Homeless Alliance director Dan Straughan will retire after 20 years leading the nonprofit

Twenty-odd years ago, a small group of influential business leaders sat down at the historic Lunch Box restaurant. Across the street, they could see the bus station. Nearby, the City Rescue Mission.

A block north was the downtown library, which at that time was the de facto day shelter for homeless people in Oklahoma City.

"So you could sit in the Lunch Box and just watch this parade of stereotypically homeless-looking people walking back and forth," said Dan Straughan, who back then was a vice president at United Way.

The bankers, lawyers and oilfield executives sitting at that table, seeing the city's mostly uncoordinated response to poverty, resolved that there had to be a better way to serve the homeless population. That conversation was the genesis of the Homeless Alliance, a nonprofit that has grown to be the nexus for several homeless resource agencies, and also offers a day shelter and cafeteria for those who need it.

Straughan was asked to run the new venture. Now after two decades leading the Homeless Alliance as executive director, Straughan will retire in April.

Meghan Mueller will become president and CEO of the Homeless Alliance when Straughan retires. After taking some time off, he said he may come back to help the organization raise money.

Two decades finding help and homes

A lot has changed in the past 20 years. The Lunch Box is long closed, but the memory of that historic lunch meeting was preserved when Straughan asked that its historic sign be given to the Homeless Alliance. It now hangs in the shelter's cafeteria.

Back then, Oklahoma City didn't even have a day shelter.

"At that time, all the overnight shelters put people out during the day under the assumption that they'd be looking for housing or accessing services, or going to work or whatever," Straughan said.

On top of that, he described the public transportation system as "less than robust," which made it hard for people who needed services to get where they needed to go.

"And then you had 100-plus government, nonprofit and faith-based organizations working with the population, but none of them were working together," he said. "It was really clear the things we needed to do was build a day shelter, build a one-stop-shop multi-agency resource center, provide the IT infrastructure that would allow all those agencies to share data on shared clients so we knew what each other was doing."

It has become a two-pronged attack on homelessness. On one hand, the Homeless Alliance helps the individual person get government services, get a job and even a home. The nonprofit also lauds its mission to "rally our community to end homelessness."

"I think there's a lot of things people can do to help, but the main thing would be to recognize that those people that you see on the street, they are not the 'stranger.' There are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. They're our neighbors. And we have a responsibility as a community to do the best we can by them."

Those dual missions are on display constantly. On a recent Sunday night, Straughan said someone got mad and broke several windows at the shelter. Instead of calling the cops, "we're trying to get somebody into housing so that they don't have these sorts of issues," he said.

But he also realizes there is an economic impact on the city.

"And frankly, if you have an awareness at all, there's a bit of a moral injury there, right? You drive under an overpass and there's three people sleeping under the bridge and you think to yourself, or I do anyway, 'my city can do better than that. We can do better than that,'" said Straughan.

The biggest and most important change Straughan has noticed over the past 20 years has been the stigma attached to homelessness. It's gotten better, due in large part to Homeless Alliance ventures like the street magazine Curbside Chronicle, whose vendors sell thousands of copies each month around Oklahoma City.

"That's 12,000 positive interactions between a homeless person and not-homeless person every month," Straughan said. "I think that and the content, educating people about homelessness, has done more to change that perspective broadly in the community than just about anything."

Curbside founder Whitley O'Connor said he struggled to get support for the paper until he met with Straughan.

"And so he literally was the only person in town who gave us a shot to actually do it," O'Connor said.

Since then, Curbside has grown into its social enterprise role with a flower shop and apparel store; each business provides low-barrier employment to people transitioning out of homelessness.

"It's hard to believe that MAPS for Housing happens without Dan. It's hard to believe there's a day shelter or emergency night shelter without Dan. A lot of what other agencies have accomplished are off the back of Dan's work," O'Connor said. "He's very humble; I don't think he quite understands the impact he's had, or would be willing to own the impact he's had. But generally speaking, over the past 20 years in terms of social services, it'd be really hard to argue that anyone has done more for the community and more for the people of Oklahoma City than Dan."

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Straughan's support of Curbside shows how business-minded he is when tackling these problems. The first employee he hired for the Homeless Alliance, Jennifer Gooden, told The Oklahoman that he tried to bring a business perspective to an intractable social problem.

"I always liked that angle, but I also felt like it was more than that," said Gooden, who now is president of the Biophilia Foundation, an organization that directs grants toward conservation and land restoration. "Dan did bring a business perspective to it, but he just never lost the heart that's absolutely essential for this kind of work."

A lasting impact

When someone retires, there's an impulse to measure the balance of their work. Straughan says he's accomplished a lot of what he wanted to accomplish. Despite Oklahoma City's population growing, the homeless numbers have stayed pretty much the same — a fact that other large cities can't claim.

His housing-first strategy has led to the impressive Key to Home Partnership, which made headlines by not only clearing out homeless encampments but immediately giving those people a place to live.

But there's still much more work to do, he said.

"Our mission, from the day we started, is rallying the community to end homelessness," Straughan said. "I haven't quite gotten there yet. It may have been an aspirational goal, but it's still the goal of the agency, and it will beafter I go."

To Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, Straughan's impact is clear.

"Dan Straughan is an institution. It’s hard to imagine meeting the challenge of homelessness in OKC without Dan’s knowledgeable, pragmatic and effective approach. During his tenure, per capita homelessness in OKC has dramatically declined. People wonder how we’ve managed to keep our overall number of people in experiencing homelessness essentially flat over the last 15 years even while our city’s population soared. It’s because Dan was always pushing policymakers in the right direction," Holt said.

"He’s innovative and he’s persuasive. Think about homelessness without Curbside, or housing first, or MAPS 4. Dan was in the middle of all of that. He’s just so good at what he does. We’ll miss him but we wish him all the best in the next chapter."

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Homeless Alliance Executive Director Dan Straughan to retire