News — Homelessness in Arizona has reached a new crisis point. In 2023, more than 14,000 people were without shelter—a 29% increase since 2020.
Help could be on the way, thanks to grant funds that are fueling new research projects based at NAU and developed alongside community partners.
Laura Noll and Robert Wickham, both associate professors of psychological sciences at NAU, recently received more than $1 million in grants from the Garcia Family Foundation to lead three projects aimed at not only finding housing and support for unsheltered Arizonans but also preventing future homelessness in the state.
“One of the reasons why homelessness is a huge issue in Arizona is because there’s a ratio of 18 to 10: For every 18 people who become unhoused, we only have the capacity to house 10 of them,” Wickham said. “Service providers are overwhelmed, and it’s important to support them as they’re navigating this intense situation.”
The series of projects kicked off when Wickham arrived at NAU in 2021. Within weeks of his start, the statistical analyst was invited to join the Arizona Housing Analytics Collaborative (AzHAC), a Garcia Foundation-funded research partnership between Arizona’s three public universities. In the three years since, faculty members and graduate students at NAU, Arizona State University and the University of Arizona have been leveraging state datasets, including the Homelessness Information System, to identify patterns that could help curb homelessness in the future.
“So far, we’ve been focused on understanding why Arizona’s current support system is not working for a subset of folks,” Wickham said. “As the rates of homelessness in the state of Arizona continue to rise, it is critically important that we better understand the underlying challenges that lead individuals and families to become unhoused.”
Working with the Maricopa Association of Governments, the research group is examining the sequences Arizonans move through before and after becoming homeless. They recently discovered that unpaid utility bills are a key canary in the coal mine—a sign that people could soon struggle to keep up with rent. Wickham said that in order to prevent these people from becoming homeless, he and his colleagues are facilitating communication between utility companies and organizations that provide support for low-income families who may come up short on other necessities, like food or school supplies.
Support for northern Arizonans
Wickham said the reach of NAU’s work on homelessness will soon extend even farther: Last year, the Garcia Family Foundation reached out to him to ask if he had any ideas for expanding AzHAC into northern Arizona. 
That’s when Wickham pulled in Noll, a trauma psychologist with experience solving complex problems through partnerships with community organizations. With a $400,000 grant from the foundation, Wickham and Noll established a Community Impact Fellows Program. The grant funds support master’s students as they work with Flagstaff Shelter Services, Catholic Charities of Northern Arizona and the Northland Family Health Center to help local residents who are unhoused and grappling with other complex issues, like domestic violence and disability.
“The fellowship program isn’t just giving students much-needed experience addressing the kinds of problems they’ll face in their careers; it’s also helping our community partners by meeting them where they are,” Noll said. “We’re working with these organizations to identify and address what they see as their biggest challenges.”
In the 2023-24 school year, for example, graduate students embedded at Northland Family Health Center found that employee burnout was one of the organization’s biggest challenges. Burnout led to frequent staff turnover and shortages, which made it harder for the domestic violence center to meet every patient’s needs. This fall, the students will evaluate staff members’ burnout experiences through interviews, analyzing the shelter’s new employee training process and examining an exit survey for those who leave. The grad students aim to pave the way for a brighter future at Northland for both employees and clients.
Noll said Ph.D. students and undergraduate Lumberjacks are now involved, too. Two interdisciplinary health doctoral students are drawing on prior experience with community-engaged research and trauma psychology to help evaluate statewide and local programs, with a focus on implementing trauma-informed evaluation procedures. Alongside the Community Impact Fellows, they’ll also mentor NAU undergraduate students looking to gain hands-on experience with research that benefits the local community.
“At NAU, we’re always asking ourselves, ‘What do our students need to be economically mobile, future readiness trained and to make good on their promise to help the community?’” Noll said. “This program not only checks all of those boxes, but it also draws on the university’s resources and the broader community’s knowledge to create a better future in northern Arizona.”
Preventing homelessness
Noll and Wickham aren’t stopping there. Together with nearly a dozen agencies throughout Arizona, they’re working to help stop homelessness before it happens.
“For folks who are living really close to the margins, they’re living paycheck to paycheck,” Wickham said. “If they can’t get to work one day—say their truck breaks down and they don’t have money to fix it—that means they can’t get to the job site, and that suddenly throws their life out of balance. These are the people who are most at risk of becoming homeless.”
Wickham and Noll have been asked to lead a team that will disperse $10 million to nonprofit organizations that provide food, medical loans and other services that Arizonans like these rely on to stay afloat. The funds come from the Garcia Family Foundation, St. Vincent De Paul and the Arizona Department of Housing.
“We’re going to track the outcome of folks who receive these prevention funds to find out whether they actually work in forestalling and preventing homelessness,” Wickham said. “If it works, it will not only keep people securely housed but will also prevent people from suffering the knock-on psychological effects of homelessness.”
Why choose to focus on homelessness in Arizona? Because, Noll said, no one in the United States is immune to the possibility of losing the roof over their head.
“My view is that we are only as safe, healthy and secure as our most vulnerable, marginalized and underserved community members,” she said. “The COVID-19 pandemic showed us how interconnected all our healthcare needs are. In this area, the wealthy person and the unhoused person wound up in the same hospital, being treated by the same doctors. We have a home in common, and that’s reason enough to look out for each other.”
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