Barbara Poppe has spent more than 40 years fighting homelessness, helped lead the Obama administration’s historic effort to end it, and today she has something most people in public service rarely have: the freedom to tell the truth.

Barb is one of the smartest people I know on homelessness and someone I’m honored to call a friend. In this deeply personal conversation, we talk about how America once moved toward ending homelessness, why we’re now going backwards, and the painful reality that the solutions we knew 40 years ago are largely the same solutions we know today.

Barb takes on criminalization, misinformation, lived experience, affordable housing, and the policy choices that keep people homeless.

Her message is both devastating and hopeful: We know how to house every single person. We could do it. We’re choosing not to.

Effective Homelessness Advocacy Messaging Toolkit https://invisiblepeople.tv/toolkit

A for-profit company working to end homelessness sounds like a contradiction. For Mike Shore, it’s been his family’s work for more than 30 years.

Mike runs HOM Inc., a mission-driven for-profit company helping communities manage the complicated work of getting homeless people into housing. We talk about whether profit can actually be a force for good, why homeless services have become so complicated, and whether business, technology, and a different way of organizing the work could help us do better.

Mike and I go way back, all the way to the early days of Twitter, when social media was actually fun. We were experimenting with a new way to talk about homelessness, building unlikely communities online, breaking some rules, and occasionally getting ourselves into trouble.

We talk about whether profit can actually be a force for good, why homeless services can be so frustratingly complicated, what business and technology can bring to the fight against homelessness, and what we lost when social media stopped feeling social.

Today’s Homeless Unfiltered podcast is sponsored by Padmission Journey: https://padmission.com/invisiblepeople

Padmission Journey is an end-to-end housing program management platform built specifically for homeless housing programs. It helps organizations manage rental assistance, rent calculations, inspections, payments, and other complex housing processes in one place, replacing spreadsheets and disconnected systems with modern tools that make the work easier.