“Yes” on Homeless Housing in My Back Yard

When the Community Shelter Board proposed a massive reorganization of homeless services in Columbus, Ohio — including relocating 800 homeless housing units to residential neighborhoods — the agency turned to GCA Strategies to develop a public acceptance program. The visionary “Rebuilding Lives” plan faced strong initial opposition from local residents, the news media, and even from non-profit agencies unwilling to relocate homeless services to new areas or to reconfigure their own public funding allocations.

GCA Strategies conducted opinion research to identify key messages and target audiences, provided hostile audience and outreach training to the client team, drafted facilitator outlines, provided facilitator training for community roundtable workshops, and developed and helped implement a community participation and consensus-building plan to win approval of the Rebuilding Lives proposal.

The results: The Rebuilding Lives proposal was enthusiastically approved by the Columbus City Council and the Franklin County Commission. No community organizations testified against the most recent proposal to construct supportive housing units for homeless people within a residential neighborhood, and a total of 605 homeless housing units out of the 800 planned units are already operational. Building on GCA’s survey research and media and community outreach planning, the public outreach program for Rebuilding Lives was awarded a coveted Silver Anvil by the Public Relations Society of America in 2001.

GCA projects are successful projects. Check out www.csb.org