Get to Know Daniel Soucy

Bloomberg Fellow Daniel Soucy currently serves as a research analyst at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, where they use data to advocate for effective, evidence-based policies that aim to end homelessness across the United States. Rooted in both professional and personal experience, Soucy’s work centers people most impacted by housing instability, especially LGBTQIA+ and gender-expansive communities, while challenging systems of inequality. Through participatory research and policy analysis, Soucy uplifts the voices of those with lived experience and advocates for structural change in housing, healthcare, and behavioral health. In the Q&A below, they share their path to this work, the urgent challenges facing unhoused communities, and the power researchers and policymakers have to drive change.

Please share a little about your current role, background, and what brought you to where you are today.

I am a research analyst at the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington DC. In this role, I analyze public data and do research using surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions to support evidence-based policy and practices known to end homelessness. I support the Alliance by communicating this information through publications, interactive data dashboards, webinars, light technical assistance, and assisting with our bi-annual national conferences.

I became interested in social policy more broadly as an undergraduate student. I worked and served in emergency shelters for people experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia. However, I think I leaned into this work because of my upbringing in New Hampshire. I watched the state’s addiction crisis grow and change due to the state’s alcohol and tobacco policies as well as the spread of opioid use in the state. As a youth, I did not understand that many of these trends were driven by poor policy. In Philadelphia, service providers and faculty at Saint Joseph’s University helped me learn that policy makers tasked with keeping people safe, stable, and healthy were not succeeding. Frequently, underfunded and understaffed non-profits and grassroots organizations were forced to fill gaps in affordable housing, healthcare, and other life-saving services. Later on, I also experienced housing insecurity myself and acute behavioral health crises. This lived experience motivated me to focus my career on contributing research that supports housing policies, access to physical and mental health care, and other services that improve homelessness.  

How has homelessness impacted the LGBTQIA+ community specifically?

We see that LGBTQIA+ people, and especially the gender-expansive community (people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth), experience discrimination, violence, and exclusion in housing, employment, and healthcare in ways that cisgender people do not. They also may not have the same access to social support from their birth families. These are all important resources and structures that most people rely on. So when gender-expansive people face barriers and hardship trying to access them, it only makes sense that they will be more likely to experience homelessness. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey demonstrated that 30% of trans people experience homelessness in their lifetime. These numbers are likely higher for gender-expansive people of color.

We also know from federal and local data that once homeless, gender-expansive people are more likely to live outside and struggle to access evidence-based rehousing programs or temporary shelter. These resources rarely cater to their specific needs and may even actively exclude them. For example, programs, emergency shelters, and subsidized housing may only have congregate spaces and be unsafe for people who present in gender-expansive ways.

More recently, the current administration decided not to enforce the Equal Access Rule, a critical regulation that prohibits discrimination by gender and sexual orientation in HUD-funded housing programs. While the rule is still in place, the administration has tried to eliminate it before and has indicated an interest in trying to eliminate it again. Without proper enforcement and efforts to correct inequities, it is likely that these challenges will only get worse.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in advocating for this community?

I struggle a lot with misinformation. For a lot of people, homelessness is something they see in their communities and therefore they may think they know a lot about why people experience homelessness and what individual choices they need to make to be rehoused. However, many people have never spoken to their unhoused neighbors or the organizations/people who serve them. I think we all generally agree that no one wants to live in a society that fails to ensure that everyone has what they need to prosper and thrive. But even well-intentioned people misidentify ways to fix the problem. In part, this is because there have been concerted efforts by some to spread misinformation about what causes homelessness. The data are very clear – we know that when rents go up and housing is unaffordable, more people experience homelessness. We also know that punishing unhoused people, like ticketing, fining, or arresting them when they sleep outside, makes the problem worse and is a waste of limited resources.

Sometimes, people think that homelessness is caused by bad decisions and a lack of effort, and often misidentify ways to end homelessness, thinking that individuals need to change. But if you talk to homeless service providers and people experiencing homelessness, you quickly realize that the structure itself needs to change. The truth is that when so many people are unhoused and so many people feel the impacts of unaffordable or inaccessible housing and healthcare, as a society, we need to think more critically about how to improve these systems rather than blaming individuals.

