Calgary Homeless Foundation (CHF)
Calgary Homeless Foundation guides the fight against homelessness. Fueled by this purpose, we envision the day when homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring—perhaps an episode in someone's life, but never a condition that defines it. Working in alignment with governments and collaboratively with service providers and community partners, we help translate complex system needs into coordinated, efficient ground-level action that maximizes the impact of every resource and creates lasting pathways out of homelessness.
We are uniquely positioned to observe the many challenges facing our city and strengthen the entire sector through strategic leadership, forward-thinking capacity development, and hands-on, day-to-day support.
Our comprehensive data warehouse reveals the full picture of homelessness in our community, enabling us to anticipate challenges and identify effective solutions. And we unite diverse stakeholders around shared goals and help address complex situations that no single agency can solve alone.
Our collective approach and focus on learning and evaluation equip us to address homelessness across our city while keeping the people experiencing it at the heart of our work. When the system works better together, more people find their way home.
We are looking for passionate, entrepreneurial, and talented people to join our action-oriented, high-impact team.
The Position
The Data Analyst helps CHF understand what is happening across Calgary's homeless-serving system by turning complex data into clear, reliable analysis and insights.
Working with data from CHF's Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), data warehouse and other sources, the Data Analyst analyzes trends in homelessness, service use, housing outcomes and system performance; develops dashboards and reporting products; and responds to emerging analytical questions from across CHF and its partners.
The role works closely with System Planning, HMIS, Data Development and other CHF teams to understand the question behind a request, determine the right data and approach, validate results and communicate what the data are telling us. This requires strong SQL and business-intelligence skills, sound analytical judgement and the ability to explain complex information clearly to different audiences.
Our Staff
CHF staff are action-oriented individuals who are catalytic leaders, courageous collaborators, evidence-inspired, and vision-dedicated. They choose to bring their professional expertise and personal talents to the non-profit sector, to add value to the full community. They work cooperatively with others in a strong team environment; demonstrate flexibility in organizing and undertaking work; show a high degree of initiative, discernment and resourcefulness; exhibit excellent communication and relational skills; demonstrate thoughtfulness and intelligence in decision making; and are focused on creating positive outcomes for persons experiencing homelessness.
How we work here
At CHF our approach is grounded in purpose, collaboration, and accountability. We believe that how we work together matters as much as what we achieve.
Here’s what you can expect from us—and what we expect from you:
- Ownership Under Pressure: We take responsibility for outcomes, even when challenges arise.
- Constructive Feedback: We give and receive feedback openly, with the goal of learning and improving.
- Pace with Purpose: We move quickly when needed, without sacrificing quality or integrity.
- Healthy Disagreement: We challenge ideas respectfully and invite discussion to make decisions stronger.
- Shared Understanding: Expertise means building clarity for others, not being “right by default.”
Our culture values transparency, inclusion, and resilience. We name real pressures—external and internal— and navigate them together. Interviews and development conversations focus on real examples of how we act when it’s hard, because that’s when our values matter most.
Accountability and Deliverables
Data Analysis & Insights — 30%
- Query, analyze and interpret HMIS, data warehouse and other relevant data to support CHF and system-planning priorities.
- Analyze trends and patterns in homelessness, service utilization, housing outcomes and system performance, including measures such as active and chronic homelessness, inflows and outflows, housing placements and returns to homelessness.
- Investigate changes, anomalies and emerging issues to understand what is happening in the data and provide context for decision-makers.
- Develop cohort and comparative analyses across populations, programs, services and time periods.
- Apply appropriate analytical and statistical methods to answer business and system-planning questions.
- Identify questions that would benefit from advanced statistical or modelling approaches and work with the Data Scientist where appropriate.
Business Intelligence & Visualization — 25%
- Develop, enhance and maintain dashboards and analytical products using CHF's business-intelligence tools.
- Work with users to translate reporting and information needs into meaningful measures, dashboards and visualizations.
- Present complex information in ways that make trends, changes and key findings easy to understand.
- Monitor dashboards and reporting products for accuracy, relevance and usability.
- Improve existing analytical products as organizational, government and system needs evolve.
Reporting & Decision Support — 20%
- Produce recurring and ad-hoc analysis for CHF leadership, System Planning, government, funded agencies and other stakeholders.
