35 Remarkable Thought Leaders Addressing Homelessness

Every city has a version of the same argument. Some people say homelessness is a personal failing. Others say it is a systemic failure. The most informed people in the world on this topic know that the argument itself is part of the problem — because as long as communities debate causes, they delay solutions that already exist, have been tested at scale, and work. The truth, backed by decades of rigorous research and hard-won practice, is that homelessness is not inevitable. It is solvable. And the evidence for that comes from the people on this list.

According to the United Nations, approximately 318 million people globally lack adequate housing, with a significant proportion experiencing street homelessness or emergency shelter dependence. In the United States alone, the 2024 Point-in-Time Count recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night. In Europe, FEANTSA's annual report documents that more than one million people experience homelessness across EU member states each year. These numbers represent a policy failure of extraordinary scale, yet the frustrating reality is that evidence-based strategies capable of dramatically reducing homelessness have existed for more than three decades. The gap is not a knowledge gap. It is a political will gap.

The people on this list have spent years, decades in many cases, closing that gap through research that reshapes the policy debate, advocacy that changes laws, data systems that make communities accountable for real reductions, and frameworks that give frontline workers the tools to move people from the street into permanent housing. They come from every discipline this problem demands: public health, law, social work, urban economics, community organising, lived experience advocacy, and international human rights. They are building something together, even from different corners of the world, and the cumulative weight of their thinking and action represents the most serious effort in human history to end mass homelessness.

Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally and a facilitator of leadership development sessions for some of the most complex organisations in the world, works with leadership teams navigating exactly the challenges this list surfaces: how do you build the team culture and communication structures that allow your people to do the hardest, most human-centred work under sustained pressure? To discuss how Jonno might support your leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

This list was compiled by assessing sustained and original contribution to the field across research, policy, practice, advocacy, and public communication. Every person included has produced substantive, verifiable work that has moved the field forward in a meaningful way. The list spans more than twelve countries and every major discipline engaged in addressing homelessness globally.

Why Addressing Homelessness Matters More Than Ever

The challenge of homelessness is not new, but its urgency has accelerated. Climate-driven displacement is adding new streams of people losing stable housing to disasters, flooding, and extreme heat. The affordable housing crisis, driven by decades of underinvestment in social housing across the English-speaking world, has created conditions where a single job loss, a medical emergency, or a relationship breakdown can be enough to push a person onto the street. Research from the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative's California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness found that the median income of people who became homeless in California in 2023 was just USD 960 per month before losing their housing, demonstrating how thin the margin between stability and crisis has become for millions of people.

What the people on this list understand, and what much public discourse still misses, is that homelessness is not a story about the people at the bottom of society's ledger. It is a story about what happens when housing markets fail, when social safety nets have holes, when mental health and substance use systems are chronically underfunded, and when political will to act is replaced by moral condemnation of the people most affected. Following the right thinkers in this space means understanding that every conversation about encampment clearances, every debate about treatment mandates, and every argument about the cost of supportive housing is actually a conversation about what kind of society we choose to build. The stakes are that high.

If your leadership team is navigating decisions about community investment, social impact, or employee wellbeing in the context of the growing housing and homelessness crisis, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and experienced keynote speaker and facilitator, delivers sessions that help leadership teams make better decisions under pressure and have the difficult conversations they have been avoiding. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what a workshop or keynote might look like for your team.

How This List Was Compiled

This list prioritises genuine and sustained contribution to the field of homelessness research, advocacy, policy, and practice. Each person was assessed on the depth and originality of their published work, research, or practitioner frameworks; their geographic reach and influence beyond their immediate community; their disciplinary expertise and how it intersects with the complex, cross-sector challenge of homelessness; and their active engagement with the broader community working to address this issue. The list was further assessed for geographic diversity across North America, Europe, the Pacific, and beyond, for disciplinary diversity spanning research, law, advocacy, clinical practice, and community organising, and for the inclusion of voices from communities that are disproportionately affected by homelessness. Every person included has made a specific, verifiable contribution to how the field thinks and acts.

Category 1: The Housing First Pioneers

Housing First is the most rigorously tested intervention in the history of homelessness policy. The principle is deceptively simple: provide permanent housing first, without preconditions like sobriety or employment readiness, and then wrap support services around the person once they are housed. Every randomised controlled trial conducted on Housing First has demonstrated that it achieves housing stability for the vast majority of participants. The people in this category either created the Housing First model, have conducted the most rigorous research on it, or have driven its global adoption at scale. Their work has shifted the entire frame of the homelessness debate from 'who deserves housing' to 'what does it take to actually house people.'

1. Sam Tsemberis

Pathways Housing First Institute

The name most frequently invoked when the global conversation turns to what actually works in ending homelessness belongs to a Greek-Canadian psychologist who ran a small pilot program in New York City in 1992. Sam Tsemberis created Housing First through Pathways to Housing, a five-year trial that gave permanent housing to people experiencing chronic homelessness and serious mental illness without requiring treatment participation as a condition of entry. The results contradicted everything the field had assumed about 'housing readiness,' and decades of replicated research have consistently confirmed his original findings.

Through the Pathways Housing First Institute, Tsemberis now trains practitioners, consults with governments, and conducts fidelity reviews for Housing First programs across the USA, Canada, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand. His book Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives, co-authored with Deborah Padgett and Benjamin Henwood, remains the definitive guide to the model's principles, evidence base, and implementation. He received the Meritorious Service Cross from the Lieutenant Governor of Canada for his contribution to the field.

2. Rosanne Haggerty

Community Solutions

Few people have done more to demonstrate that homelessness is a solvable systems problem than the woman who converted New York City's derelict Times Square Hotel into the largest supportive housing development in the United States in 1991. Rosanne Haggerty founded Common Ground Community, establishing one of the first large-scale demonstrations that permanent supportive housing worked for chronically homeless people. She later founded Community Solutions, which leads the Built for Zero campaign, a movement of more than 100 communities using real-time data to achieve 'functional zero' for veteran and chronic homelessness.

