Training

At 15, she headed to a CVS store on Tucson’s east side with her friends to buy a pregnancy test. Back then, they traveled everywhere on foot. At that age, the unknown feels survivable when your friends are beside you.

Two weeks into her freshman year at Santa Rita High School, her test came back positive. Adria Tena bought prenatal vitamins and tucked them onto the nightstand beside her bed, underneath the ordinary clutter of a girlhood she hoped would cover for her.

Her mother found them anyway. 

That was when Tena told her she was pregnant. And that was when her mother told her she could not live at home anymore.

That same night, Tena packed a backpack, grabbed a couple more totes with a few days’ worth of clothes and headed down her childhood street to a friend’s house. She never went back to get the rest of her things.

Fear barely registered. Instead, a resolve took hold that pointed her inner compass one way: forward, always forward.

“I didn’t necessarily feel scared,” Tena said. “I felt more like, ‘I’m gonna go and do my own thing and I don’t really need you.’”

What followed was a life bouncing around borrowed rooms in friends’ and family members’ homes. Someone always knew where to send her. Someone checked back. Someone filled a gap.

• • •

Years later, Tena still ensures one door leads to another. This time, she does it with the weight of Arizona’s public systems behind her.

As a program administrator at Solari, Inc., Tena oversees the Data Warehouse Enterprise for Linkage Arizona, or DWEL-AZ. It is a statewide effort to connect health and homelessness data, so agencies can better coordinate care for people experiencing homelessness.

The project took shape during the fourth cohort of Data Labs, an award-winning training and technical assistance program at the Beeck Center, in partnership with the National Governors Association, working directly with state government teams to scope and launch data sharing projects that improve public services. Through a human-centered design curriculum and hands-on support, Data Labs helped 18 state teams tackle policy challenges in areas like housing, education, workforce, and public benefits.

In the Grand Canyon State, health systems and homelessness systems often serve the same people, but rarely share data in ways that help them work together. The state’s Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, may not know a person’s housing status. Homelessness service providers may not have a clear picture of a client’s health or behavioral health.

DWEL-AZ bridges that divide — linking records across Arizona’s Medicaid agency, Department of Housing, and homeless service providers, with privacy and security protections in place — so providers and policymakers can prioritize services, coordinate care, and understand needs at a system level. 

• • •

The work has taken on urgency in recent years. In 2023, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs issued an executive order revamping the state’s homelessness commission and calling for stronger coordination across agencies. At the same time, housing insecurity has increased substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Arizona Center for Economic Progress.

Partnering with the Beeck Center, however, helped the Arizona team name what they were already experiencing: fragmented data that was making a growing crisis harder to address. 

“The hardest part isn’t agreeing on the problem,” said Travis Done, a senior consultant in the State Data and Analytics Office at the Arizona Department of Administration. “It’s aligning consent, compliance, and trust across organizations that were never designed to work together,” Done said. Solving it required “stitching” across programs and institutions, he said.

That challenge — alignment across systems — was one Tena personally understood.

As a teenager, she attended Tucson’s Teenage Parent High School and graduated valedictorian. She went on to Pima Community College with multiple scholarships. But she is quick to say none of it happened alone.

At 17, a youth program helped cover her apartment security deposit. Youth On Their Own linked her to mentorship and housing navigation. School staff and community organizations made referrals, filled gaps, and followed up. Each step depended on someone identifying and connecting her to resources.

“I used to think I had to do everything myself,” Tena said. “I was determined. I felt like I had something to prove.” Over time, that mindset shifted. “Now my motto is, “It takes a village.’”

Since completing Data Labs, DWEL-AZ’s pilot has run for more than a year. The project’s team built governance structures and collaboration across the state’s Medicaid agency, its three Continuums of Care, and homelessness service providers. The pace has been slower than expected, but progress is steadily moving forward.

“What we didn’t fully anticipate was how much time governance would take,” Tena said.

Sharing data across health and homelessness systems requires navigating consent rules that vary by region, strict Medicaid compliance requirements, and privacy protections designed to prevent harm. For Medicaid, this meant developing exclusionary checklists, so providers do not inadvertently commit fraud. For homelessness providers, it meant new agreements, new workflows, and new assurances about how client data could — and could not — be used.

“All that had to be built before anything could go live,” Tena said. “The security, the policy review, the governance. It’s the kind of work that’s invisible, but it’s also the work that makes this viable.”

This alignment demanded time, especially for a project funded largely through philanthropy. Without dedicated state line items, many partners contributed to DWEL-AZ on top of their day jobs. The benefit, Tena said, was deeper buy-in and shared ownership.

After the team presented to funders during Data Labs’ Demo Day, they secured $930,000 in new funding from the Garcia Family Foundation, Tena said. The support provided runway to complete governance work funders recognized as essential.

• • •

For Done, sustained funding mattered less for speed than for durability. “If you don’t build the foundation right,” he said, “the system won’t last.” 

DWEL-AZ is now within about 90 days of launch, Tena said. That milestone reflected not only resources or timing, but the process that helped the team get there. Data Labs mattered in part because the Arizona team arrived from different places. Done worked across agencies without formal authority over most of the people in the room. Tena was newly hired, managing day-to-day operations without a data background. Randy Hade, Solari’s director of homeless initiatives, brought years of experience convening homelessness coalitions but little time to rethink how those groups worked together.

Most cross-sector collaborations, Done said, are relationship-driven and time-starved. People solve urgent problems in real time, with little opportunity to step back and design a shared plan end-to-end. Beeck’s technical assistance created that space.

“It gave us a way to work toward common ends,” he said. “I’ve never seen such varied folks working together like that. It’s inspiring.”

Today, DWEL-AZ has its own implementation-focused working groups, reflecting what the team carried from Data Labs. This means approaching problems from policy, technical, human, and operational perspectives at the same time; using shared language to explain DWEL-AZ to new partners; and trusting that progress can happen even without formal authority.

Coming from a behavioral health background, Tena was still learning the terrain as the first full-time staff member dedicated to administering DWEL-AZ.

“There were areas I wouldn’t have thought about on my own,” she said, including how to sequence data work over time, plan for governance milestones, and translate big ideas into manageable steps.

The tools introduced during Data Labs are still in use, including action plans, opportunity trees, and goal-setting frameworks. Tena now applies them to DWEL-AZ and across Solari’s analytics workgroups. “It helped me think forward in a way I didn’t before,” she said.

Hade described the outcome in terms of focus: “It helped us tighten our goals. We had a lot of loose, ambitious ideas,” he said. Data Labs pushed him to look at the project from multiple angles. The process, he added, helped newcomers like him and Tena feel more confident about what they were trying to achieve, and hone ideas into clear objectives they still use to guide how they talk about DWEL-AZ.

For Tena, that clarity connects back to why she entered social work in the first place.

“When people know what they’re eligible for, when systems talk to each other, that’s power,” she said. “Knowledge is power. And connection is how people get to the next step.”