strategy | Tool & Resource Design
Description:
HJC has worked alongside a team of young people with lived expertise, community partners, and funders for over three years to develop the youth-led intermediary called the
LA Emissary. Employing the full spectrum of HJC service offerings, we support LA Emissary’s advocacy and skill building initiatives, and collaborate to create the programs and structure to implement their theory of change and affect system transformation to better serve unhoused young people.
LA Emissary focus areas are Local Organizing & Training through the formation of the 8 regional teams of young people hosted by non-profits in every region of Los Angeles County, County-wide System Change Efforts to End Youth Homelessness through the Cross Systems Leadership Table, and Youth-led Grantmaking through the Youth and Young Adult Pooled Fund, a philanthropic pooled fund that has granted over $6 million dollars in LA County to housing and services and youth leadership programs.
LA Emissary has become a well-oiled machine with the support of Housing Justice Collective. They’ve opened doors we were ready to run through and equipped us with skills across facilitation, mediation, and grant management.
More than that, they listen, they care, and they prioritize our intentions. HJC has truly been the frame that holds our picture together.
La’Toya Cooper, LA Emissary
Client:
Project:
Community Engagement &
Rental Assistance Policy Framework Design
Services:
Facilitation | Policy Design | Strategy
Description:
HJC is supporting the design of a state rental assistance policy & strategy built in the interests of all Californians, that can be won in the state legislature, and push future governor priorities.
The activities within the scope of this project include: complete landscape assessment; facilitation of a series of regional and statewide stakeholder engagement sessions; a framework for action and shared narrative to connect with future legislative opportunities.
Client:
Office to Prevent & End Homelessness Illinois Department of Human Services
Project:
Plan to End Homelessness
Services:
Coaching | Facilitation | Strategy | Tool & Resource Design
Description:
HJC worked with senior leadership of the State of Illinois Office to Prevent and End Homelessness to develop the next two year plan to end homelessness. Areas of focus included:
Leadership Team Development and Alignment to improve team dynamics and culture of the recently expanded leadership team, and implement cohesion, governance, and accountability measures.
Framework Review and Strategy to facilitate assessment of options, addressing of anxieties around racial equity, course of action decision-making and adherence.
Engagement Process Design to develop a structured and cohesive engagement process to be utilized by the senior leadership team, and design an approach to ensure alignment and clear steps for the agencies being engaged.
HJC has taken big-picture concepts such
as transparency, fairness, and equity and translated them into meaningful action within the homelessness sector and local continuum of care.
By breaking these broad principles into practical, actionable strategies, HJC has helped move conversations into implementation.
Eugenia R. Olison
Office to Prevent & End Homelessness,
Illinois Dept. of Human Services