Built for Zero's central innovation is the by-name list: a real-time database that tracks every person experiencing homelessness in a community by name, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks of a fragmented service system. Under Haggerty's leadership, Community Solutions received a $100 million MacArthur Foundation grant to expand Built for Zero to 75 communities across the United States. She was awarded the Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism from the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, an Ashoka Senior Fellow, and a Hunt Alternative Fund Prime Mover.

3. Leilani Farha

The Shift

For six years, Leilani Farha served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, filing reports, issuing communications, and conducting country visits that held governments accountable for the gap between their legal obligations under international human rights law and the conditions in which their most vulnerable citizens were living. She is now Global Director of The Shift, an international human rights movement focused on the intersection of housing rights, financialisation of housing markets, and climate change.

Farha was the driving creative force behind 'Push,' a 2019 documentary that exposed the mechanisms through which global investment capital has transformed housing in cities around the world from a social good into a financial asset, pricing millions of people out of their homes. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum, testified before parliamentary committees, and continues to use her platform as a human rights lawyer to hold governments and institutional investors accountable to their legal obligations. Her work at The Shift represents a growing recognition that the homelessness crisis cannot be fully addressed without confronting the financialisation of housing markets at its root.

4. Margot Kushel

UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative

Medicine and homelessness research intersect nowhere more powerfully than in the work of Margot Kushel, a practising internal medicine physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Kushel approaches homelessness as a public health emergency and has built one of the most prolific research programmes in the world dedicated to understanding the health causes and consequences of housing instability, with a particular focus on older adults experiencing homelessness for the first time.

Her landmark California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH), the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted in a US state, documented that the overwhelming majority of people who become homeless do so for economic reasons rather than individual pathology, directly challenging the dominant cultural narrative. Kushel testified before the US Congress in 2025 on the evidence base for housing-first approaches and has continued to amplify her research findings through high-profile media contributions, including a 2025 op-ed arguing that affordable housing, not criminalization, is the only evidence-based solution to street homelessness.

5. Iain De Jong

OrgCode Consulting

The person who literally wrote a book called The Book on Ending Homelessness has spent more than two decades helping communities, governments, and organisations translate evidence about what works into systems that actually move people into housing. Iain De Jong is President and CEO of OrgCode Consulting, a Canada-based firm that works globally with homeless service systems to improve their effectiveness through training, system assessment, and quality improvement processes. He created the VI-SPDAT (Vulnerability Index and Service Prioritisation Decision Assistance Tool), the most widely used triage instrument in homeless service systems globally.

De Jong's leadership academies on ending homelessness have run in Canada, the United States, and Australia, training the next generation of community leaders to approach homelessness as a solvable systems problem. His recent partnership with the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness to deliver the Leadership Academy in Perth, Sydney, and Brisbane in 2026 reflects the global reach of his practical, no-nonsense approach to systems change. He is known in the field for his intellectual rigour and his willingness to challenge comfortable assumptions about what is and is not working.

6. Juha Kaakinen

Y-Foundation / Tampere University

The story of Finland's dramatic reduction in homelessness begins with a man who has spent more than three decades architecting the policy and organisational infrastructure that made it possible. Juha Kaakinen was the chief architect of Finland's Housing First programme, which from 2008 led to a 76% reduction in long-term homelessness and transformed the country's approach from managing homelessness in shelters to ending it through permanent housing provision. He has published extensively on the conditions that made Finland's success possible and, critically, on why simply importing the Finnish model to other countries without addressing those structural conditions is unlikely to produce the same results.

His co-authored paper 'What does it take to end homelessness? Tweaking or transforming systems,' published in Housing Studies in April 2025, provides one of the most important analyses of the limits of incremental approaches and the structural conditions required for genuine systems transformation. Kaakinen has advised governments across Europe and beyond on housing-first policy design and is a Faculty member at Tampere University in Finland.

Category 2: The Policy Architects and Advocates

The gap between evidence and policy is one of the most studied and least resolved problems in social science. The people in this category have made it their life's work to close that gap in homelessness specifically — building the advocacy organisations, policy frameworks, legal tools, and political relationships that convert research into legislation, funding, and system change. Without their work, the best research in the world would remain on library shelves.

7. Ann Oliva

National Alliance to End Homelessness

Ann Oliva has been described as one of the foremost experts on homelessness policy in the United States, a characterisation grounded in more than two decades of work at the intersection of federal housing policy, advocacy, and evidence translation. As CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the leading US advocacy and capacity-building organisation, Oliva has navigated one of the most turbulent periods in federal homelessness policy in decades, including the 2025 shift in HUD funding priorities away from permanent housing and toward treatment-mandatory approaches that most researchers consider counterproductive.

Her decade of service at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development included designing and implementing homelessness prevention programs, rapid rehousing initiatives, and a demonstration to end youth homelessness. She was named one of HUD's 50 most influential leaders in the department's first 50 years. In 2025, Oliva launched a sustained public communication campaign to explain the evidence base for Housing First to policymakers, journalists, and the public at a moment when federal policy was moving in the opposite direction of the evidence — a campaign that has involved congressional testimony, op-eds, policy briefs, and regular commentary on LinkedIn that has reached tens of thousands of people in the sector.

8. Freek Spinnewijn

FEANTSA

For more than two decades, Freek Spinnewijn has directed FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless, the only major European network focused exclusively on homelessness. From Brussels, he has shaped the policy debate on homelessness across 30 European countries, developed the ETHOS typology that provides a common framework for understanding and measuring homelessness in Europe, and consistently pushed the European Commission and member state governments to treat homelessness as a structural policy failure requiring a housing-led response rather than a personal failure requiring moral management.

In 2025 and 2026, Spinnewijn has been at the centre of the European debate about what an EU Affordable Housing Plan means for people experiencing homelessness specifically, consistently arguing that a Council Recommendation on homelessness must be separate from and more specific than a general Recommendation on Housing Exclusion. His publication of FEANTSA's Tenth Overview of Housing Exclusion in Europe in 2025, which documented rising homelessness across most EU member states for the first time in years, including the first rise in Finland in over a decade, provided the evidence base for renewed urgency in European homelessness policy.

