How Pa. Housing Alliance’s new executive director plans to build on the org’s successes

Twelve years ago, Phyllis Chamberlain embarked on a road trip through Pennsylvania with then-Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania Executive Director Liz Hersh and Director of Operations Joyce Sacco.

At the time, Chamberlain was working for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, where she was advocating for federal policy to accommodate affordable housing and alleviate homelessness. At the time, Hersh and Sacco were helping to build a statewide coalition of housing partners from nothing.

(“The only people who wanted us to exist was us,” Hersh told us earlier this year before leaving her post at Housing Alliance to lead Philadelphia’s Office of Supportive Housing.)

Now, Chamberlain has found her way back to Pennsylvania — not passing through or observing the affordable housing landscape, but leading the charge as the coalition’s new executive director.

The advocate has federal policy experience, but more recently, Chamberlain headed up the Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness before making her way north to lead the Homeless Planning Council of Delaware.

In her 15 years of advocacy at both national and state levels, Chamberlain said she’s watched as advocates began to recognize that homelessness is ultimately a housing issue.

“In homelessness, there’s been such a big change toward focusing on how a whole diverse group of people can really come together and make a difference. There are so many different players,” she said. “People that experience homelessness may come from the foster care system or the corrections system. There’s really a focus on how people can pull together and how homelessness impacts all these different systems.”

"Yes, the problems are big and we can't control all the factors, but what are the ways we can work together to really make a difference?"

Chamberlain said she admires the Housing Alliance’s focus on solutions. Homelessness is an intractable, cyclical problems that can feel overwhelming at times, and Chamberlain hopes to maintain that drive toward figuring out what works and what doesn’t rather than spend time talking about challenges.

“Yes, the problems are big and we can’t control all the factors, but what are the ways we can work together to really make a difference?” she asked.

She’ll also look to hone in on the connection between housing and health issues. The more the housing community can make connections between housing stability and health outcomes, the more we will know about the importance of housing.

“For both homelessness and affordable housing, there isn’t always a huge sense of urgency to really tackle these problems,” Chamberlain said, adding that the public has become desensitized to homelessness since it became prominently visible in the 1980s. That’s created a sense of hopelessness around the issue. Chamberlain argues that homelessness can be solved — it just takes getting people “excited” about making an impact on it while remaining “practical.”

But here’s the problem: People don’t generally get excited about anything “typical” unless it’s ice cream or Kanye West rants. How will Chamberlain balance excitement with practicality?

By humanizing the issue.

“Really, with this kind of work, you can lose sense of the actual people and how [homelessness] impacts communities,” she said. “We should always make it about the people who are impacted by the policies and by the programs.”