Commonwealth Club: Rethinking Homelessness Response: The Case for Belonging and Connection

Homelessness is one of the most vexing issues in the social impact field. Despite countless attempts and huge budgets to address it, and everyone anxious for results, it persists. Many talk of housing first, what other inputs can achieve results, and how can they be measured? Join moderator Kevin F. Adler, founder of Miracle Messages, for an intimate roundtable exploring a critical but often overlooked dimension of homelessness: the need for connection, relationships and belonging alongside housing and material support. Through lived experience, direct service, policy and systems-change perspectives, panelists Lawrence Lincoln, Khadijah Williams, Christina Garcia, and Miracle Messages founder Kevin F. Adler will discuss what it means to treat relationships as an essential intervention, not simply an outcome. Together, the conversation will examine how human connection can strengthen homelessness prevention and response, humanize social service systems, and shift the conversation from “housing first” to “housing AND belonging.” About the Speakers Kevin F. Adler is a social entrepreneur, sociologist and bestselling author whose work explores how connection can help people move beyond homelessness—and heal our fractured society. As the founder and board chair of Miracle Messages, Kevin has pioneered the concept of “relational poverty” as an overlooked cause and consequence of homelessness and mobilized thousands of everyday people to take action. Since 2014, Miracle Messages has reunited more than 1,200 unhoused neighbors with loved ones, facilitated over 500,000 minutes of calls and texts between caring volunteers and unhoused neighbors, and launched one of the nation’s first randomized controlled trials of guaranteed income for unhoused individuals—a $2.1 million study led by researchers at USC and funded by Google.org. Adler is the author of When We Walk By, which Publishers Weekly called “a must-read for anyone interested in solving the problem of homelessness,” and Natural Disasters as a Catalyst for Social Capital, which examines how shared trauma shapes community resilience.  Christina Galindo Garcia is president of the Community Economic Defense Project (CEDP), one of Colorado’s largest organizations dedicated to preventing homelessness and advancing housing justice. Having experienced homelessness, foster care, incarceration, and recovery herself, Christina brings both professional expertise and lived experience to her work transforming systems that impact people experiencing poverty and housing instability. Over the past 12 years, she has led the expansion of statewide housing, rapid rehousing, supportive housing, and homelessness response programs that have helped tens of thousands of Coloradans remain safely housed. Christina serves on the boards of the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and the Community Investment Alliance. She is passionate about creating systems rooted in dignity, belonging, and the belief that every person deserves a place to call home. Lawrence Lincoln, formerly unhoused, partnered with Lifelong Trust Health Center and Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless to navigate through the perils of life on the streets, emerging as a human being residing under a roof. His life was transformed from one devastated by the violence that attends poverty and addiction to one grounded in self-care, education and community service. An alumni of Camden Coalition’s Consumer Scholar program and advisor/contributing editor for the Center for Health Care Strategies Partnership for Action and Complex Care Research Agenda, Mr. Lincoln has redirected his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) toward post-traumatic growth, attaining a degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University (SFSU). He has gone on to become an MFA candidate in SFSU’s Creative Writing program. Mr. Lincoln has been published by SF Weekly with the article “Sheltering in Place Without a…