- Work with stakeholders to understand the question behind an analytical request and determine the appropriate data and approach.
- Interpret findings and provide meaningful context rather than reporting numbers in isolation.
- Support organizational, government and system-level reporting requirements.
- Communicate findings, assumptions and limitations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
Data Quality & Measurement — 15%
- Validate analytical outputs and investigate unexpected, inconsistent or incomplete results before information is reported or published.
- Apply consistent definitions, business rules and calculation methods across reports, dashboards and analyses.
- Identify data-quality issues through analysis and work with HMIS and Data Development to understand and address underlying problems.
- Reconcile results across datasets and reporting products where required.
- Document and communicate data limitations that affect the interpretation or use of analytical findings.
Collaboration & Continuous Improvement — 10%
- Work closely with System Planning, HMIS, Data Development, Data Science and other CHF teams to support evolving analytical needs.
- Identify opportunities to automate repeatable analytical work and improve the efficiency and consistency of reporting and analysis.
- Share analytical knowledge and practices across the team and contribute to consistent approaches to analysis, measurement and reporting.
- Contribute to improving how CHF uses data to understand homelessness and system performance.
Education and Experience
Education
A graduate degree in Statistics, Data Science, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, quantitative social science or another discipline with a strong analytical component; or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
Experience
- 2–4+ years of experience in data analysis, business intelligence, reporting or a related analytical role.
- Demonstrated experience working with complex datasets and translating analysis into meaningful findings.
- Experience developing dashboards, reports and visualizations for operational or decision-making audiences.
- Experience working with administrative, health, social-service, government or other complex real-world data is an asset.
- Experience in homelessness, housing or the social sector is an asset but is not required.
Technical Capabilities
The successful candidate will bring strong capability in:
- Strong proficiency in SQL, including querying, joining, aggregating and validating data from relational databases.
- Experience with business-intelligence and visualization tools such as Power BI, Qlik Sense or Tableau.
- Strong analytical and quantitative reasoning, including an understanding of descriptive statistics and appropriate statistical methods.
- Experience validating, reconciling and investigating data.
- Strong data-visualization skills and an ability to present complex information clearly.
- Proficiency working with large and complex datasets.
- Experience with Python or R, Azure, Databricks or other cloud-based data environments is an asset.
Core Competency Requirements
The ideal candidate will be expected to demonstrate the following core competencies:
- Analytical Thinking: Looks beyond the reported number to understand patterns, changes and anomalies and determine what they mean.
- Data Judgement: Understands how definitions, data quality, completeness and context affect analytical results and validates findings before drawing conclusions.
- Problem Solving: Takes an analytical question, determines what information is needed and develops a practical approach to answering it.
- Attention to Detail: Produces accurate and consistent analytical outputs and identifies discrepancies before information reaches users.
- Communication: Explains data, findings, assumptions and limitations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Collaboration: Works effectively with colleagues across CHF and with external partners, bringing an analytical perspective while understanding the operational and system context behind the data.
- Initiative & Organization: Manages competing priorities, works independently and looks for practical ways to improve existing analytical processes and products.
General Competency Requirements
The ideal candidate will be expected to demonstrate and grow the following competencies:
Taking Accountability for Guiding the Fight Against Homelessness by:
- Regularly sharing our Purpose and Ambition and making decisions that move us toward
- Following through on my commitments to earn the trust of my colleagues and community partners
- Identifying obstacles, admitting my mistakes, and taking ownership of solutions
Fostering a Growth Mindset by:
- Regularly seeking new information and leveraging data to inform my solutions and decisions
- Treating mistakes as learning opportunities and focusing myself & others on improving future results
- Considering how I may have contributed to problems and regularly seeking feedback to discover how I can improve
- Accepting ambiguity and taking action to move us in the direction of our goals without waiting for perfect information
Empowering Others to Succeed by:
- Articulating and agreeing upon clear expectations and desired results
- Meeting regularly with my key internal and external stakeholders to ensure they have what they need from me to succeed
- Eliminating organizational constraints that hold people back
Collaborating for Greater Impact by:
- Proactively collaborating with others and incorporating their input into solutions
- Respecting the unique strengths and agency of others by encouraging them to propose solutions and make decisions
- Having the courage to share difficult perspectives directly, respectfully, and in a timely manner, and encouraging others to do the same
- Being willing to change my perspective when presented with new information