9. Tim Richter

Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness

Canada's most prominent voice on the national policy dimensions of homelessness, Tim Richter has spent more than a decade building the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness into the country's leading cross-sector organisation dedicated to homelessness as a solvable systems problem. As President and CEO, he has been a persistent presence in federal policy conversations, advocating for investment in Housing First programs, evidence-based funding allocation, and the kind of coordinated national strategy that has delivered results in countries like Finland.

Richter was a key architect of the 'Reaching Home' federal homelessness strategy in Canada, which introduced Housing First as the core framework for federally funded homelessness programs and represented the most significant shift in Canadian homelessness policy in a generation. He has written extensively on what it takes to build the political will necessary to end homelessness, arguing that the evidence has always been sufficient and that the missing ingredient is the moral and political commitment to act on it. His regular LinkedIn commentary on Canadian housing and homelessness policy reaches an audience of policymakers, practitioners, and advocates across the country.

10. Eric Tars

National Homelessness Law Center

The legal dimension of homelessness advocacy has no more committed practitioner than Eric Tars, Senior Policy Director at the National Homelessness Law Center, who has spent years litigating against the criminalisation of homelessness and building the legal frameworks that protect the civil and constitutional rights of people without housing. Following the US Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which gave cities broader authority to enforce anti-camping laws, Tars has been among the most prominent voices analysing the ruling's implications and helping communities and advocates understand what it does and does not permit.

His 2026 article in FEANTSA's magazine, 'Updates from a Movement Under Siege: Fighting Criminalization of Homelessness in the U.S.,' provided European policymakers with a detailed account of how enforcement-based approaches to homelessness are spreading in the United States and why the evidence consistently shows they fail to reduce homelessness while increasing harm to people who are already in crisis. Tars represents a tradition of homelessness advocacy that insists on the legal rights and human dignity of homeless people as a non-negotiable foundation for any serious policy response.

11. Donald Whitehead

National Coalition for the Homeless

The National Coalition for the Homeless is one of the oldest and most consistently principled advocacy organisations in the United States, grounded in the belief that 80% of its staff and 60% of its Board should have lived experience of homelessness. Donald Whitehead, as Executive Director, embodies that commitment: his own experience with addiction, loss, and homelessness is not incidental to his advocacy but central to it. Under his leadership, the Coalition has maintained a focus on racial justice, civil rights, and the structural drivers of homelessness at a time when much of the sector has moved toward more technocratic solutions.

Whitehead has been a persistent voice in the national debate about the criminalisation of poverty, the racial dimensions of homelessness, and the importance of funding organising and advocacy work alongside direct service. His career has spanned more than 20 years across multiple organisations including Goodwill, the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, and Saint Vincent de Paul of Baltimore, and he brings both lived wisdom and institutional knowledge to the most politically contested dimensions of the homelessness debate.

12. Jeff Olivet

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Jeff Olivet spent several years as Executive Director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness under the Biden Administration, leading the federal government's most comprehensive strategy to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025. He now serves as a senior adviser at the Initiative on Health and Homelessness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he continues to research, write, and speak on the intersection of health systems and housing instability. In January 2026, he co-hosted a major Harvard symposium on 400 years of homelessness in America, gathering researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to examine historical and contemporary approaches to the crisis.

His 2025 co-authored article in JAMA Network Open on the role of health and hospital systems in addressing homelessness as a public health crisis has been widely cited and is shaping conversations about how healthcare providers can serve as frontline partners in homelessness prevention rather than simply end-of-pipeline responders. Olivet has been a consistent advocate for addressing the structural racism that underlies disproportionate homelessness rates among Black, Indigenous, and Native American communities.

Category 3: The Researchers Who Changed the Conversation

The homelessness debate is plagued by bad data, contested definitions, and politically motivated interpretations of limited evidence. The researchers in this category have done the hard work of generating rigorous, peer-reviewed evidence that has shifted the field's understanding of why homelessness happens, who it affects, and what interventions actually reduce it. Their work is the intellectual foundation on which every serious homelessness policy conversation now rests.

13. Gregg Colburn

University of Washington

When Gregg Colburn and his co-author Clayton Page Aldern asked why homelessness rates were so dramatically higher in Seattle and San Francisco than in cities like Cleveland or Detroit with similar or higher poverty rates, they produced one of the most important reframings of the homelessness debate in a generation. Their 2022 book Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, published by the University of California Press, demonstrated through rigorous statistical analysis that housing market conditions — specifically the cost and vacancy rate of rental housing — explain regional variation in homelessness rates far better than conventional explanations focused on individual factors like addiction or mental illness.

Colburn is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed University Professor and Associate Professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington. His research has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist, and Bloomberg. In April 2025, he co-authored 'What Would It Take to End Homelessness in the United States?' — a major policy paper co-written with Margot Kushel, Marybeth Shinn, Samantha Batko, and Martha Galvez — that set out the most comprehensive evidence-based roadmap for ending homelessness in the United States published to date.

14. Dennis Culhane

University of Pennsylvania

Dennis Culhane has been one of the most influential homelessness researchers in the United States for more than three decades. As a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, he has shaped the evidence base on everything from the cost-effectiveness of permanent supportive housing to the drivers of family homelessness to the effectiveness of different intervention models. His longitudinal research on the trajectories of people experiencing homelessness pioneered the distinction between episodic, transitional, and chronically homeless populations — a framework that now underlies how most US communities allocate their homelessness resources.

In March 2026, Culhane co-hosted a FEANTSA webinar titled 'Latest US Homelessness Data and What Europe Can Learn' that brought together European and American researchers for an exchange about the evidence on Housing First models and the risks of following the American policy pivot toward treatment-mandatory approaches. His long record of making complex research accessible to policymakers and practitioners makes him one of the most frequently cited experts in congressional testimony, media coverage, and policy documents on homelessness in the United States.

15. Marybeth Shinn

Vanderbilt University

Marybeth Shinn has spent more than four decades studying the causes and consequences of homelessness with a singular focus on one question: what actually prevents families and individuals from becoming homeless in the first place? As Professor Emerita of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University, she has produced a body of research that consistently challenges the assumption that homelessness is primarily driven by individual pathology rather than structural insufficiency in the housing and social welfare system.

