We’re looking forward to seeing you in San Diego this week for our 2015 National Conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness. Here in DC, as you may already be aware, we just had a ton of snow dumped on us. Some of us had our flights to San Diego canceled, and we’ve had to scramble to make new arrangements. But so far it looks like we’re all going to make it.
If you’re going to be there, please consider sharing your experience on social media using the conference hashtag #NAEH15. If you aren’t attending, you can keep up with the conference on Twitter, on the Alliance blog, and the Alliance Facebook page. Alliance staff will be tweeting about conference content, events, and speakers throughout the event.
Here at the Alliance, we often say that the answer to homelessness is housing. Though there are many ways to ensure people have access to housing, one of them is by connecting them to employment. If people are employed in living-wage jobs, they should be more able to afford housing.
Over the past several years, MDRC, a nonprofit that conducts research on social policy, has examined a demonstration project to explore ways to increase employment and earnings for families living in subsidized housing. In 2012, MRDC released early findings from the project in a report, “Working Toward Self-Sufficiency: Early Findings from a Program for Housing Voucher Recipients in New York City.” (MDRC will release a second report of longer-term findings soon.)
MRDC focused on the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program, a federal program that works to decrease reliance on housing vouchers by providing case management to prepare families for and connect them to employment, increasing families’ share of the rent as their income increases, and diverting families’ increased rent payments into interest-accruing accounts that are paid out to them upon program completion.
This brief highlights two successful collaboration between EveryOne Home and Alameda County Social Services Agency to end family homelessness. It describes an initiative that combined the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund and the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing (HPRP) program, and a demonstration pilot that uses federal child welfare resources and the expertise of local homeless service organizations to meet the housing needs of child welfare-involved families.
This paper provides an overview of the DeKalb Kids Home Collaborative, which is an example of a successful partnership forged between homeless service providers, the school system, and an employment service provider. The partnership emerged after school leaders and homeless service providers came together to help a mother and son struggling with homelessness. Their collaborative effort helped the family escape homelessness and inspired the providers to develop a formal partnership to help children avoid or quickly escape homelessness.
This webinar, which originally streamed October 21, 2013, explores how housing needs can impact the outcomes of families receiving child welfare family preservation or reunification services.
