Update to the Beacon Community
To the Beacon community,
From the beginning, Beacon has served as an inspiration and guide to those who want to embrace big risks, stand in the gap, and take on the hardest challenges in service to ending homelessness.
The focus of our work is an important sector of affordable housing known as permanent supportive housing. This model blends affordable housing with on-site services to help residents navigate the challenges in their lives that have made stable housing impossible until now.
Since our founding over 20 years ago, we have grown from a single congregation asking how to better love our unhoused neighbors into the largest permanent supportive housing organization in Minnesota. More than 1 in 10 of all supportive housing units in the state are operated by Beacon.
We now serve more than 1100+ residents at 21 properties across the Twin Cities. Over 2/3 of these homes are supportive housing. Our faith-rooted collaborative has grown to include more than 100 congregations.
Together we create new homes. We serve residents. And we change systems.
With this scale comes extraordinary opportunity for mission impact, but the scale of our work also makes this mission more challenging to hold than ever before.
In short: As I write this today, the state of the supportive housing sector as a whole is fragile.
The mental health crisis, a deadly and rapidly evolving opioid epidemic, and the aftershocks of the pandemic economy have hit our community hard and have caused many challenges for the residents of Beacon homes. These forces have also made our work more challenging.
For Beacon, and many of our peer organizations, this means new and complex operational challenges—surging costs, and declining revenues stacked on thin margins and old assumptions about the true costs of serving our neighbors exiting homelessness.
Over the past year it has become clear that our ability to continue to protect, sustain and grow our mission will rely on strategic and operational changes. Beacon’s board and leadership have been asking hard, but important, questions to ensure the resources we steward on behalf of the community are best aligned with securing a strong foundation for our mission long into the future.
Transparently, this has meant right sizing our budget to avoid long-term structural deficits, including the difficult decision to ensure our staffing reflects what we can afford at this moment in time. Sadly, this week we shared news internally that we are reducing staffing by 26%.
With challenge comes opportunity. The opportunity to realign has also meant that we have been able to renew our focus on our responsibilities as a supportive housing organization, including enhanced rigor around the fundamentals of property operations, asset management, and updating our supportive housing model to reflect evolving community need.
It means we will continue to create new homes but will prioritize ensuring our overall portfolio is healthy. Our pace of production will slow as we better discern how to develop a broader range of affordable housing types that can sustain Beacon’s core supportive housing mission.
And, it means that we will center the organizing, advocacy and systems change work needed to ensure policymakers better stabilize and sustain supportive housing that already exists today.
At the heart of our work is helping people, so it’s always the most difficult when our own people—the people who make our mission happen—are negatively impacted. Our heartfelt thanks go out to every staff person who has given so much to Beacon’s critical community mission.
Through all of this, Beacon remains committed to delivering a high-quality supportive housing model with the excellence, fidelity, and care residents deserve and our community expects.
This work is fragile. But it has never been more needed. And though this is painful moment to navigate, we are making the hard decisions needed now to secure this mission long into the future.
Because in the end, this isn’t Beacon’s mission. We’re just a steward. This mission belongs to all of us.
Together in this,
Chris LaTondresse
President and CEO, Beacon
Nancy Burns
Chair, Beacon Board of Directors
P.S. To learn more about the state of the nonprofit affordable housing sector, how the landscape has shifted, and the headwinds Beacon and many peer organizations are facing as a result, listen to this podcast featuring Chris and other sector leaders, or by reading one of these articles: here, here, and here.
