Displaying items by tag: policies

by Valerie Harkins, Executive Director of the Maternity Housing Coalition

There is a very human impulse that shows up again and again in maternity housing leadership:
“Can I see your policies and procedures?”
“Does anyone have a full set I can use?”
“We just need something to get us started.”

This desire is understandable. Housing ministry is weighty work. Leaders are carrying legal responsibility, pastoral responsibility, donor trust, staff wellbeing, and the lives of mothers and children—all at once. Wanting a pre-written roadmap is not laziness; it’s fatigue mixed with responsibility.

But here’s the quiet truth we rarely say out loud: what feels like a shortcut at the beginning often becomes a long detour for years to come.

Why Housing Is Different

In many ministries, templated policies can be a reasonable starting point. Pregnancy centers, for example, often share core operational similarities: appointment-based services, limited client duration, standardized service models.

Housing is different.

Housing is incarnational. I’ve been pondering this word lately. The housing ministry is embodied, relational, and constant. You are not serving a client for an hour—you are stewarding a home, a community, and a shared daily life. The mission is lived out at 2:00 a.m., at the dinner table, in conflict, in relapse, in reconciliation.

Because of that, policies and procedures are not neutral documents. They are theological, sociological, and practical statements about what you believe human dignity requires in your context.

A policy that makes sense for:

• A home serving college students
  
• A home serving women exiting street homelessness
  
• A home serving women from a reservation community
  
• A home serving women in addiction recovery
  

may share vocabulary—but they should not share substance.

If they do, something important has been skipped.

The Temptation to “Model After” Another Program

It’s tempting to build a program by modeling it after a respected home:

“They’re established.”
“They’re doing it well.”
“We’ll adjust later.”

But program design doesn’t begin with policies. It begins with discernment. When that step is bypassed, policies quietly become misaligned with mission—and the misalignment doesn’t stay contained. It seeps into staff culture, resident expectations, board confusion, and eventually, outcomes.

Policies written before clarity do not save time. They simply postpone the work until it is harder to undo.

What Policies Are Actually Meant to Do

Healthy policies are not aspirational documents. They are protective agreements that flow from three anchors:

1. Your Mission
   Not a generic mission. Your mission—clearly articulated, bounded, and honest about what you are and are not called to do.
   
   
2. Your Community Needs Assessment
   Who are you serving in reality, not on paper? What histories, risks, strengths, and patterns show up consistently in your home?
   
   
3. Your Indicators of Success
   Three to five measurable outcomes that, if achieved, mean your mission is being fulfilled at a baseline level.
   

Only after those anchors are in place do policies make sense. And once policies are clear, procedures naturally follow. Procedures exist to serve policies—not the other way around.

On Measuring Outcomes (Yes, You Can)

Many leaders quietly resist outcome measurement—not because they don’t value excellence, but because goals feel ambiguous or overwhelming. That hesitation is usually a signal, not a failure.

It typically means one of two things:

• The mission statement needs refinement, or
  
• The organization needs support in learning how to measure what already matters.
  

There are very few—if any—outcomes in the housing ministry that cannot be measured in some meaningful way. Measurement is not about control; it’s about unity and integrity. It aligns boards and staff, honors constituents, strengthens donor trust, and—perhaps most importantly—guards against mission drift.

What you do not define, something else will define for you.

Learning From One Another—The Right Way

None of this means we stop learning from one another. On the contrary, learning is essential. But how we learn matters.

The strongest growth happens through:

• conversation, not document dumps
  
• context, not copy-paste
  
• relationships, not repositories
  

Networking allows leaders to explain why a policy exists, who it serves, and where it struggles. It allows differences to be respected rather than erased. It strengthens the field without flattening it.

When policies are shared relationally—through story, dialogue, and discernment—everyone grows wiser without compromising their own mission.

A Gentle Invitation Forward

If you feel the pull toward ready-made policies, pause—not to shame yourself, but to listen. That pull often signals a deeper need: clarity, confidence, or companionship in leadership.

Mission leads.
Data clarifies.
Outcomes focus.
Policies protect.
Procedures serve.

That order matters—today and ten years from now.

The companion handout,  "Indicators of Success," will help you think through this process. And as always, you are not meant to do this work alone. The strength of this Coalition has never been uniformity—it has been faithfulness, thoughtfully lived out in very different homes, for very different women, with the same deep commitment to life and dignity.