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The NHI is a multi-departmental federal initiative that has a set of common long-term objectives and some agreed upon shorter-term outputs and outcomes, but no central management function. The evaluation examined whether this multi-departmental approach enabled managers to deliver the Initiative effectively, and helped to establish a coordinated federal effort to address homelessness at the local and national levels.

To make this assessment, evaluators interviewed senior managers at the NSH and managers responsible for inter-departmental liaison for policy development and partnership development purposes. As well, they attended interdepartmental evaluation meetings, where they participated in discussions with officers from the NSH, CMHC and PWGSC about how homelessness funding was being integrated as part of their existing programs. They reviewed documents from CMHC and PWGSC that described their homelessness-related activities. Finally, in conducting the community cases studies, they inquired of HRDC facilitators, community planning leaders and provincial and municipal government representatives as to the nature of the federal presence in the communities in relation to homelessness.

Coordination of HRDC-based programs

The evaluation found that the HRDC-based components of the NHI were coordinated. Community facilitators in the regions were responsible for the SCPI, Youth and Aboriginal components together. Officers assigned to the three components were seen to be working very closely in the great majority of communities, attending the same regular staff meetings, jointly attending community planning sessions, and following largely the same procedures for the administration of projects. For their part, managers responsible for the Youth component (at HRDC) and the Urban Aboriginal Strategy (at the Privy Council Office) attended regular meetings, including evaluation steering committee meetings to coordinate the three components. In addition, at the NSH, project expenditures for all three components were jointly maintained and monitored in common databases, and financial and other management reports routinely included all three components. As a result of these practices, program managers were able to identify a need to adjust the terms and conditions of the Aboriginal and Youth Homelessness components in the second year, to allow SCPI funding guidelines to be used.

Coordination among all NHI components

Efforts have also been made to coordinate the "non-HRDC" based components of the NHI with the SCPI, Aboriginal and Youth Homelessness components, through management and staff-level meetings. These have focused in particular on developing common approaches to evaluate the various components of the Initiative and to report in other ways on what has been achieved. In the case of the Surplus Federal Real Property for Homelessness Initiative (SFRPHI) at PWGSC, there has been active and on-going coordination between the NSH and program managers and staff at PWGSC and CMHC in the development of three specific real property transfer projects and preliminary discussions about other potential real property transfer projects. Coordination in this sense was project-specific, as opposed to a senior management level strategic coordination of the two components.

Local or regional CMHC officers in particular were reported in eight different communities to have been active in working with steering committees through the provision of advice and some services in relation to engineering, property management and other housing-related issues. Key informant interviews indicate that such collaboration has been dependent largely on pre-existing working relationships (e.g. between municipal program officers or community leaders and local CMHC officers or their provincial/territorial counterparts) or the initiative of those same people as the NHI began to unfold. Extensive interviews with local HRDC officials and community planning leaders make clear that no systematic, management-driven coordination took place at the local level. It was reported that the NHI is seen largely as an HRDC initiative, with funding and other support from some other federal departments or agencies at the individual project level.

At the national level, the evaluation found no evidence of interdepartmental agreements, policies or plans that might have constituted a collaborative mechanism. Furthermore, there were no regular senior level meetings taking place at the federal level to coordinate NHI departments.

Coordination with other federal departments

Within this review of federal coordination, the evaluation also observed that there has been very limited integration of other (non-NHI) federal departments and agencies into the homelessness initiative thus far at the community level. Attendance by federal officials other than those from NHI departments at community planning meetings or other meetings related to homelessness has been almost non-existent. In two communities examined, meetings were called by HRDC specifically to encourage participation in the homelessness initiative by other federal departments, but in both cases no on-going involvement occurred. The evaluation did not include interviews with non-HRDC federal government officials unless they were identified as participants in community planning (as was the case with several CMHC officials). Evaluation findings in this regard are therefore limited to evidence of the lack of participation in community planning (the focal point for federal involvement in the Initiative) and reports of participation by local HRDC managers. Those respondents uniformly reported that federal managers and staff at the community level who do not see the direct relevance of their programs to homelessness issues are reluctant to devote time to homelessness-related meetings or planning exercises, because they are perceived as peripheral to their core functions. No instruction to participate in the homelessness initiative has been forthcoming from their senior managers, and they are therefore not accountable to do so, or rewarded for such efforts. This too was cited as a factor in their lack of participation.

Conclusion

The analysis of reported participation at the community level and key informant interviews suggests that the goal of formal national and local coordination between NHI partners has not been realized. Key informant interviews indicate that this may have resulted in part from the lack of clarity in the Minister of Labour's mandate as federal coordinator for homelessness. Despite her title, the Minister had no authority to institute cross-departmental management strategies. Consequently, there was no formal mechanism through which to encourage a broader commitment to the homelessness initiative among federal departments and agencies (whether or not they were receiving NHI funds).

While interdepartmental collaboration did occur in places at the local level, this collaboration was not the result of a planned approach at the national level. Key informants have suggested that greater collaboration could have resulted in additional partnerships and project opportunities, and that such collaboration may have strengthened community perceptions of the federal commitment in this area. However, no attempt was made in this evaluation to assess the actual impacts of the lack of coordination.