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As director of Guilford County's 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, Jehan Benton is looking to overhaul the way we tackle homelessness in Greensboro and High Point.

The program looks to help the chronically homeless - people with substance abuse and mental health problems, those who have the most trouble working back into mainstream society. Nearing the end of its first year, the program has done more than hand out food and provide cots for the night.

It's gotten 55 homeless people off the streets, into housing and support programs and on their way to being self-sufficient.

Benton sat down with reporter Joe Killian to talk about how the war on homelessness has changed and how she joined the fight.

Q. Greensboro and High Point are hardly the first cities to do this. What have you learned from looking at other cities’ programs?

A. Greensboro and High Point became the 210th city in the U.S. to say they were going to do it. So there was a lot of good information out there. But like a lot of people, I was skeptical at first too. I kind of thought all the homelessness efforts that were out there wouldn’t really work. But I started doing some research and I found that (10-Year Plans) were having some significant results — especially in larger cities — with doing it this new way.

Q. What is that new way?

A. Well, when you think about the word homelessness — they don’t have a home. But we’d been doing everything but that. So the new focus was taking someone without a home and getting them in a home — and then wrap services around them. A lot of it is strengthening the system of care, a lot of focus on collaborations between agencies. When people started sharing information and services, changes were made. People are really excited for the first time, to have different entities working together. So it’s not just about homelessness — it’s about people who are low income as well, who are on that cusp. It’s about ex-offenders who are coming back into your community. It’s about mental health and substance abuse, which affects people in all ranges of income spectrums, but the homeless most of all.

Q. Why did it take so long for agencies and disciplines to come together to take on this problem?

A. Well, like with anything, I think there was a lot of territorialism. But funders have sort of shifted their focus to collaborative efforts, so that kind of forces a change. Then when you start talking to your neighbor, you notice what a difference it makes. If I run a shelter for men, but I’m just a shelter. What happens when they hit that time limit and they can’t stay any more? You need to be talking to whoever is running a transitional housing program, or if that person needs job training, you need to be talking to whoever can provide that. If you have no relationships with other agencies, how do you really help that person?

Q. Did you always want to be in social work?

A. No. I went to the Academy at Dudley, which is like science, math and technology. I went to a liberal arts school, to Carolina for undergrad. I was an economics and political science major. But one of the things I did as a summer job in Greensboro, and I kept doing it, was a program with the housing authority in Greensboro — a summer enrichment program. I started out teaching some classes — I was doing dance and African American History, cultural arts. That kind of introduced me to the housing world a little bit. ... Since I was into economics and statistics, I started doing some things with Durham’s crime prevention unit, sitting in on hearings, learning a little about housing. Then I graduated, went to work for a bank and hated it. I knew I wanted to go to grad school, but never thought it would be in social work. I had a business background. But I found a great program at the University of Chicago, a nonprofit management program. You get an administrative background — you learn about financial management, budgets, politics.

Q. Isn’t there a trend in social work toward people coming in with a business background? Like Philip Mangano , the U.S. homelessness czar?

A. Oh, definitely. One of the things you see is that a lot of the foundations — the United Ways, especially — recruit from the business industry. It’s like a second career for people who have that business background and get it. I think High Point University now has a nonprofit management program and I think there are only about five in the country. With that you learn how to do policy, how to work in the business world and run your agency right for business.

Q. Have people in social work traditionally been bad at that?

A. I think that’s where nonprofits have sort of failed in the past. You can’t just be out there doing stuff because you think it’s right — you have to be fiscally sound, you have to have a strategic plan. And that’s the difference that a 10-Year Plan makes, I think — we’re not just out there doing it because it’s the moral thing to do. Yes, it is right to do it. But it also makes business sense. It makes economic sense to stop looking at homelessness in a way where you spend X amount of dollars and you have no end change.

Q. The idea is that you want to make an investment, not give a handout.

A. Yes. You can break it down where you end up spending $20,000 in public resources on one person, with no change. They’re right where they were when you started. Or you can spend $10,000 and they’re in a home, they have services and they’re not using thousands or tens of thousands in public resources.

Q. This 10-Year Plan is a cooperative effort between Greensboro and High Point. Are there any important differences between homelessness in the two cities?

A. No, they’re pretty similar. This population tends to move back and forth. ... You’re dealing with similar labor forces — in High Point it was the furniture industry and Greensboro was more of a mill town, with textiles. But they both suffered when those industries left.

Q. How important is education and job training for the people who worked those jobs?

A. It’s incredibly important. A lot of people think that to get a GED is some numerous amount of dollars. It’s $7 to take the placement test versus maybe hundreds of dollars that people think it is. We’re working with programs to get them into community colleges, to get them training, but also get them placement. How do you make people who are homeless or ex-offenders coming back into the community attractive to employers in North Carolina? It’s a fire-at-will state, but employees can sue based on discrimination. There’s a fear from employers. So maybe we can work with temp agencies as a buffer. You can hire this person through a temp agency and once you have this person on your payroll for six or eight months and they’re great, you can go ahead and hire them. It can be a trial period and we can get around the stereotypes of what hiring that person will be like.

Q. Is that one of the biggest obstacles, getting past those stereotypes?

A. It can be. People become homeless for a lot of different reasons but the truth of it is, if I’m on the street in the same clothes I was wearing yesterday, I can’t go to a job interview. If I don’t have a phone and voice mail, if I don’t have an address, I can’t apply for a job. If you don’t have an address, you can’t even get an ID. These are those concrete things you have to take care of.