Beginnings: 2009 - 2016
Dave McCann, (donor, individual, advocate), and since January 2023, working as McCann Advisory, LLC Consulting Firm Principal (Investor in Housing/Architect & CTO of IT Systems), has been working with charities in both Washington and California to help reduce homelessness, since 2009. As Dave donated money to fund programs to get people housed, he noticed that CEOs of many charities struggle to win arguments with potential funding sources about exactly what constitutes “effective impact” with County and Private Funders when using data around Homelessness. As a result, this turned his attention to data reporting technology and driving more capable, advanced IT systems in this area, which he began to focus on in 2016.
Microsoft, Seattle and Homelessness
Dave first engaged with a few select Seattle, Washington charities focused on homelessness in 2010-2014, with the Microsoft Giving Campaign donating to Plymouth Housing, (a Seattle CBO leader in permanent supportive housing for a particular Population of Focus). Shortly afterward he got more interested with his role on the Philanthropy board of Fare Start, a Microsoft founder Paul Allen-funded charity in 2016-2018, which took people who were homeless and trained them to be skilled enough to work as sous chefs in Seattle restaurants. This 2016-2018 experience taught Dave that getting people into work was “good”, but his realization was that they all too frequently had nowhere to live permanently that was affordable - and then often reverted to homelessness.
LIHI and the Need to Prove Impact
Affordable Housing became his “new personal mission”. This led him, after some research, to the Low Income Housing Institute, (LIHI) in 2018, which strives in Seattle and other counties to bring affordable housing to the least privileged. Led by visionary Sharon Lee, LIHI works with King County and other WA counties, not only to secure County money to build and operate housing - but to prove impact. And they often have to argue the case for these provable “Impact Outcomes” to win recurring County or City support. LIHI’s program leaders taught Dave that the accuracy of how many people were truly housed, over time – the baseline Impact Outcome if you will – was one that could be difficult to get multi agency agreement on, particularly across disparate systems, differently defined population cohorts, measurement metrics, etc. Exactly whose data was “correct”? A problem to be tackled!
During and after Covid, from about 2021 on, Dave began to focus on the gap in “data correlation” and “causation”, that causes hesitation on the part of Government Homelessness funding programs, between Government Agencies, (Fed, State or County), among Corporate & Individual Donors, and passionate local Charity CEO’s and VP’s of Community Engagement, who want to make an Impact and reduce homelessness in their local community.
Data Gaps, Diversity Make Identifying 'Pattern' Elusive
From working with the Low Income Housing Institute, getting to know key LIHI personnel - and also gaining a better understanding of the software systems in King County, Dave began to see many gaps – in data model designs, data update regimes and other areas. These discrepancies can occur between ‘Large Charity’ Salesforce systems, County Information Systems such as BitFocus and ClarityHealth - a Homelessness Information Management System (HMIS) - and also, expectedly, in spreadsheets run by hundreds of small, local charities with typically 10-30 people. County and City Politicians (once elected) often set up NEW, often more advanced policies – but these officials are also answerable to an increasingly data savvy electorate who want provable data, to be assured that their Taxpayer dollars are being used wisely. Not an unreasonable ask in an information-rich society. ‘Politicians come and go. Systems don’t’.
The barrier to easy answers on pattern, correlation and causation, is the diversity of systems in a county – and the lack of connectedness and agreed Data Definitions between Government, Donors, Charities, and Politicians who share and view the same data. (Often frankly with scared politicians hiding behind lawyers who don’t understand technology). It is so easy for a journalist or a politician to publish a polemic on a “point in time” snapshot, or a “single case”. But it is often very hard to get County and City communities to engage in rational dialog on “shared data”.
Reducing the Correlation and Causation Gap to Help Reduce Homelessness
Dave concluded that “shared commonly defined data” and “impact outcome reporting” are the North Star of helping Charities command optimal funding, align their resources, and collaborate with Government to mitigate homelessness in any community. As a career technologist, he has decided to dedicate a substantial piece of his retirement intellect, to helping advance systems that solve this correlation and causation gap. Homelessness Care Program Impact Analysis & standards-based Dashboards is the new area of focus.
Now, in 2023 and forward, McCann Advisory works with a small set of charities - to help automate their Data Interoperability, Cohort definition, and Correlation and Causation Analysis – in order to help communities come together to not only be able to agree on data definitions, gaps, and adopt strategies for coming together – but to ‘see impact and invest more’.
United Way and Beyond
Retired from 8 years as a technology executive at Amazon Web Services in October of 2022, he turned up his engagement with the USA’s third largest charity, United Way, on the topic of Impact Data Capture and Data Reporting - again on “reducing homelessness”. He maintains this focus to this day.
Now in 2025, he is working with 10 United Ways in California, to bring Digital Transformation to the coordinated care needed to take people off the streets, get them housed, and prove that Private/Public funds can be optimally harnessed to prevent, reduce and ultimately eliminate homelessness in west coast states such as California, Washington, and Oregon.