Blog: Homelessness Ends Here

I recently finished Atul Gawande’s collection of essays: “Better - A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.”  In this very readable book, Gawande, who also contributes regularly to The New Yorker, reflects on why and how, when measured on a scale of achievement and success, some of us land at the highest end of the bell curve and others do not.

While his subject is medicine, his observations have relevance for any field of endeavor and they certainly ring true to those of us wrestling with the challenge of ending homelessness.

“Betterment,” he says, “is a perpetual labor.” His prescription? You have to work every day for change. You need a diligent attention to detail, a disciplined commitment to doing things thoroughly and well, a refusal to accept failure and a constant search for new solutions.  It sounds simple, but to get better is fiendishly difficult.

His work celebrates those who, despite working within severe limits and facing huge obstacles, use their ingenuity to craft new, better solutions. He points out that often these solutions are the result of people working together as a team.

I put his book down and thought of the professionals and volunteers, clients and consumers, who we’ve worked with over the years.  How they show up day after day to serve and to contribute their best to our communities and who, whether they know it or not, are the keenest practitioners of the art and craft of betterment.  May their tribe increase!

Robert Hohler is executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust, and chair of the national Steering Committee for Funders Together to End Homelessness.