Episode 184 – What if Your Project was Fighting Homelessness?

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Amy King is a champion for the homeless! Hear how she boldly addresses the need for safe, rapidly deployable, living shelters, to deliver the dignity of private space for the homeless. This is a complex project which integrates social services to provide a healing community environment in each village, and also seeks to debunk adverse public perception towards homelessness. Table of Contents 02:28 … Meet Amy04:00 … The Homeless Problem05:11 … Homelessness Data06:41 … Designing the Shelters09:27 … Looking at a Pallet Home10:47 … The Prototyping Phase13:29 … Pitching the Project14:59 … The First Client16:35 … Talk to People with Lived Experience17:32 … Impact Stories19:38 … Returning Home21:15 … COVID as a Catalyst22:43 … The Impact of a Pallet Village25:30 … Forming a Team27:33 … Kevin and Kyle28:53 … Overcoming Obstacles33:01 … Requests from Cities33:30 … Overseas Market34:55 … The Goal to End Homelessness37:39 … “What I Wish I Had Known”40:55 … Where to Next for Pallet?42:32 … Access to Housing for the Homeless43:43 … Intrinsic Motivation for the Project45:36 … Find Out More46:06 … Closing AMY KING: So housing, there’s this really popular American narrative which is homelessness is a housing problem.  I 100% disagree with that.  ... A house, four walls and a roof, do not solve a person’s homelessness crisis.  Giving them keys to an apartment does not solve their homelessness.  You have to address the root cause issue.  That person will end up homeless again.  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds.  With me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy Danny Brewer.  We are so excited you’re joining us today.  We have an incredible project story. Our guest is Amy King, and she is the founder and CEO of Pallet.  This is a public benefit corporation working to end unsheltered homelessness and give fair chance employment opportunities to people of all backgrounds.  Pallet has deployed more than a hundred villages across 85 U.S. cities.  Amy also co-founded Weld Seattle, which is a nonprofit that equips systems-impacted individuals with housing, employment, and other resources conducive to reintegration back into society.  And her passion is just incredible.  I think you’re really going to enjoy her story. BILL YATES:  Yeah, when you take a husband and a wife – and Amy has a background in psychology.  She is a psychologist by education.  Her husband is a master builder engineer.  When you take those two and combine them and take the passion they have, you end up with something amazing like Pallet. Just getting back to it, Pallet offers short-term shelter, community rooms, and private stall bathrooms.  A large interim housing community can be set up in a matter of days with minimal tools using this Pallet system.  Each Pallet structure is versatile.  Units can be used for a variety of purposes from sheltering evacuees to building command-and-support centers or for temporary housing for recovery workers.  Their motto is “No one should go unsheltered when shelter can be built in a day.”  WENDY GROUNDS:  And they’ve done so much more than just build shelters.  When you hear Amy talk, what started as a small project, it grew, and it became more and more, and they got involved in the community.  They got involved in the lives of the people who were living in these shelters.  BILL YATES:  And as we’ll hear from Amy, many of those that have experienced homelessness are now vibrant workers and contributors to Pallet. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Amy.  Welcome to Manage This. AMY KING:  Thank you so much for having me.  I’m excited to be here. Meet Amy WENDY GROUNDS:  We are really looking forward to getting into this topic and to hearing about the incredible work that you’re doing.  But won’t you first tell us a little bit about your background, your career, and how it led to fighting homelessness? AMY KING:  Yeah, absolutely.  So I actually studied psychology in school.  And I started out as a psychologist working  primarily with children, and then moved into the healthcare space and managed some surgical practices here at our local Level 1 trauma center called Harborview.  And then I did private practice for a while, so more on the business side of healthcare.  I learned a lot about business and kind of fell in love with business. At the same time, my husband, he’s a general contractor and has been for 20 years.  And so he started a construction company that we ended up very much by accident hiring people that were exiting the justice system to work in that organization, working with them, teaching and training them on the construction trades.  And my husband asked me to come work with him and help him sort of build out the business components of that entity, which I agreed to do, temporarily because I like being married to him.  I said, “I’ll do it for a while, and then I’m going back to healthcare.”  And then I just really fell in love with the people that were working with us, and I never left. So they really spurred us on to think about homelessness, addiction recovery, and justice system involvement, and kind of how that impacts people’s lives.  And Pallet, and we also have a nonprofit called Weld Seattle, those two entities were born out of that original entity.  So that’s kind of the wavering path I’ve been on since I got out of college. Yeah. The Homeless Problem BILL YATES:  You developed Pallet because you saw a problem.  Can you describe the homeless problem that you observed in your community? AMY KING:  Absolutely.  Yeah, when we started Pallet, you know, homelessness was really on the rise.  And it’s been a problem for a long time.  But public homelessness was really on the rise, and especially in cities like Seattle, where we’re from, where camping bans went away, and people were more publicly out in the open, and you could see them.  And the issue was more kind of in your face. And as we saw it and interacted with those folks, and we’re also employing people who had experience with living on the streets, we were learning a lot about trauma and how that kind of institutes these sorts of issues.  We learned a lot about broken societal systems and how they impact our ability to help people and respond to people.  And as we learned more, we just realized we couldn’t look away, and we couldn’t not do anything. Since then, of course, homelessness has really been on the rise, but being able to center voices of lived experience and spend our time around folks who have actually lived this way and learning from them has really shaped our response efforts, both from a product perspective and a model perspective.  And it’s been quite a learning curve for us. Homelessness Data WENDY GROUNDS: Do you have any data on homelessness? AMY KING: Yeah, I have so much data on homelessness! You may have seen the most recent PIT Count that came from the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. As of 2022, which is the most recent data, there were five hundred and eighty thousand people experiencing homelessness across the US. About forty percent of those live unsheltered. So they are outside or living in an uninhabitable situation, on the street, under a tarp, in a building that isn’t meant for human habitation. Interestingly enough, it’s important to know who the population is and characterize the population. We know that the data we have is not overly reliable and valid. But of the data we have, it shows that about seventy two percent of people experiencing homelessness are individuals, so individual adults that are living alone or have been estranged from their families. About twenty-eight percent are families. And about twenty-two percent of the folks that are experiencing homelessness are chronically homeless, meaning that they’re cycling through systems and they just stay outside and they’re struggling to get them engaged with services and move on. We also know that the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in America are people of color. There’s a large percentage of people that are LGBTQ, transgender youth, that’s a really high population. And then, males more than females, so a lot more men than women are experiencing homelessness especially unsheltered homelessness. So those are some of the high data points to know. Predominantly transient adults is who we serve though Pallet and who really fits our model well. Designing the Shelters WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us a little bit about the homes that you’ve developed, because I read on your website that you developed these homes out of Hurricane Katrina when you saw a need for people needing rapid shelters.  And now this has become also shelters for homelessness.  So just tell us about the actual homes that you’ve developed. AMY KING:  Yeah, so my husband, again, he was the original inventor.  He’s a general contractor so understands very much what it takes to build housing from a construction perspective.  After Hurricane Katrina he said, “It’s crazy to me that in the wealthiest country in the world that we crammed a bunch of people into the Superdome, and all of the health and safety issues that came out of that experience that were all over the news.” And really what it boiled down to was this idea of agency and independence of personal space, but with services.  And so it felt like we should be able to provide individualized housing post-disaster that allows people to feel safe and secure and not like they’re being exposed to health issues, which is of course even more relevant now because of COVID. But at the time, he felt like we should be able to do this better.  So he created the concept of a panelized shelter system, understanding that panelized construction is easier to deploy,