Her landmark prevention research demonstrated that rapid rehousing interventions can be highly effective in preventing family homelessness when they target households at the moment of crisis rather than those who are already chronically homeless. She co-authored the major 2025 paper 'What Would It Take to End Homelessness in the United States?' alongside Gregg Colburn, Margot Kushel, Samantha Batko, and Martha Galvez, which provided policymakers with the most comprehensive evidence-based blueprint for ending homelessness produced by American researchers.

16. Suzanne Fitzpatrick

Heriot-Watt University

Few researchers have contributed as much to the comparative understanding of homelessness policy across different welfare state contexts as Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Professor in the School of Built Environment at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Her decades of work on homelessness in Scotland, Wales, and across Europe has examined why some jurisdictions make faster progress than others in reducing street homelessness, and what the political, legal, and institutional conditions for effective responses look like. Scotland's legally enforceable right to housing — among the strongest in the English-speaking world — has been significantly shaped by advocacy informed by her research.

Her April 2025 paper co-authored with Juha Kaakinen and Ella Kuskoff, 'What does it take to end homelessness? Tweaking or transforming systems,' published in Housing Studies, argues that the incremental, technocratic improvements being made in most countries are necessary but insufficient to end homelessness in any meaningful sense. Genuine progress, the paper argues, requires structural transformation of housing and welfare systems that most governments have shown no appetite for. It is one of the most intellectually honest and politically uncomfortable papers published in the field in recent years.

17. Stephen Gaetz

Canadian Observatory on Homelessness / York University

The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, which Stephen Gaetz founded and directs, has done more than any other institution in Canada to bridge the gap between homelessness research and the practice and policy communities that need to act on it. Gaetz, a Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University and President and CEO of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, has built the Homeless Hub into an internationally recognised online research library containing over 25,000 items, making it the most comprehensive repository of homelessness research and practice resources in the world.

His research on youth homelessness in particular has been foundational to the development of Housing First for Youth as a distinct model adapted to the developmental and social realities of young people rather than simply applying the adult model to a younger population. He was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada for his contribution to homelessness research and knowledge mobilisation. His multi-site randomised controlled trial, 'Making the Shift,' tested Housing First for Youth in Ottawa and Toronto and has produced findings now shaping youth homelessness policy across Canada and internationally.

18. Samantha Batko

Urban Institute

Policy research has more impact when it is accompanied by genuine technical assistance to the communities trying to implement it, and Samantha Batko has built a career doing exactly that. As a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute's Housing and Communities Division, she leads research and technical assistance projects focused on preventing and ending homelessness, with particular expertise in rapid rehousing, system performance measurement, and the integration of health and housing systems. Her work helps translate complex research findings into practical tools that communities and service providers can use to improve their homelessness response systems.

Batko co-authored the major 2025 paper 'What Would It Take to End Homelessness in the United States?' alongside Gregg Colburn, Margot Kushel, Marybeth Shinn, and Martha Galvez, contributing the systems-change and technical assistance lens that complements the more purely academic perspectives of her co-authors. Her conviction that research only matters if it reaches and changes practice makes her a distinctive voice in a field that too often produces excellent findings with limited implementation.

19. Ella Kuskoff

University of Queensland

Emerging from Australia's growing body of homelessness research, Ella Kuskoff brings a critical comparative lens to the question of how different countries design and implement homelessness responses. A researcher in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland, her work examines how welfare state structure, political economy, and housing market conditions interact to produce different homelessness outcomes, and what Australian policymakers can realistically learn from international examples without naively assuming that what worked in Finland will automatically work in Brisbane or Melbourne.

Her April 2025 paper co-authored with Juha Kaakinen and Suzanne Fitzpatrick in Housing Studies is among the most important comparative analyses of ending homelessness published in recent years, arguing that surface-level adoption of Housing First principles without the structural housing and welfare reforms that underpin successful models is unlikely to achieve lasting reductions in homelessness. As an Australian voice in what is too often a North Atlantic conversation about homelessness solutions, Kuskoff brings important geographic diversity to the field's intellectual leadership.

20. Julia Woodhall-Melnik

University of New Brunswick

Youth homelessness demands specialised research because the pathways into it, the experiences of it, and the interventions that work for young people are meaningfully different from those for adults, yet too much of the global evidence base has treated homelessness as a single, undifferentiated phenomenon. Julia Woodhall-Melnik, in the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick, has contributed significantly to building the specific evidence base for Housing First for Youth, including a comprehensive 2025 systematic review published in Urban Affairs Review that synthesised and critically assessed the evidence for HF4Y programs.

Her research has been cited in the policy frameworks of Canadian housing programs and in the academic debates shaping how Housing First principles are adapted to meet the distinct developmental, social, and rights-based needs of young people. She is part of a generation of Canadian homelessness researchers who are producing rigorous, youth-focused evidence at a moment when youth homelessness prevention is receiving unprecedented policy attention across North America.

21. Martha Galvez

NYU Furman Center

The Housing Solutions Lab at the NYU Furman Center, which Martha Galvez directs as Executive Director, does something that too few research institutions do: it works directly with city governments to help them design, implement, and evaluate local housing policies that reduce homelessness and housing instability. Galvez brings the practitioner's understanding of what implementation actually requires alongside the researcher's commitment to evidence, making her one of the most practically useful voices in the field.

Her co-authorship of 'What Would It Take to End Homelessness in the United States?' in 2025 reflects her place among the most respected researchers in American housing policy. The paper's influence on the policy debate has been significant, providing a coherent, evidence-based alternative to the enforcement-heavy direction that US federal homelessness policy took in 2025. Galvez's work on zoning reform, housing supply, and affordable housing finance gives her a systemic perspective that complements the more direct service-focused work of many homelessness researchers.

Category 4: The System Builders and Data Champions

Understanding a complex social problem is necessary but not sufficient. The people in this category have built the infrastructure — the data systems, the coalition frameworks, the community-level accountability tools — that allow communities to move from good intentions to measurable results. They are the people who understand that ending homelessness is not just a policy problem but an operational and organisational challenge that requires precision, coordination, and real-time feedback.

