Better Angels Homeless Shelter Management & Outreach App

Affordable housing and homelessness

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Seven years ago, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority forecasted that LA homelessness would be reduced from ~44,000 in 2017 to fewer than 15,000 by 2022. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. More than 75,500 people experienced homelessness in LA County in 2023, a 9% increase vs. 2022.
LA County has invested significant resources to address this crisis. In 2015, the county’s Board of Supervisors launched the LA County Homeless Initiative as a central task force to reverse the trend, and local agencies spent $9.6 billion on temporary and permanent housing for the unhoused from 2018 to 2021. Yet during that same stretch of time, the homeless count skyrocketed.
LA is now home to more unsheltered homeless people than any other metropolitan area in the U.S. The root causes are many, including a catastrophic lack of affordable housing and a distributed political system that makes collective decision making more difficult. We believe our technology can make a difference.

To adequately address this crisis, two critical needs must be met—vital data that accurately measures the efficacy of initiatives undertaken by public and private entities at the macro level, and individual detail to directly help unhoused people and those serving them at the micro level. Better Angels’ Homeless Shelter Management & Outreach App satisfies both.
Phase 1, which includes an Outreach App, Shelter Management System, Shelter Database, and Analytics, will allow nonprofits, businesses, and government to best deploy resources, while providing accountability and, most importantly, getting people rehoused more quickly.
Specifically, among other functions, our software platform will:
Track cases so that outreach workers can easily access information and case histories
Quickly and accurately verify an unhoused person’s identity to avoid case duplication
Share information about an unhoused person’s needs and preferences over time
Fill out forms with AI, pre-populated fields, and e-signing
Leverage AI to speed reporting to the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS)
Identify shelter locations in all eight Service Planning Areas (SPAs) and access a comprehensive database of facilities
Make on-the-spot referrals into shelters and shelter waitlists
Track utilization by population type, geography, bed type, funder, etc.
Aggregate data from across SPAs with clear, concise data visualizations
Automate compliance reporting and track benchmark performance

Our vision is a Los Angeles County no longer burdened by a homelessness epidemic that only grows worse each year. We believe our revolutionary software will help get us there by transforming every step of the journey from homelessness to housing for our neighbors in crisis.
Phase 1 has two primary objectives:
The first step to helping an unhoused person is getting to know them and their individual needs, so that case managers can quickly find, secure, and improve access to shelter, mental health and addiction treatment, job training, food banks, healthcare, and other vital resources. Better Angels’ intuitive applications unlock these capabilities not only for our organization but for all stakeholders working on homelessness in LA.
Better Angels’ technology will empower LA County policymakers to understand trends over time and track successes—and challenges—transparently, so that rising homeless count numbers can be reversed and more residents in need can be quickly helped and rehoused.

Presently, LA County lacks modern tools to manage its shelters. It’s impossible to track capacity and services in real time, leading to underutilized beds in a city with a 30,000-bed deficit. Thus, our key metric during Phase 1 is street time—the amount of time a person experiencing homelessness is unsheltered. Our aim is to reduce street time for unhoused people in LA by 25% across the county with these tools:
Outreach App. An easy-to-use, centrally networked application that manages and shares pertinent client data, from location to services requested to mood, eliminating caseworkers’ dependence on notebooks or electronic devices.
Shelter Database. Detailed, searchable metadata, including demographic restrictions, security requirements, check-in times, and more, so caseworkers can match clients to the right shelter. Shelter Management System. Modern bed reservation and waitlist management, allowing timely, seamless client onboarding.