What would you like lawmakers to know about the communities that you work with?

There are a few things. First, keeping people housed is impossible without enough affordable housing as well as rental, and income support to help people meet their basic needs. Programs like homeless services, Medicaid, and social security need robust funding, or our communities will suffer. Many homeless service organizations are successfully preventing people from ever even becoming homeless by providing small rental subsidies and free healthcare programs. Still, more people are entering homelessness than the homelessness response system is funded to serve, but the problem will get much worse if these programs lose funding and can no longer meet the growing needs of the people who rely on them.

Similarly, people experiencing homelessness are your constituents. Policymakers who care about their constituents and care about ensuring that their constituents are able to build prosperous communities need to provide resources to the organizations and programs that help people stay in housing and stay healthy. Additionally, lawmakers should know that when they invest in these programs, they are saving themselves and their communities resources. Multiple, robust studies demonstrate that it is much less expensive to pay someone’s rent and keep them in housing than it is to provide emergency services like police responses and emergency room visits to people dealing with the health challenges that are caused by living outside.

Third, the organizations and dedicated workers who serve people experiencing homelessness work tirelessly and with limited resources to keep people housed and reconnect people with housing. They are underpaid, they are overworked, and they often work in extremely challenging environments. Lawmakers should listen to these people when they say they need more resources to do their jobs well. I am really saddened by the way that non-profits and other organizations that help people achieve their goals and improve their communities are being targeted as poor stewards of public funds. They are a cornerstone in all of our communities and deserve respect for their experience and robust resources to serve everyone in need.

Are there any research projects you are particularly proud of that you would like to highlight?

I have the privilege of working with seven other people who have experienced homelessness from across the United States. Together, we developed surveys, interview protocols, and focus groups to explore the impact that people who experienced, or are experiencing homelessness, have on ending homelessness. For example, they do case management or street outreach. Some are directors and organizational leaders. Others are advocates. They contribute critical insights to the system that only come from the experience of being unhoused.

Soon, this team will publish materials identifying best practices for partnering with individuals who have experienced homelessness, as well as make the case that employing and supporting these partners is critical to ending homelessness. This project uplifts people who know the most about the real experience of homelessness and asks them what data and information would help us improve the homelessness response in the United States. Facilitating this space has demonstrated the challenges that the lived expertise workforce face as well as the impacts they are having on helping people access and stay in housing. I am excited to publish materials and work with the research team to make sure that homeless service providers and policymakers can learn about the data and use it to more effectively end homelessness in our communities.

How do you hope to make an impact in your community in the future?

I want to produce research and evidence that can inform policy, especially at the intersection of homelessness, housing, substance use, and behavioral health. I love research and I love using research to move policy. I want to find new and creative ways to explore and examine data as well as communicate this data in ways that resonate with people. 

What made you apply to the Bloomberg Fellowship?

I applied because my background is in social policy and direct service, but I am really passionate about behavioral health and substance use. I am lucky to have taken some coursework in this area, to have learned from my own lived experience and to have community partners who help me learn more. But especially as a researcher, exploring these topics from a public health lens offers a new and far more comprehensive understanding of the challenges I am trying to help solve.

I wanted to build these skills but I did not want to leave my work and I certainly did not want to isolate myself from the community organizations and people that my current work supports. It means too much to me. The fellowship offered a perfect opportunity for me to gain new skills but also immediately apply these skills to the urgent work of building a movement to end homelessness by fixing structures of unaffordability, inequality, and exclusion that keep people unhoused.

I am just so grateful for this opportunity. Learning about and gaining expertise in health systems can be really intimidating and, frankly, impossible without significant resources. But as someone who is passionate about improving social policy, I need this expertise to do my work and pursue my passion with the focus that the communities I work with deserve and need. The opportunity to earn an MPH has a significant impact on my work and my contributions to my organization - I am beyond grateful to this fellowship for making that possible.