22. Chris Ko

Community Solutions

The Built for Zero campaign, which has helped more than 100 communities in the United States achieve measurable reductions in veteran and chronic homelessness, runs on a set of principles and operational practices that Chris Ko has helped develop and disseminate as Managing Director of Community Solutions. Ko's work focuses on helping communities use data not just to measure the size of their homeless population but to actually drive the decisions that get people housed, one person at a time, in real time. The by-name list methodology that Built for Zero has pioneered depends on a quality of data and a frequency of coordination that very few communities had achieved before engaging with the campaign.

Ko is an active presence on LinkedIn, where his commentary on what it actually takes to build and sustain the community infrastructure required to end homelessness reaches practitioners and policymakers across the United States. His work with Built for Zero represents one of the most ambitious and best-documented experiments in collective impact ever applied to a complex social problem, and the results — 14 communities achieving functional zero for at least one population as of 2024 — are the strongest evidence yet that community-level homelessness can be ended, not just reduced.

23. David Pearson

Australian Alliance to End Homelessness

Australia's effort to end homelessness has a coalition leader whose combination of local knowledge and global learning has positioned the country to apply the Built for Zero methodology in an Australian context. David Pearson, CEO of the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness (AAEH), spent a Churchill Fellowship in the United States studying how communities had used Built for Zero's 'functional zero' framework to end veteran and chronic homelessness, and returned to Australia with a clear vision for the Advance to Zero campaign. Under his leadership, AAEH has built partnerships with Queensland health authorities, local governments, and community service organisations to implement coordinated data systems and by-name lists in Australian communities.

His active LinkedIn presence documents the real-time challenges and progress of the Advance to Zero campaign, including the profound systemic issue of preventable deaths among people experiencing rough sleeping in Australia — a subject he helped bring to national attention through a 2025 partnership with The Guardian Australia to investigate and publicise the scale of the problem. Pearson brings both the strategic vision of a coalition leader and the operational persistence of someone who knows that ending homelessness requires changing how entire systems work, not just how individual services deliver.

24. Abe Oudshoorn

University of Western Ontario

Peer-reviewed research on homelessness needs journals and conference platforms to reach the practitioners and policymakers who need it, and Abe Oudshoorn has been building that infrastructure as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Homelessness and as a key organiser of the International Journal on Homelessness Conference. He is also a researcher and Professor at the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing at the University of Western Ontario, bringing a health sciences lens to questions about how people experiencing homelessness access, or are denied access to, healthcare.

The IJOH conference he helps organise, with co-hosts including DePaul University's Institute of Global Homelessness and the University of Pretoria, is one of the only genuinely global forums bringing together researchers from every inhabited region of the world to share findings on preventing and ending homelessness. Oudshoorn's editorial leadership and his own research on health and homelessness contribute to a field that depends on rigorous, internationally comparative evidence to make its case to policymakers.

25. Dawn Gilman

Changing Homelessness

The operational complexity of a homelessness response system is rarely visible to the policymakers who design it or the researchers who study it, but it is visible to the people who run it. Dawn Gilman has spent more than 17 years as the driving force behind Changing Homelessness in Northeast Florida, growing it from a single-employee organisation with a budget of under a million dollars to a 90-person agency delivering more than $20 million in housing, case management, prevention, and diversion services annually. That growth was not accidental: it reflects Gilman's capacity to build the community partnerships, secure the funding, and maintain the operational discipline that effective homelessness response at scale requires.

Her leadership has won Changing Homelessness a Community Solutions partnership, a role in the Built for Zero campaign, and the Jeff Bezos Day 1 Families Fund Leadership Award. She serves on the National Alliance to End Homelessness Leadership Council, where she contributes a practitioner's perspective grounded in years of managing a real community system through the inevitable turbulence of funding cycles, policy changes, and community politics. Gilman represents the thousands of community leaders whose operational excellence and systems-thinking are the actual mechanism through which evidence-based homelessness policy gets delivered.

Category 5: The Storytellers and Advocates

Changing public attitudes about homelessness is as important as changing policy — because in a democracy, policy follows public opinion, and public opinion about homelessness is stubbornly shaped by moral judgements about people rather than structural analysis of systems. The people in this category have committed their careers to changing how the public, the media, and policymakers think and feel about homelessness by telling stories that convey the humanity of people without homes, the injustice of their situation, and the possibility of solutions.

26. Mark Horvath

Invisible People

Before Mark Horvath founded Invisible People in 2008, he had been homeless himself. After losing his job in the television industry during the 2008 financial crisis and facing homelessness for the second time in his life, he picked up a camera and started recording interviews with people living on the streets of Hollywood Boulevard. Invisible People has since produced videos reaching more than one billion people annually, won multiple Shorty Social Good Awards, and become one of the most recognised and trusted media organisations in the world dedicated to homelessness.

Horvath's genius is his understanding that the primary obstacle to political action on homelessness is not a lack of policy options but a lack of human connection to the people affected. His unedited, intimate interviews give audiences something that policy reports and academic papers cannot: direct encounter with another person's humanity. In 2025, Invisible People published its groundbreaking Effective Homelessness Advocacy Messaging Toolkit, the most comprehensive research-based guide to communicating about homelessness solutions ever produced, directly serving advocates, policymakers, and communications professionals working to shift public opinion.

27. Kara Young Ponder

UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative

At the intersection of racial justice, community engagement, and homelessness research, Kara Young Ponder's work at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative addresses one of the most uncomfortable but important truths in the field: homelessness in the United States is not racially neutral. As Director of Community Engagement and Racial Justice, she works to ensure that research findings are communicated to and with communities most affected by homelessness rather than simply about them, and that racial equity is embedded in both research design and policy recommendations.

Her presentation at the 2025 NLIHC Housing Policy Forum highlighted how data collection practices can either illuminate or obscure racial disparities in homelessness, and why policymakers need racially disaggregated data to design interventions that reach communities most at risk. Young Ponder's work ensures that the UCSF Benioff initiative's research, which is some of the most rigorous in the world, is connected to the communities it is meant to serve and communicated in ways that build rather than extract trust.

