If you care about housing the homeless in Dallas, you need to know Mandy Chapman Semple
For months now, Mandy Chapman Semple has quietly worked behind the scenes to make sense of a homeless assistance network in North Texas that looks a lot like a bowl of spaghetti — dozens of good-hearted providers pulling in different directions with no system in place to measure their own impact, let alone their collective impact on getting people off of the streets.
With the support of the Meadows Foundation, Dallas Foundation and six other major foundations, Semple, who is credited with making a dent in Houston’s homeless population in 2012, is working as a consultant on homelessness in Dallas. And what she’s noticed so far is cause for pause. “The path out of homelessness is not very clear,” she recently told the Dallas City Council. “The components are not organized in a way to make it easy and efficient to resolve their homelessness.”