Housing agencies need to open themselves up to their fellow bureaucrats in other departments in order to improve outcomes and design better programs for the communities they serve, a panel of agency leaders agreed this morning at the New England Housing Network’s Annual Conference in Framingham.
Too often, panelists said, agencies are constrained by their own missions, "siloing" themselves off from the other agencies working in the area and resulting in inefficiencies. More "silo-busting" is needed to appropriately address needs, said federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) New England Regional Administrator Barbara Fields. She pointed to collaboration between HUD, the Federal Emergency Management Organization, and state and local agencies to address the devastation caused in Vermont by Hurricane Irene last year as an example of how programs could work well.
"Listening to each other’s stakeholders is one of the best parts of these collaborations," said Mary Beth Mello, regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Transportation. "I know when I go out with a housing group or an environmental group I hear about things that I never hear about when I talk to my own transportation stakeholders."
Betsy Rosenfeld, acting regional health administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, pointed to a successful government program which acted to combat high asthma rates among children living in publicly-funded housing. The program, she said, required coordination between housing agencies, public health agencies and environmental agencies to help identify affected children and properly remediate environmental factors, such as mold and mildew, which were causing the asthma.
In one city where the program was operating, a doctor called the city’s public health department to complain that his emergency room admissions had dropped to the point where it affected his bottom line, Rosenfeld recalled.
"Well, we said to him, we know your revenue depends on sick kids, but let’s see if we can work together," said Rosenfeld, to a round of laughter.
She explained that the incident inspired the program’s organizers to work with physicians and insurance companies, getting initial funding from them to help work with and identify needs, buy air purifiers and other equipment to remediate problems, and sharing with doctors some of the savings generated from the decline in emergency room admissions and prescriptions.
If agencies and stakeholders from a wide range of organizations can work together, Mello said, "We can really solve problems and add value to people’s lives."