28. Colleen Echohawk

Pioneer Human Services

Indigenous communities are dramatically overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and yet Indigenous-specific homelessness advocacy has too often been treated as a subset of the broader homelessness conversation rather than recognised as a distinct and urgent area of policy and practice. Colleen Echohawk, Chief Executive Officer of Pioneer Human Services in Seattle, is one of the most prominent Indigenous voices in the US homelessness sector, advocating for culturally specific approaches to housing and services that start from Indigenous communities' own understandings of wellbeing, belonging, and housing.

Echohawk has served on multiple advisory bodies addressing homelessness in Seattle and Washington State, and her commentary on the intersection of Indigenous rights, housing justice, and the politics of encampment clearances in the Pacific Northwest has reached large audiences through media coverage and direct engagement. Pioneer Human Services is one of Washington State's largest social enterprises, employing more than 800 people and operating businesses alongside direct services to formerly incarcerated, homeless, and substance-using people.

29. Tristia Bauman

National Homelessness Law Center

The criminalisation of homelessness — the practice of using laws against camping, sitting, or lying in public to move people from visible locations without addressing their housing needs — is one of the most persistently harmful policy responses to street homelessness, and Tristia Bauman has spent her career as an attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center fighting it. She has litigated cases, filed amicus briefs, and conducted public education on the constitutional implications of anti-homelessness laws across the United States, contributing to a body of legal analysis that has constrained the most aggressive enforcement approaches in multiple jurisdictions.

Her analysis of the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson explained clearly to practitioners and advocates what the ruling does and does not permit, helping communities understand the new legal landscape without capitulating to the false narrative that the ruling makes criminalisation either effective or inevitable. Bauman's work represents the legal front of the broader movement to establish that people experiencing homelessness retain the full protection of constitutional rights regardless of their housing status.

Category 6: The Global Connectors

Homelessness is a global problem that remains insufficiently understood and addressed as a global phenomenon. The people in this category are doing the work of connecting local knowledge, national policy, and international frameworks in ways that allow the most successful approaches to travel across borders while respecting the context-specific conditions that shape what works where.

30. Peter Mackie

Institute of Global Homelessness

Peter Mackie's career spans academic research, international advocacy, and now organisational leadership as the newly appointed Executive Director of the Ruff Institute of Global Homelessness at DePaul University. A Professor in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University and a founding editor of the International Journal on Homelessness, he has focused particularly on homelessness prevention as a distinct and underinvested strategy, including the global expansion of the 'Upstream' intervention, which works with children and young people in schools to prevent future homelessness by identifying and addressing risk factors early.

His appointment as Executive Director of the Institute of Global Homelessness represents a significant transition from research to institutional leadership in the global homelessness movement, bringing his evidence-based prevention expertise to an organisation that has been one of the primary connectors between global advocacy and local practice. He also chairs Llamau, Wales's leading youth homelessness charity, giving him a practitioner's connection to the realities of service delivery alongside his research and institutional roles.

31. Melanie Redman

A Way Home Canada

Youth homelessness prevention is a distinct field within homelessness advocacy, and Melanie Redman is its most visible Canadian champion. As President and CEO of A Way Home Canada, she has built the organisation into a significant national platform for youth homelessness prevention, running the most comprehensive youth homelessness prevention conference in Canada, which in 2025 attracted more than 600 participants from across the country. She co-led the multi-site Making the Shift randomised controlled trial on Housing First for Youth alongside Stephen Gaetz, contributing the leadership and organisational infrastructure that allowed a complex, federally funded research project to run effectively across multiple communities.

Her commitment to the principle that young people with lived experience of homelessness must be at the centre of any solution to youth homelessness is reflected in A Way Home Canada's program design, advocacy, and governance. Redman's LinkedIn activity reaches a significant audience of youth sector workers, policymakers, and funders across Canada and internationally, and her regular commentary on the evidence for prevention-oriented approaches has helped shift the conversation from crisis response to upstream intervention.

32. Lia van Doorn

Utrecht University of Applied Sciences

European homelessness research has a distinctive character that combines rigorous methodology with deep engagement with practice, and Lia van Doorn is one of the exemplars of that tradition. As Professor and Chair of the Research Group 'Housing and Welfare' at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, she brings more than 30 years of experience studying homelessness — including a foundational longitudinal cohort study of homeless people in Utrecht from 1993 to 2000 — to a field that badly needs both the long view and the fine-grained understanding of individual experience that only longitudinal research can provide.

She delivered the keynote address at the 19th European Research Conference on Homelessness in September 2025, hosted by FEANTSA's European Observatory on Homelessness and Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, giving her a platform to synthesise decades of European research for an audience of researchers and practitioners from across the continent. Van Doorn represents the tradition of homelessness research that refuses to separate the structural analysis of why homelessness happens from the deeply human understanding of how it is experienced.

33. Larry Cohen

Point Source Youth

The youth homelessness sector has debated for years about whether targeted housing assistance — direct cash or vouchers specifically for young people at risk of or experiencing homelessness — can achieve durable housing stability without the intensive case management infrastructure of traditional programs. Larry Cohen, Executive Director of Point Source Youth, has been building and testing models that demonstrate it can. Point Source Youth's Targeted Housing Assistance Program achieved a 91% housing stability rate at six months in its 2025 National Symposium data — one of the strongest outcome figures in youth homelessness services.

Cohen's approach reflects a broader shift in the homelessness field toward recognising that young people often need resources more than they need supervision, and that the complexity and cost of heavily case-managed programs can become a barrier to reaching the young people most at risk. His national symposia, held annually and bringing together advocates, youth leaders, and policymakers, have become one of the most important forums for sharing innovation in youth homelessness solutions across the United States.

34. Juha Kahila

Y-Säätiö (Y-Foundation)

The Y-Foundation is the housing association that has been at the heart of Finland's Housing First success, and Juha Kahila's role as Head of International Affairs has made him one of the most frequently sought-after voices on what the Finnish model actually involves, what conditions made it possible, and what the limits of its transferability to other contexts are. He was featured in a major Big Issue investigation in 2025 examining why Finland's homelessness, after years of dramatic decline, began to rise again — a development that has complicated the 'Finland solved it' narrative that has circulated in global policy discussions for years.

