Susan McDowell was jogging recently with her sister when they found a cellphone. They opened it up, intent on tracking down the owner. Inside were clues to someone’s world: pictures of a man with tattoos, then a first name that sounded familiar to McDowell.

Then her sister said, “Oh, and it looks like he’s a plumber, too.”

“And that was just enough information for me to figure out that he was a client we served in 2010, 2011,” McDowell told me last week, as we spoke about her 26 years at the helm of LifeWorks, an Austin nonprofit addressing youth homelessness. “The last we heard from him, after he had done a lot of work with us, was that he was headed for a plumbing apprenticeship. And I was like, ‘Danged if he didn’t do it.’”

McDowell has these random and uplifting encounters with former clients more often than you might think (one time the lady taking McDowell’s pizza order over the phone asked, “Are you LifeWorks Susan?”). And these glimpses into people’s better lives after LifeWorks are among the treasured takeaways for McDowell as she ends her tenure this month with the organization she has run since its 1998 founding.

“On any given night, we’re serving well over 200 youth with housing or shelter in Austin where the alternative would likely be that they are sleeping somewhere not fit for human habitation,” McDowell said. “And in that journey, we’re not just providing housing. We’re providing mental health support. We’re providing case management and advocacy. We’re providing a pathway to education and the workforce. The fact that we’re able to do that increasingly for so many youth — I’m just humbled that I got to be part of that journey.”

McDowell is not retiring, and she’s not going far. She starts in July as the new executive director of the Austin-based Sooch Foundation, created two decades ago by Silicon Laboratories cofounder Navdeep Sooch to fund educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged students.

“Sooch board members have known Susan for many years and especially respect her track record in working toward solutions to some of our most pressing social issues,” retiring Sooch Executive Director Mary Ellen Pietruszynski told me. “We are excited to see what’s to come.”

At LifeWorks, McDowell is passing the torch to Liz Schoenfeld, who has been at LifeWorks for 11 years, most recently as the chief research and evaluation officer who has further delved into data to help inform the nonprofit’s work.

As you might expect, housing remains a key part of addressing homelessness. Using money from the city of Austin, Travis County, the state and private donations, LifeWorks plans to start construction later this year or early next year on the Works III, a 120-unit apartment complex off Tillery Street for youth (ages 18-25) who need stable housing.

That complex will mark an ambitious addition to LifeWorks’ housing inventory, which includes the 45-unit Works I (opened in 2014) and the 29-unit Works II (opened in early 2020), all located near one another in East Austin. (LifeWorks also works with other nonprofits to connect clients to apartments around the city.)

As we talked about lessons learned in her nearly three decades working on youth homelessness, however, McDowell was clear: Construction isn’t enough. You can’t build your way out of this problem. And the challenge goes beyond the question of shelter.

McDowell pointed to a University of Chicago study awhile back that included detailed interviews with homeless youth in Travis County. One of the questions was: When was the first time you experienced homelessness?

“Many of us would expect to hear a young person talk about the first time that they slept rough, or they were on somebody’s couch, or that they got kicked out of the house. We’re structure-focused,” McDowell told me. “But what would tend to come up more often was a youth talking about being removed from their family at 8 or 9 years old by foster care. So it wasn’t about house. It was about disruption of family.”

And while all kinds of different factors play a role in adult homelessness, the story among youth (8% of the local homeless population, or about 500 young adults in Travis County) is hauntingly consistent: 76% of them have gone through either the foster care system or the juvenile justice system (or both).

Schoenfeld told me one of her priorities will be working with those agencies on diversion programs and other efforts to help young adults move forward.

“We’re exploring these innovative partnerships, these innovative solutions, to really try to look upstream to disrupt some of the cycles that we see happening over and over again,” Schoenfeld said.

She pointed, for example, to the Travis County Transformation Project, a pilot program launched last year providing counseling and temporary housing for 15- or 16-year-olds who might otherwise go to juvenile detention for violence against a family member. LifeWorks provides housing and other support while facilitators with the Amala Foundation help teens and their families repair fractured relationships.

Homelessness often feels like a daunting, intractable problem, one that has stirred fierce political rancor in recent years. But there is hope in the work that LifeWorks and many others do, helping people one at a time — providing a roof, yes, but also services, training and encouragement.

And while McDowell’s tenure at LifeWorks is drawing to a close, I suspect she’ll keep crossing paths with thriving ex-clients for years to come. It’s bound to happen when you help build not only structures but community.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or on X at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: LifeWorks CEO Susan McDowell leaves for new role at Sooch Foundation