Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable families with school age children are at risk of homelessness due to financial instability and other risk factors. Children whose families are at risk of homelessness are more likely than their peers to have lower test scores, increased absences, and more suspensions.

Founded by Al and Barbara Siemer in 2011, the Siemer Institute oversees a network of programs across the United States to help families stay housed and keep children enrolled in school. The Siemer Institute collaborates with community-based funding partners by providing challenge grants to implement community-appropriate solutions within the Siemer Institute Family Stability framework. Multi-year grants empower partners to build lasting, effective programs. Since 2011, their network has grown from two cities to over seventy.

The Siemer Institute is making a significant impact by empowering local providers to address the unique needs of families with school-aged children. Local providers use data-driven assessments of family need and progress to provide appropriate services such as intensive case management and coaching; financial and other material assistance; and strategic partnerships with school districts and other local service providers.

By providing flexible support, these providers can tailor their approaches to best serve each family, ensuring they achieve desired outcomes in housing, income, and educational stability. This holistic approach helps families maintain stable housing, increase their income, and ensure their children remain stable in school, fostering long-term success and resilience.

The Siemer Institute network actively engages in a collective impact model, sharing best practices to align successes with the goal of affecting national change. They conduct research to continually inform and enhance the work of their partners. They also provide ongoing opportunities for their partners to connect and learn from one another and prioritize collaborative decision-making.

Increasing Their Collective Impact

In 2020, the Siemer Institute sought to modernize their data collection and reporting systems. Their funding partners wanted more frequent insights into outcomes data and network impact, but the lack of standardized reporting methods made it challenging to evaluate their expanding network.

The Siemer Institute needed a scalable tool to unify their network, establish shared outcome measures, and provide near real-time insights into their overall impact. SureImpact fulfilled these needs, enhancing the network's data capacity and empowering partner organizations with greater visibility into their outcomes.

With consistent data collection, built-in reporting and analytics, and outcome dashboards for both funders and grantees, the Siemer Institute can now see and support the work of its entire network with clarity. Partners spend less time reporting and more time serving families. The Siemer Institute can see how the network is performing as a whole—or examine outcomes in a specific city, region, or organization.

A New Standard for Accountability and Learning

The Siemer Institute now supports more than 150 direct service providers through 74 funded partners across 39 states. SureImpact’s collaborative data model connects the Siemer Institute network with a standardized platform for data entry and reporting. Partner organizations can enter data directly or upload it from other systems. Either way, the information flows into a shared dashboard that shows how families are doing—by site, by geography, or across the entire network.

This change has improved data quality, made reporting automatic, and given the Siemer Institute and its partners critical insight into their work.

"As a funder that is investing in over 70 programmatic partnerships across the country, it is important to have access to near real-time data. Having access to the data at the client level as well as regional level allows us to analyze results and turn that information into learning opportunities that can be shared across our network. With SureImpact, our process is streamlined, and we have much more confidence in our reporting and data," said Kimberly Habash Dorniden, President & National Executive Director of the Siemer Institute.