Kahila's willingness to engage honestly with the limits and recent challenges of the Finnish model, rather than simply defending it as a success story, is one of his most valuable qualities as an international voice. His work translating Finland's Housing First experience for audiences in the UK, Australia, and other countries that have been drawn to the Finnish model reflects both the genuine lessons that can be drawn from Finland's experience and the important caution that structural housing and welfare conditions matter as much as program design.

35. Jonno White

Consult Clarity

The people on this list are the thinkers, researchers, and advocates shaping how the world understands and responds to homelessness. Jonno White is the person you bring in when your leadership team is ready to act on what they say — to build the kind of organisational culture, communication structures, and leadership capacity that allows people doing this work to sustain it over the long term. Working with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, facilitates leadership workshops and keynote sessions that help leadership teams have the difficult conversations, make better decisions under pressure, and build the trust structures that allow complex, human-centred work to actually work.

Many of the organisations represented on this list are doing some of the most important and most demanding work in the world. The leaders of those organisations face every challenge that the field of leadership development has studied — burnout, team dynamics, conflicting values, resource scarcity, and the particular psychological weight of working with people in crisis every day. Jonno White works with leadership teams in the social sector to address these challenges directly. To book Jonno for a workshop or keynote for your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Homelessness is a field with no shortage of committed, credible voices, and several people who were seriously considered for this list did not make the final 35. Matthew Desmond, the Princeton University sociologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted, has produced some of the most important work on eviction and housing instability in the United States, but his current focus has shifted toward economic inequality broadly rather than homelessness specifically. Sherry Larkin of YWCA Canada has been a significant voice on the intersection of gender-based violence and women's homelessness, but her content focus has broadened in recent years. Homayra Yusufi, Executive Director of True Colors United, is doing vital work on LGBTQ youth homelessness that deserves recognition and a dedicated look in future content.

Louise Casey, Chair of the Institute of Global Homelessness Advisory Committee and a veteran UK housing and social policy voice, has a strong contribution to the field but recently changed roles, making her current primary focus unclear at time of research. Diane Yentel, who led the National Low Income Housing Coalition with exceptional skill for many years before departing in early 2025, belongs on any list of the most consequential US housing advocates of the past decade — but her current role at time of publication was not confirmed.

Common Mistakes When Engaging With Homelessness Thought Leadership

The most common mistake people make when first engaging with the thought leadership in this space is treating it as a uniform body of knowledge rather than a genuine intellectual debate. Researchers like Gregg Colburn, Dennis Culhane, and Margot Kushel have done important work demonstrating that housing market conditions are the primary structural driver of homelessness rates across regions, but this finding coexists with equally important research demonstrating that individual-level vulnerabilities — mental health conditions, trauma histories, addiction, family breakdown — significantly elevate individual risk within those structural conditions. These are not competing findings. They describe different levels of the same system, and conflating them leads to policy debates that miss the point entirely.

A second mistake is assuming that the Finnish housing model can simply be transplanted to other countries. Finland achieved its dramatic reductions in homelessness through a combination of Housing First programs, a robust social housing sector, a universalist welfare state, and consistent political will sustained across multiple governments. Countries that have tried to adopt Housing First as a program-level intervention without addressing the structural conditions that underpin Finland's success have found, unsurprisingly, that the results are more modest. Juha Kaakinen and Suzanne Fitzpatrick's 2025 research on the distinction between tweaking and transforming systems captures this point with important precision.

A third mistake is treating lived experience as a form of testimony to be heard rather than a form of expertise to be acted on. The most sophisticated homelessness organisations in the world — including the National Coalition for the Homeless, A Way Home Canada, and Point Source Youth — have built their programs and governance structures around the principle that people with lived experience of homelessness should be decision-makers, not just storytellers. Engaging with this thought leadership seriously means rethinking not just what you know about homelessness but how you make decisions about it.

A fourth mistake is underestimating the importance of data quality in community-level homelessness responses. The Built for Zero campaign's central innovation is the by-name list, which requires a community to track every person experiencing homelessness by name in real time. Without that quality of data, it is impossible to know whether a community's response system is actually housing people fast enough to reduce the total number. Many communities have good intentions and significant investment but no meaningful way to know if their system is working.

A fifth mistake is conflating the criminalisation of homelessness with a solution to it. The evidence on this question is unambiguous: enforcement-based approaches — anti-camping laws, encampment clearances, fines for public sleeping — do not reduce homelessness. They disperse it, hide it, and make it harder to address by severing people from the outreach and service relationships that are often the precondition for housing. Eric Tars and Tristia Bauman at the National Homelessness Law Center have spent years documenting not just the legal failures of criminalisation but its practical failure as a homelessness reduction strategy.

Implementation Guide: Building a Thoughtful Reading and Engagement Practice

The value of following thought leaders on homelessness is directly proportional to how you integrate what you learn into how you think and act, which requires a more deliberate practice than simply adding people to LinkedIn. Start by choosing two or three people whose discipline or geographic context is most relevant to your role, and read everything they have published in the last twelve months rather than simply following their social media activity. Someone like Gregg Colburn or Margot Kushel has published peer-reviewed research in 2025 that is substantially more informative than their most-liked LinkedIn posts, and the posts only make full sense in the context of the underlying research.

Set aside time each month to engage with the primary sources — journal articles, policy papers, government reports — rather than just the secondary commentary about them. The field of homelessness research is genuinely contested in productive ways, and you will understand the intellectual debate much better if you read Kaakinen and Fitzpatrick's 2025 paper on systems transformation alongside, rather than instead of, Ann Oliva's commentary on what that means for US policy. The conversation between these voices is where the most useful thinking is happening.

For practitioners and policymakers specifically, the Built for Zero community, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, and FEANTSA all maintain knowledge repositories — the Built for Zero community platform, the Homeless Hub, and FEANTSA's research publications respectively — that are more systematically organised than any individual's LinkedIn feed and allow you to find specific evidence on specific questions rather than being dependent on what any individual happens to post in any given week.

