CEO Corner Week of 10/19/2026: State Level Opportunities

This blog is jointly authored by Ann Oliva and Cynthia Nagendra.

Back in 2022 when I started here at the Alliance, the team of senior leaders began to contemplate what we wanted to accomplish over the next three-to-five years. One of the first decisions we made was to hit the road and get a better picture of what was happening in your communities so that it could ultimately inform our work.  

As we crisscrossed from state to state, we saw a lot of hardship. We also saw so much perseverance, determination, and grit. Perhaps more than anything, we saw a lot of resolve and innovation in the face of uncertainty.  

Beneath the surface, we also saw a lot of very smart and strategic work. As communities were rushing to use COVID relief resources — resources that were vital, yet unwieldy and unexpected — we saw communities working with incredible creativity and drive.  

That impression stuck with us after our field visits, especially when we considered the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.  

We all knew that progress on the national level would be challenged in a new administration, and that we were going to have to make progress in the spaces where that would be most possible. Those spaces are increasingly on the state level.  

This awareness came to us amid another contemplation: that we would never emerge from this uncertain moment intact if we were only fighting against harmful policy proposals. 

To do that, we decided that we need to work within key states who are already making progress and innovating on various fronts. Many localities are already showing the nation that ending homelessness is possible — and proving that we don’t need to throw out years of evidence on what works or focus on arrest or forced institutionalization to get there. 

With that in mind, I want to introduce our Vice President of State Strategies and Innovation, Cynthia Nagendra. In the rest of this blog, Cynthia will describe the future-facing work she is leading. 

Introducing Cynthia Nagendra

Some of you may remember me as the former Director of the Center for Capacity Building for the Alliance, a role where I learned from dozens of communities around the country about what does and does not work to make sustainable progress on reducing homelessness.  

I recently returned to the Alliance after several years of helping to lead a research and policy institute as well as San Francisco’s homelessness system. While I was working in community, I learned a great deal more about how federal and local policies, practices, and funding streams intersect on the ground to make progress — or cause challenges — in building the health and housing infrastructure of our communities. 

This experience has given me greater certainty, not less. We can meet this moment with renewed vision, pragmatism, and hope. We can envision an America where everyone, at every income level, has a home they can afford and the resources to thrive.  

That vision is bold, but it is not naive. It rests on two decades of proof that homelessness can end, and on a field that has never been more resilient or more creative. This is the future we are building, with wisdom, conviction, and imagination.  

The following is some of our thinking about how to drive this future-facing work, and why we believe now is the moment to embrace this.

1. We want to build the whole foundation, not just the safety net. We recognize that the homeless system is bearing a burden it was never designed or equipped to take on. To make homelessness truly rare and brief and make housing sustainable, we need other pillars of infrastructure to get stronger: housing affordability, health and behavioral health care, and economic stability, to name a few. State government (and state resources) have exceptional influence over all of these.  
2. Change is possible. Things may feel entrenched at the federal level for now. But we have example after example that change is possible now at the state and local levels. Innovation, emerging practices, and a new evidence-base is being built for how to permanently and affordably house people across communities. And states hold many of the levers that decide whether people get and stay housed: Medicaid, housing finance agencies, affordable housing pipelines, rental assistance, land use, cash assistance and workforce systems. Localities and CoCs hold the keys to emergency and crisis response that can shift as other levers are engaged. 
3. We have a plan. In that vein, under our new state strategies and innovation work, we are planning to convene leaders across multiple sectors, test ideas, and evaluate practices and policies. Together, we will work to build the evidence and infrastructure we need across the country to reach this bold, unified    vision. We will incentivize and test new, promising, and emerging ideas where we want to grow more evidence. And we will create the infrastructure that needs to be built to get us closer to this goal. A cohort of states will be illuminated for their daring, evidence-based housing and health policies.

This is only the beginning. In the year ahead, we will share our vision for how our sector can be ready when the next federal opportunity arrives. That means we will be ready not only to reverse the deeply harmful policies of this Administration, but to champion bold new ones — policies that reflect our core values and lessons from communities across the country. When that moment comes, we intend to be prepared, and we invite you to prepare with us. 

Stay tuned!