John Records, CEO and executive director of COTS for the past 21 years, is stepping down to teach and lecture on poverty and homeless issues.
The 62-year-old Records will stay on the Committee on the Shelterless board of directors, but become a public service professor at the School of Social Welfare at State University of New York at Albany that he helped found.
He will also give talks on innovative approaches in tackling homelessness, dividing his time between Petaluma and Colorado, where his wife is from.
“In the past two decades we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how to help people and have built nationally recognized programs,” Records said.
“Our success rates of getting people into permanent housing are double that of other organizations…So this is a logical next step and a chance for me to take what we’ve developed here into the world.”
Mike Johnson, the current chief operating officer, will take over Records’ position effective July 1. Johnson spent eight years homeless in the Petaluma area and first joined COTS as a cook in 1999.
The experience has helped Johnson and other administrators understand the challenges COTS clients face and how they think about their lives.
“People are not just a collection of problems: they are not just addicts or just homeless or jobless,” Johnson said.
“They are a whole human being who need to feel a sense of purpose like everybody else and they need to be connected to their community…They have to have something to look forward to and we’re giving them a foundation to do that.”
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