HEIRS to the Kingdom
City Mission's Proprietary Model for Tracking Success
City Mission’s HEIRS model is a proprietary method for tracking the effectiveness of our programs and services in helping residents move from homelessness to independence. For every resident, we evaluate their progress throughout their stay at the Mission in these five categories: housing, employment, income, recovery, and spirituality. We believe that success in these five areas can lead to life transformation.
“Our program is designed to get results,” explained City Mission President/CEO Dean Gartland, who pioneered this model 19 years ago. By focusing on these outcomes, we can identify strengths and weaknesses within our program and formulate strategies for improvement–with the goal of helping as many people as possible find success on their journey to independence.
In 2004, Gartland began a research project to identify how agencies who work with the homeless measure success. His goals were to create a data-driven model for evaluating the success of homelessness programs and also to collect key data points to demonstrate programmatic success to donors and grant-funding agencies.
Gartland devised a questionnaire that he sent out to numerous organizations, asking them a series of questions regarding how they measure the success of their programs. The responses to his questionnaire identified five key metrics common across nearly all of these agencies: housing, employment, income, recovery, and spirituality. And the HEIRS model was born.
Gartland adopted James 2:5 as the Biblical foundation of the HEIRS program. It reads, “Listen, my dear brothers: Didn’t God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that He has promised to those who love Him?”
When he came to City Mission in 2008 as Vice President and Director of Programs, Gartland introduced his HEIRS model to City Mission and began building a program around it. The effectiveness of the program was immediately apparent, and Gartland was appointed President/CEO of City Mission two years later.
Today, our current Director of Residential Programs, Leah Dietrich, still uses HEIRS as the primary method for evaluating the success of our programs.
“HEIRS is the proof in the pudding that our program is working,” she explained. “And it also shows us areas where we need to improve. Over time, we began to see that our residents need different things, their barries are changing. Recently, we have seen a skewing of age toward a younger demographic who are finding themselves homeless. And the HEIRS model helps us to see how we can adjust to best meet those needs.”
One of the amazing things about the HEIRS model is that it is not just valuable organizationally, but it is also incredibly helpful to our residents as a tool for monitoring their individual progress through our program. Gartland continues to emphasize the importance of making sure that residents know about the goals and outcomes when they come into the program, so our staff can work alongside them to help them achieve success, because our success as an organization is just a function of our residents’ individual successes as they move from homelessness to independence.
Dietrich agrees. “It’s exciting for our residentsto track their progress, and it’s exciting for us to see our residents move through that struggle and find their a-ha moments along the way. Our residents will complete a self-assessment and then compare it to our Housing Coordinator’s assessment of their progress, and it can start a valuable conversation and help us work together to establish goals and create personalized treatment plans with each resident.”
Between 2017-2020, using the HEIRS model, City Mission achieved an overall success rate of 64% including a 78% success rate in finding sustainable housing.
Those successes are a testament to the diligent work of our residents and staff working together to establish and achieve personal goals to overcome barriers, and our proprietary HEIRS model facilitates the collaboration that generates that continued success.
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