Volunteer at the Summit

• Volunteers must be 18 years of age or older.
• All volunteers must attend the mandatory volunteer orientation (Sunday evening, March 1, 2026 at 5:15 P.M.) onsite at the summit hotel. Travel should be scheduled accordingly.
• Volunteers receive complimentary summit registration. Travel and hotel accommodations are not included.

Please review the general volunteer duties and physical requirements below prior to applying.

Please reference the full summit agenda here.

• Executive Leaders: Guide organizations through strategic, operational, and cultural leadership. Often serve as executive directors, CEOs, or senior managers with organizational or multi-agency responsibilities.
• System and CoC Leaders: Coordinate regional homeless response systems (e.g., Continuums of Care), overseeing data, funding streams, and system performance aligned with federal, state, or local housing goals.
• Government and Policy Leaders: Hold elected, appointed, or administrative roles that shape policy, budgets, and legislation related to homelessness, housing, healthcare, and community development.
• Peer Leaders (Lived Experience Experts): Lead through lived experience with homelessness, providing strategy and insight on advocacy, program design, and system governance, as well as peer support.
• Emerging Leaders: Stepping in to new levels of influence. Includes rising leaders across sectors and early or mid-career professionals developing management skills, entering formal leadership roles, or growing their leadership identity.
• Advocate Leaders: Organize and mobilize for systemic change from outside traditional institutions through legal advocacy, organizing, campaign work, or public education. They hold systems accountable and represent community-driven power.
• Philanthropic Leaders: Invest in homelessness solutions, system transformation, or community infrastructure. Represent private foundations, community foundations, grantmaking staff at United Ways, corporate giving programs, individual philanthropists, or venture philanthropy.
• Research Leaders: Generate and apply evidence to drive actionable solutions to end homelessness, ensuring that data, evaluation, and community knowledge inform systems and policy change.

• State-Level Leadership: Creating Change: Explore how to identify and leverage underutilized state-level resources—such as funding streams, policy levers, and data systems—to drive progress and create meaningful change. You’ll learn how to develop strategies for promoting more equitable access to state resources, focusing on improving the take-up rate of successful programs in underserved communities. We’ll also discuss the value of creating a state-level peer exchange network to share best practices, solve problems collaboratively, and accelerate collective progress. Join us to learn how to lead with impact and transform your state.
• Cross-sector Coalition Building for Policy Wins: In today’s policy and political climate, no single organization can drive transformative change alone. This session explores how partnering across sectors—labor, housing, health care, environment, and more—creates stronger coalitions and amplifies collective power. Participants will learn the essentials of building, sustaining, and operating effective coalitions, from navigating different perspectives and work cultures to aligning on shared goals. Attendees will leave with strategies to forge cross-sector partnerships that can help defend and unlock bigger policy wins and lasting systems change.
• Data to Action – Using Local Data to Drive Change: Without data, we cannot make informed change. But what do we do when the data we rely on is increasingly at risk? Join this collaborative strategy lab to discuss the growing uncertainty around federal data and to conduct a deep dive into the power of local data. See how communities are improving data collection, enhancing storytelling, implementing evidence-based programmatic change, and advancing advocacy at the local level.
• Putting Experience and Evidence in Action: Building a Local Research Team with People who Have Experienced Homelessness: Laypeople with lived experience of homelessness can be researchers, helping everyone better understand the dynamics of effective homeless response. In this session, we’ll discuss how to form a layperson research team, how to train individuals with lived experience in research methods, and how to create sustainable models to support people with lived experience in this work.
• Sustaining and Building Funding Support for Evidence-Based Practices: When effective homeless service interventions are under suspicion and ethical innovations are met with skepticism, how can homeless services leaders and advocates build necessary funding support? This session will explore strategies to sustain and increase critical funding to scale interventions through formulating compelling narratives that integrate data and lived expertise. Presenters will also explore advocacy and communication strategies to reach critical stakeholders.
• Leaving Nobody Behind: How to Deliver on Your Equity Commitments: What do tangible diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies look like in practice? This session focuses on how leaders can translate abstract diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments into concrete strategies that deliver measurable outcomes. Presenters will also examine how communities are navigating legal and political pressures while ensuring vulnerable populations are protected and supported in their path to thriving.
• Building Unified Pathways to Justice: Advancing Rights and Dignity for Vulnerable Communities: In July 2025, the President’s Executive Order called for expanded policing and forced institutionalization as responses to homelessness—policies that jeopardize the civil and human rights of people experiencing homelessness, as well as individuals with disabilities, mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and other marginalized groups. This session will examine the historical and ongoing barriers that have hindered collaboration across sectors, including homeless services, disability rights, public health, and behavioral health. Together, we will explore strategies to break down silos, strengthen cross-sector partnerships, and build a united, more powerful movement to protect rights and advance lasting solutions.
• Co-Leading Through Challenges: A Case Lab for Funders and Partners: This session will bring together both funder and grantee/partner dilemmas. Using Funders Together for Housing Justice’s signature case consultation format, participants will co-create strategies around real challenges faced in the pursuit of housing justice. Participants will serve as thought-partners offering analysis and strategies that emphasize courage, equity, and solidarity. Participants will leave with concrete ideas, tangible tools and deeper cross-movement trust that can help overcome current challenges. This format breaks down silos by inviting funders and partners to help each other think through challenges and solutions.