As the first-ever Lane County and city of Eugene joint housing and shelter strategist, Sarai Johnson faces many challenges including coalescing a community increasingly divided over how to address homelessness.



Johnson, who will earn an annual base salary of $85,000, will be tasked with helping to move forward strategies focused on making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The position is meant to support city and county efforts to preserve and create high-quality housing affordable to low- and moderate-income households, as well as address the plight of those experiencing homelessness.

Johnson also will be in charge of implementing the creation of 350 units of permanent supportive housing, and the siting and development of a 75-bed low-barrier shelter and navigation center — recommendations from the Housing & Shelter Report, a five-year plan adopted by the city and county to address homelessness and housing instability.

Previously, Johnson was the assistant director of DevNW, formerly NEDCO, a nonprofit financial services group. In 2014, she founded a consulting business, Lean Nonprofit, focused on helping organizations build, fund and measure programs. In the following interview, which was edited for clarity and brevity, Johnson discusses her new role.

What brought you to taking this position?

I have been consulting for the last 5 1/2 years, mostly focused on helping nonprofits build really, truly effective programs. I mostly work with housing, community development organizations, because that's kind of where my roots are.

I like solving problems. I love creating processes that can be adapted to work with a lot of different kinds of organizations of different sizes of different focus areas. But I really, really miss doing the work that I can see evidence of in my own community.

It sounds like homelessness isn't your specialty.

I have worked in housing on a different end of the spectrum for affordable rentals, and then a lot of homeownership work, but this is clearly such a huge pressing challenge in our community (homelessness), so I was really, really excited to expand that knowledge or apply it to a new area.

How do you intend to be able to respond to the business community and homeless advocates even if they want different solutions for homelessness?

I'm talking to so many people every day, both advocates and business community members, including those who have been really kind of in the spotlight and the hot seat on this recently. ... When I talk with them, I believe that they're relatively on the same page. What I see is that people are so eager for a solution that they're working on that, where they are right now, from their perspective, and haven't yet found a way to plug into kind of the bigger movement that we're working on fomenting here (in local government.) And we will be able to gather all of these groups together over time, not that long into the future.

How do you translate larger, nebulous projects into meaningful action?

I am tasked with making sure that we build the navigation center, low-barrier shelter, and lots of permanent supportive housing, all those units that are suggested.

What is the urgency of a position like yours?

Between the city and the county, there are the things that are already happening and we can coordinate those things better where we have a lot of efforts that could easily become diffuse. My job is to bring us together so that we can really aim them toward the goal. It's kind of like a light bulb shining light everywhere in the room versus a laser that's putting the same wattage to burn a hole in the wall.