CEO Corner: The Number I Keep Coming Back To

Seventy percent.

Since our founding in 1991, that number is the share of the people living in Hearth housing who have been with us more than ten years. Some have been with us fifteen. Some twenty.

I want to explain why that number matters more to me than almost any other one we report.

When people talk about ending homelessness, they usually talk about the moment someone gets a key. It is the photograph everyone wants. And it is a real moment, one I have watched more times than I can count and never once found routine.

But the key is the beginning of the story, not the end of it. The question that actually decides whether this work succeeded is asked years later, quietly, with nobody watching. Is the person still housed? Are they all right? Did the thing hold?

For seven out of ten of our residents, the answer is that it held for more than a decade.

I say that plainly because there is a debate happening right now about whether permanent supportive housing is worth funding at the scale it needs. The argument against it treats it as a stopover, a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else. We have been running this model for thirty-five years, and I can tell you it is not a stopover. For an older adult who spent years outside, it is the last address they will need, and that is not a failure of the program. That is the program.

What 10 years looks like is ordinary. It looks like knowing your neighbors. Like a case manager who notices you seem off before you say anything. Like a doctor’s appointment you actually keep because someone helped you get there. Like being a person other people expect to see.

One of the people who works here came to us unhoused. She is on staff now. I think about that whenever someone asks me what the outcome of this work is supposed to be.

We are the first and only organization in Greater Boston working solely to end older adult homelessness. That focus is why we have this number at all. You do not learn what a decade of stability looks like unless you stay with people for a decade.

On October 8 we are gathering at our Inspire Action gala to celebrate exactly this, and to fund more of it. I would like you in that room. Not because we need the ticket, though we do, but because it is difficult to explain what seventy percent feels like and much easier to show you.

Rhonda A. Pieroni

President and CEO, Hearth