Can Crossroads expand to LA and Beyond?

Crossroads has been extremely successful in San Diego. Over 5,500 indivudals have been helped, and resource connections have been made over 40,000 times. The site has fostered a unique collaboration between homeless resource providers, and we have seen an incredibly positive reception from both individuals experiencing homelessness, and volunteers helping the homeless. With an expressed interest to bring Crossroads to other cities, can the site be replicated, or is Crossroads growth forever stopped at San Diego.

CrossroadsLA logo

Can Crossroads Be Replicated?

In short, yes Crossroads can be brought to other cities. In fact, the site was built with the intention of being brought to other cities. When designing CrossroadsSD, I built the site so that adding new homeless resources would be extremely easy. This same feature can be used when building an entirely new site for a new city. What I would do, and what were doing right now to bring Crossroads to LA, is copy CrossroadsSD without any resources, change the homepage to reflect LA’s needs, and then add new homeless resources that apply to LA just like how I would add resources to CrossroadsSD.

With replicating Crossroads being as easy as adding a new resource to the site multiple times, it is in fact very plausible to bring Crossroads to other cities in the US.

Where would Crossroads be Replicated?

With Crossroads being designed to have the capacity to be replicated in other cities, where would Crossroads be brought to next? Currently, we are expanding to Los Angeles. With a homeless population around 8-10 times San Diego, this is an immense challenge in of itself, but not an impossible one. Once Crossroads expands to LA, we hope to bring this site to other cities in California, and eventually nationwide. In an ideal world, Crossroads can be in every city in the United States, making the United States’s efforts against homelessness as efficient as possible to hopefully solve one of the country’s most plaguing issues.