Consider attending the major conferences in this space. The National Alliance to End Homelessness National Conference, the FEANTSA Forum, the Canadian Conference on Homelessness, and the International Journal on Homelessness Conference all provide access to the most current thinking in the field and, importantly, access to the people producing it. Many of the researchers and advocates on this list are genuinely accessible at these events in a way that they are not through digital channels alone.

Finally, remember that the most important application of thought leadership on homelessness is not knowing more about the issue in the abstract but using that knowledge to change something in your sphere of influence — the policies your organisation advocates for, the programs your community funds, the public conversations you contribute to, or the leadership culture you build within your own team.

Jonno White, experienced keynote speaker and executive offsite facilitator, works with leadership teams in organisations across the social sector and beyond to build the kind of team culture and communication infrastructure that allows this kind of learning to actually change practice. To discuss a keynote, workshop, or offsite for your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most influential thought leaders on homelessness globally in 2025 and 2026?

The global conversation on homelessness is shaped by practitioners, researchers, advocates, and policymakers operating across multiple disciplines and more than a dozen countries. The most influential voices include Housing First pioneer Sam Tsemberis, Built for Zero leader Rosanne Haggerty, former UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha, UCSF researcher Margot Kushel, and FEANTSA Director Freek Spinnewijn among many others. This list brings together 35 of the most credible and active voices across research, advocacy, law, policy, and practice.

What is Housing First and why is it so important in the homelessness debate?

Housing First is an approach to addressing homelessness that provides permanent housing immediately and without preconditions such as sobriety or employment readiness, then wraps support services around the person once they are housed. It was developed by Sam Tsemberis through Pathways to Housing in New York City in the early 1990s and has since been adopted in countries around the world. Every randomised controlled trial of Housing First has demonstrated that it achieves housing stability for the vast majority of participants and is significantly more effective than approaches that require people to demonstrate housing readiness before receiving permanent housing.

What does functional zero mean and has any community achieved it?

Functional zero is a standard used by the Built for Zero campaign to describe a community where homelessness, when it occurs, is rare, brief, and non-recurring — meaning the community's systems are fast enough to house people before homelessness becomes chronic. As of 2024, more than 14 communities in the United States had achieved functional zero for at least one population, typically veterans. It is a measurable milestone rather than an absolute claim that no one will ever experience homelessness in a community again.

How was this list compiled?

This list was compiled by assessing genuine, sustained contribution to the field of homelessness research, advocacy, policy, and practice across four primary criteria: demonstrated expertise through published work, research, or sustained practice; geographic and disciplinary diversity; genuine impact on how the field has evolved and how communities respond to homelessness; and active engagement with the broader professional community. Candidates were assessed across disciplines including public health, law, social work, urban economics, community organising, and international human rights, and the final list was assessed for geographic coverage across North America, Europe, the Pacific, and beyond, as well as for gender balance and representation of communities disproportionately affected by homelessness.

Can I hire someone to facilitate workshops for my organisation on leadership in the homelessness sector?

Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams in the social sector — including homelessness organisations, housing providers, nonprofits, and government agencies — to build the team culture, communication structures, and leadership capacity that allows teams doing complex, human-centred work to sustain it over the long term. His Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, and keynote presentations address the specific leadership challenges facing organisations working under sustained pressure. To book Jonno for your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is far more affordable than most organisations expect.

What is the most important thing policymakers can do to address homelessness?

The evidence consistently points to three priority actions: increase the supply of affordable housing, particularly at the very lowest income levels where the housing deficit is most severe; fully fund Housing First programs with fidelity to the evidence-based model; and eliminate laws that criminalise homelessness, which consistently fail to reduce it while increasing harm to affected people. The political will to take all three steps simultaneously, in a sustained and adequately funded way, is the defining gap between countries and communities that are making progress on homelessness and those that are not.

Is homelessness solvable or is it inevitable?

The evidence and the experience of communities that have achieved functional zero for specific populations says unequivocally that homelessness is solvable. Finland's decade-long reduction in long-term homelessness by more than 75%, Houston's achievement of functional zero for veteran homelessness, and the Built for Zero campaign's growing list of communities achieving measurable reductions all demonstrate that when communities combine adequate housing investment, coordinated service systems, and real-time data accountability, they can move toward a world where homelessness, when it occurs, is genuinely rare and brief. The obstacle is political will, not knowledge or capability.

Final Thoughts

The people on this list are not optimists in the naive sense. Many of them have spent their careers watching political consensus build and collapse, watching evidence-based programs get funded and defunded, watching communities make real progress and then see it reversed by budget cuts or political shifts. What they share is something more durable than optimism: a conviction, grounded in evidence and sustained by decades of hard-won practical experience, that homelessness is not an inevitability but a policy choice. And policy choices can be changed.

Following the thought leaders on this list will not transform your organisation's approach overnight, but it will give you a richer, more evidence-grounded, more humanly connected understanding of one of the most consequential social problems of our time. It will introduce you to frameworks — Housing First, Built for Zero, functional zero, homelessness prevention — that have real evidence behind them. It will connect you to people who are working on solutions with genuine intellectual seriousness and genuine commitment to the people most affected.

For leaders in the social sector specifically, the practical insight that runs through virtually all of this thought leadership is that homelessness is a systems problem that requires systems leadership: the capacity to coordinate across organisations, to use data to drive decisions, to maintain focus on shared goals under sustained pressure, and to build the trust structures that allow genuine collaboration across sectors. These are exactly the leadership challenges that Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams to address through workshops, keynotes, and executive team facilitation.

To discuss how Jonno can support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on navigating difficult decisions within leadership teams, check out my blog post '35 Influential Thought Leaders on Hiring for Values' at consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-hiring-for-values.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Influential Thought Leaders on Hiring for Values

Most organisations say they hire for values. Almost none actually do. They write the values on a wall, list them in a job description, and then choose candidates based on the gut feeling of whoever happens to be in the interview room that day. What they are actually hiring for is familiarity, confidence, and likability, which have almost nothing to do with values and everything to do with the interviewer's own unconscious preferences.

This is the great paradox of values-based hiring: the organisations most committed to their values tend to have the most sophisticated and self-defeating hiring processes when it comes to actually assessing for them.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-hiring-for-values