“Making It Work”: Accommodation and Resistance to Federal Policy in a Homelessness Continuum of Care

Abstract

This is a case study of the development of a rural continuum of care (CoC) program funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to create a coherent system of services and planning processes to end homelessness. It concerns how the founding local coalition of agencies managed internal conflicts about HUD’s changing programmatic and administrative requirements from 1994 to 2015. It addresses the coalition’s relationship with HUD, intracoalition conflict between secular and faith-based agencies over federal requirements, and the workarounds developed to keep local divisions over service modalities from harming the larger project. Through this lens, we analyze the pressures for conformity intrinsic to the relationship between federal agencies and nonprofit grantees. We conclude that HUD and its CoC grantees have interdependent aims that limit the exercise of federal authority. Federal project grants may neither necessarily nor typically transform nonprofits in the image of the state.