Elizabeth Baker

What we talked about

A system, and the people who have already been failed by systems

The episode opens on the sharpest idea in it. People who work in homelessness response talk about clients who buck the system, and Elizabeth Baker’s response is to ask how many systems have already failed the person in front of them. Criminal justice. Health care. Over and over again.

Her diagnosis of what makes something feel like a system is precise: you become a cog, a number in a spreadsheet, a set of demographic data points that produces a prescribed solution. That is not how The Other Ones Foundation enters the space, she says. It enters with a deep sense of community, and when someone arrives at the Esperanza Community the first job is not intake. It is belonging.

Fifteen years, starting as a case manager

Baker has worked in Austin’s homeless response system for about fifteen years, and she has worked at nearly every level of it. She started as a case manager, moved into program management, then spent years in grant management, then went into executive leadership. Before joining The Other Ones Foundation in 2021 she was at Integral Care, the local mental health authority.

She keeps returning to her time at the ARCH, the shelter downtown, and specifically to what clients told her there about what frustrated them. In a leadership role, she says, that history is what lets her make sure the organization does not repeat those same mistakes. Without having done the job herself, she does not think she could have designed the programs the organization now runs.

She is also honest about the limits of her own vantage point. She still goes out and spends time with clients, but her title changes the conversation, and she knows it. So she treats her staff — the people doing the work directly — as the more reliable channel, and describes her job as elevating quieted voices and letting them challenge her assumptions about how things should run. Thirty hours a week in an office, she notes, buys you a limited amount of perspective, and the decisions being made from that office are big ones.

The chair she sits in outside her own organization

Baker co-chairs the local Leadership Council, which she describes as the governing body that oversees how federal housing funds are used in the Austin area: which programs get prioritized for funding, and what policies guide them.

Her reason for valuing the seat is worth hearing. It is the only vantage point that is not about one organization or one funding stream. It is about how the whole system behaves. And since decisions she makes for her own organization ripple across that system, she wants to be in the room where the ripple is visible.

The partnerships she is proudest of in year one

Asked what she is proudest of in her first year as executive director, she does not name a program. She names partnerships, and the reasoning behind them is a read on the funding environment: the financial and political landscape is getting harder, and programs that survive will be the ones where nonprofits lean on each other.

The clearest example is a formal referral relationship with Central Health. Someone experiencing homelessness has invasive surgery, recovers for a few weeks in Central Health’s medical respite program, and then reaches the end of that stay still medically fragile. Returning them to a tent throws away everything the health care system just invested. Now they are referred into bridge shelter instead, and the recovery holds.

Integral Care brings mental health services on site. Goodwill of Central Texas is bringing skills training and supported employment, a relationship she calls budding rather than finished. The Yellow Bike Project is in the mix too. The through-line is layering: open the site to other service providers so every dollar the organization spends does more than it could alone.

The misconception she most wants corrected

People want to work. That is the answer, and she has been beating the drum on it for a while.

Her explanation of why the public believes otherwise is more interesting than the correction itself. For roughly the last decade, Austin’s system has been built around the people who are sickest — those most likely to die outside, least likely to exit homelessness without serious intervention. That was the right call, and she says so. But she is old enough in this work to remember a more balanced picture, because at the ARCH she met both populations: people in early recovery with chronic conditions who would need support for life, and people who had simply hit a bad stretch. An unexpected termination. A death in the family. A house fire.

For that second group the intervention is often short. Clothes, hygiene, and enough footing to fill out applications and sit an interview again.

Workforce First, and what the work does to a person

This is where she tells the origin story, and where she is careful to note that her husband was the prior executive director, so the credit is not hers. The organization began by doing outreach and asking people living outside a single question: what is the system not giving you that you need? The answer came back consistently. I want to work, and nothing here gives me a way to do it.

So in 2019 they started Workforce First, and the first version was simple: a contract with the City of Austin to clean litter out of parks and green spaces. Money in people’s pockets, a reason to get up, and a way to give something back to the city. Austin got cleaner parks. The crews got purpose.

What they learned running it is the part that matters. Three or four months of work visibly changes how a person carries themselves. So the question became how to make that permanent rather than transitional, which turned one part-time job into a continuum: the transitional job first, then a GED, then a class in HVAC or auto mechanics. She reports a 71% graduation rate from those classes.

She is also watching the labor market for the ceiling. There is heavy state investment in trades training right now, saturation will come eventually, and the assessments that would tell you when arrive annually and already six months stale. Her clients are ready and engaged; she would rather see the wave than get hit by it.

And housing is the next wall. Even with a certificate and a job, Austin rent is Austin rent, and the trade-off is a cheaper place with no transportation or an expensive one with a bus line.

Two hundred beds now, and the largest of its kind next

The Esperanza Community currently operates around two hundred emergency shelter beds. Over the next three years it goes into a major construction project adding 325 more units, along with new service space designed to bring partner organizations on site.

Baker’s framing of the stakes is not about the ribbon cutting. This is infrastructure and programming that Austin will be using for twenty years, so the design has to be right and the partners have to be long-term — service partners and financial partners both. Her stated job is to make the organization indispensable to local government, to Central Health, and to the other institutions whose support will have to carry it through the next decade or two of serving more than a thousand people a year.