Resources and services for Rhode Island’s homeless have grown steadily wider, deeper and more progressive since the start of the millennium.
Part of the improvement can be attributed to Laurie A. Devlin, chief financial officer of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s leading organization providing services to the homeless.
Devlin joined Crossroads’ predecessor, Travelers Aid Housing, in 2001 as director of finance, rising to CFO two years ago. Since 2001, Devlin has handled and overseen complex financial planning and a bold series of expansions that started with a bang in 2004, when the organization moved from downtown Providence to the rehabbed former YMCA building on Broad Street.
Crossroads now operates five facilities, in addition to its Broad Street home: a family shelter, a women’s shelter, two housing developments in North Kingstown and a residence in West Warwick for the elderly who are homeless. Crossroads employs 125.
Crossroads provides a range of care and support encompassing emergency needs, shelter, housing, medical care, and case management for social and vocational services.
The expansion of facilities and services since 2004 – at a total cost of more than $40 million – is a mammoth undertaking, requiring complicated management of financial matters, information technology and personnel issues, all of which fall under Devlin’s purview.
As a nonprofit with various forms of private and public funding, Crossroads must operate financial systems that comply with Rhode Island law, and generally accepted accounting principles of the R.I. Office of the Auditor General, the IRS, and the R.I. Office of Management and Budget.
Devlin seems unflustered by the magnitude of the task. She said she left her previous post, as a senior accountant at Memorial Hospital, because she did not feel challenged. Since she joined Crossroads she has “never been bored,” she said.
Devlin described herself as a “hands-off manager” of the eight people she supervises in finance, IT and HR departments.
“I have great people working for me,” she said. “When they are doing something that I wouldn’t do, I may step in. But mostly I let people develop their own sense of how things can be done. It seems to work.” The average tenure of Devlin’s employees is eight years, an indicator of her positive style of leadership at Crossroads.
Martha Conn Hultzman, a principal at the Providence accounting firm LGC+D, who nominated Devlin for the Providence Business News CFO award, was impressed by the number of very large construction projects that Devlin has overseen. “A typical CFO might have something like this – with really complex finances and funding sources – once in their career,” Hultzman said. “Laurie has done several, while still keeping normal operations going. Her skill-set is one of leadership and effective supervision. She approaches the work cooperatively.”
When Devlin joined the predecessor to Crossroads in 2001, the organization had revenue of $3 million; by 2014, its annual gross revenue was $12.1 million. The use of federal, state and private money has made her stewardship more intricate as the demands of reporting and compliance have become more complex.
As a senior manager, Devlin was deeply involved in a strategic-planning process starting in 2013. Part of this planning was continuing movement toward a Housing First approach, which has been gaining traction among homeless-services providers and thinkers in many places.
The philosophy before Housing First was to get homeless people under temporary shelter and then to work on specific problems like physical and mental illnesses, addiction and job placement. Under Housing First, the primary task is to get people into permanent, supported housing, and then backfill with appropriate services.
Devlin said that, as a leader, she takes direction from Crossroads’ own core values: safety, effectiveness and respect.
Back in 2001, when she moved from Memorial Hospital to Travelers Aid Housing, Devlin was looking to flex her professional muscles. “At the time I wasn’t aware so much about the homeless situation,” she said. “It was an eye-opener to [join] this mission of helping folks who need help. It is much more rewarding to work in this environment.” •
