Rosanne Haggerty

Rosanne Haggerty
Founder
Common Ground

Rosanne Haggerty began her crusade to end homelessness upon graduation from college, when she spent a year volunteering at a homeless shelter in New York City. She quickly realized that the shelter approach doesn’t work: “Our shelter kept the kids warm for the 30 days they could stay, provided healthy meals, a health clinic, job and educational counseling…but at the end of 30 days, they still had nowhere to go. Most went back to the street, returning to the shelter as soon as they were eligible. It became clear that without connecting homeless kids with a stable home, nothing else we offered would stick.” Seeking a sustainable, long-term solution, in 1990, Rosanne started Common Ground, which takes a systematic approach to ending homelessness by renovating rundown buildings, converting them into affordable housing, and providing intensive social support for residents. Common Ground—now the nation’s largest builder and operator of housing for the homeless, with programs in New York, Connecticut, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington, DC—has demonstrated that affordable housing can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of shelters, hospitals, jails, and other institutional responses. To encourage the widest adoption of her cost-effective solution, Rosanne has enlisted hospitals, historic preservationists, veterans’ organizations, property management companies, schools of architecture, corrections agencies, and housing authorities to take on Common Ground’s mission. Says Rosanne, “Each community institution—indeed, each person—has a role to play in creating communities where no one is left out and all have a secure home.”

Before starting Common Ground, Rosanne spent seven years working for Brooklyn Catholic Charities, overseeing the development of more than 1,000 affordable homes and apartments. Rosanne is an Ashoka senior fellow (2008) and a MacArthur fellow (2001); she has received the Peter Drucker Award in Nonprofit Innovation (1999) and the Rudy Brunder Award for Urban Excellence (1997). A graduate of Amherst College, Rosanne is a PhD candidate in sociology at New York University. She is an Amherst College Life Trustee and serves on the board of directors of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Quest Diagnostics, and the Center for Urban Community Service.

Read more about Rosanne Haggerty:
A Downtown Grocery
Hartford Courant
January 11, 2010

Nonprofit Group Seeks To Open Grocery Store In Downtown Hartford By Summer
By Kenneth R. Gosselin, Hartford Courant
December 23, 2009

New Units Offer Concierge and Games to People on the Streets
By Paul Bibby, Sydney Morning Herald
November 23, 2009

Bringing Them In From the Cold
By Russell Skelton, Brisbane Times
November 22, 2009

Taking the Homeless Beyond Shelters
By Jina Moore, Christian Science Monitor
September 6, 2009

Schermerhorn Mixes Homeless, $2 Million Townhouses, Ballerinas
By James S. Russell, Bloomberg
August 31, 2009

 

Previous Page    Back to Prime Mover Fellows    Next Page