How do we start the conversation about changes that could lead to better futures for the unhoused and the communities we live in? Social worker and author Sherman S. Haggerty has context and solutions to offer. With decades of experience as a homebuilding executive and director at Volunteers of America Northern California-Northern Nevada, Sherman is available for interviews, expert commentary and Q&As with actionable steps and concrete strategies your audience can use to fight homelessness.
According to Forbes, 580K people in the United States are losing their chances to leave homelessness behind and become respected, contributing members of their communities. Partly due to policy changes at the federal level, the prospects for the unhoused are sinking to an unprecedented low. Sherman offers practical solutions, not only for our government leaders but also for the average person, including physical and mental health programs, volunteer and community outreach, the destigmatization of homelessness and so much more.
Sherman Haggerty is an experienced social worker and can discuss:
- The affordable housing crisis
- Federal mandates regarding the unhoused population
- How to rehabilitate individuals
- How immigration impacts homelessness
- How our criminal justice system impacts homelessness
Learn more about Sherman and his book, Hope Disappearing: A Population Left Behind (Izzard Ink, November 9, 2021), at pastorhaggerty.com.
Sherman has a master’s degree in management from the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management program at Claremont College. He worked as an executive for thirty-five years in homebuilding and land development for two large public companies. He retired in 2008. While working in Sacramento, he served on the board of directors for the North State Homebuilders Association, acting as the board chair in 2000. While on that board, Sherman worked with a handful of those board members to start a new nonprofit in 1999 titled HomeAid. That organization was developed as part of the National Homebuilding Association initiative to help supply new beds for the transitionally homeless in their communities. Over the last 20 years HomeAid has worked to provide hundreds of new beds and several new facilities to serve the homeless and other vulnerable citizens in the Sacramento region.
He was asked to join the Volunteers of America board of directors in 2005, where he served until December 2013. In 2010 he was voted into the California Homebuilding Foundation’s Hall of Fame, based in part on the community service work he had been a part of in Sacramento. In January 2014 he voluntarily stepped down from the VOA board to run the daily operations at Mather Community, a transitional housing homeless program with the goal of growing their employment program. In the six years he was responsible for the program, they served well over one thousand clients, many of which left homelessness for good. Between August 2015 and April 2019, he completed a three-year program to become an ordained minister with Volunteers of America, focusing his work on trauma and moral injury.
