(Cartoon courtesy of G. Renee Guzlas)
The Buddhist text, the Udana, tells an ancient parable. Several blind men, who have never seen an elephant, each feel one part of the large animal. They each then proceed to inaccurately describe the whole elephant, based on that one part.
Alternate versions of the parable describe the men not as blind, but as wearing blindfolds. When they remove their blindfolds, their disagreements dissipate, and they can all describe the elephant accurately.
The lesson of the parable is that when you have limited data your understanding will be incomplete and hence inaccurate.
In the homeless rehousing system, we collect large amounts of data about people, but this data is limited to their homeless experience, specifically. Healthcare systems, the criminal legal system, the foster care system, and other social services systems also collect large amounts of data about the same people. However, once again, this data is limited to people’s experience with the specific system.
This gives each of our systems an incomplete and hence inaccurate view of each person and of the homeless population at large. This, in turn, makes it much more difficult to apply data-informed decision making to the problem of homelessness.
How do all our systems remove their blindfolds, and see the whole elephant of homelessness? We use a data warehouse, a tool that uploads data from multiple information systems and integrates the data into one full picture. At MDHA, we are investing in just such a tool.
Thank you to the Addy Foundation and the Meadows Foundation, for covering the expense of building our data warehouse. Through their support, they are helping our community remove its blindfolds and gain an accurate and complete understanding of homelessness, throughout our systems.
Together, through comprehensive data-informed decision making, we can and will make homelessness in Dallas and Collin Counties rare, brief, and nonrecurring.
This thought piece accompanies the fourth video of our Learning Series: Understanding Homelessness: Understanding How Data Helps End Homelessness. Don’t miss it!
Additional Resources:
Homeless Management Information System
System Performance Measures in Context
How HMIS Helps the Individual Person Experiencing Homelessness
How Sharing Data Through a Data Warehouse Can Help the Person Experiencing Homelessness
Introduction to Data Warehousing: Definition, Concept, and Techniques
The Potential of Linked Administrative Data for Advancing Homelessness Research and Policy
