Mystic — Women often do best when they listen to their heart in the exercise of leadership, the executive director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness told a crowd of about 200 at the Mystic Hilton Thursday.

"That's when we can make our biggest impact as women," said Lisa Tepper Bates of Stonington at a Celebration of Women Breakfast sponsored by the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut to acknowledge benefactors of its Southeast and Norwich Area Women & Girls Funds.

Bates, who came to the nonprofit sector via the U.S. Foreign Service, said that men and women often have the same goals in leadership, but "we are not the same."

She noticed during her foreign service that while men gravitated toward conflict resolution in hotspots, arms negotiations and trade issues, women extended themselves to look at human rights, refugees and issues involving women and children.

Yet, she said, "Those were not the assignments that would take you bustling up the ranks."

Bates eventually listened to her heart and became involved in issues closer to home such as teen pregnancy, homelessness and education. And as head of the Mystic Area Shelter and Hospitality and, later, the leader of the statewide homeless coalition, she helped lead the way as Connecticut became the first state in the country to effectively end veteran homelessness.

Based on her experience, Bates urged women to embrace two basic concepts in their own work life: seek out data on what works and enhance collaboration.

Data, she said, showed that previous ways of dealing with homelessness were failing. While it seemed reasonable to make housing the final step in ending homelessness after finding a job and dealing with other issues, Bates said data proved the most effective path to help people was to immediately provide housing.

This stabilized families and made the other interventions more successful, she said, leading to a reported 30 percent decrease in homelessness statewide in just the past two years.

And collaboration has been the key to making this happen, Bates said. It used to be that clients had to seek out up to 20 providers, she said, but now these agencies are collaborating to take the onus off the homeless, providing a one-stop shop for services.

"Our agencies work as real systems," she said. "Now we are all going in the same direction at the same time."

Collaborating, Bates said, is easy to say and hard to put into effect, but women tend to be good at it.

"This is an area where we excel," she said. "I have seen women lead the way in (fighting) homelessness with strong impact."

l.howard@theday.com