Agenda at a Glance

School Connections: Education and Homeless Children (9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.)
How can homeless service providers ensure young children have access to early childhood development services? How can providers promote school participation and reduce school mobility for the children of families they serve? Workshop speakers will examine strategies to promote access to educational supports for children and youth experiencing homelessness and explore how improving coordination with schools can benefit children and families.

Capitol Hill Day: Harnessing the Power of Your Community (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.) 
This is a perfect opportunity for people who are participating in Capitol Hill Day (CHD) to learn the most up to date information about our policy priorities, including emerging issues, impacting homelessness in the United States. This session will include tips on how to harness the power of people with lived experience of homelessness as advocates, and we will review best practices on building and maintaining relationships with your elected officials in Congress, as well as in your community!

Diversion and Problem-Solving: Understanding the Basics (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
Join us in this pre-conference session to receive an overview of how to effectively implement diversion at your program and in your community. Presenters will discuss how diversion can improve your homeless crisis response system as well as the fundamentals of effective diversion practices. Participants will gain an understanding of what diversion means, the basics of diversion practice, and where diversion should happen to reduce new entries into homelessness.

Homelessness and the Criminal Justice System (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.) 
From interactions with law enforcement to inability to find permanent housing after exiting jails and prisons, homelessness has multiple intersections with the criminal justice system. This session will explore those intersections through the lens of research, policy, and practice.

Race and Homelessness: What You Should Know about the Past and Present to Address Racial Inequities in Your System (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.) 
This will be an interactive session that will cover historical and structural barriers along racial lines. Attendees will learn how these barriers persist today and how they impact people of color experiencing homelessness. Attendees will also learn about some practical tools or practices they can utilize to promote racial equity in the homelessness system.

Low-barrier and Housing-focused Shelter 2.0 (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.) 
Well-run low-barrier and housing-focused shelter decreases lengths of homelessness, maximizes resiliency, improves system flow, and helps ensure that shelters are used as a process to be housed again rather than as a destination. This pre-conference session is for shelter operators that are already in the process of moving towards being low-barrier and housing-focused, as well as those that are in the planning stages of making this transition.

Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP): Everything We Know, So Far! (9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
Communities have been involved in the groundbreaking Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) for a couple years now, and communities all over the country can start improving their own responses to youth homelessness based on the lessons innovative YHDP sites have learned. This interactive session will cover all aspects of YHDP, including developing coordinated community plans, authentically collaborating with young people, building partnerships with other youth-serving systems, and ramping up housing assistance, among others.

Ending Homelessness 101: What You Need to Know to Get Started (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
Are you just getting started in the homelessness field? Not sure what all these acronyms mean? Wondering why everyone keeps talking about the “systemic response” to homelessness?

This session provides a broad overview of homelessness and is targeted to people who have been working on homelessness – at the program, administrative, or policy levels – for one year or less*. Topics covered include the latest data on homelessness and best practices and policies to end it. Attendees will leave the session with a stronger general understanding of homelessness – and the most effective ways to address it – that will improve their entire conference experience.

*To ensure enough space in this pre-conference session for people who are new to the homelessness field, registrants who have been involved in homelessness work for more than one year are strongly encouraged to attend other, more advanced and topical pre-conference sessions.

Homelessness and Post-Secondary Students (10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.) 
New research is demonstrating the prevalence of homelessness and housing instability among post-secondary students attending four year and community colleges. What does the data show about populations at greatest risk? How can localities housing providers, and schools intervene? Workshop speakers will examine emerging research and discuss practice and policy strategies.

1.01 It Is Time to Think About Everyone Else: Ending Individual Adult Homelessness

The largest group of people experiencing homelessness is individual adults. Almost half of them are unsheltered, and African-Americans and Native Americans are overrepresented. But local, state, and federal responses to homelessness do not prioritize this population. This workshop will highlight the latest research about the characteristics and needs of individual adults experiencing homelessness, especially those who are not part of any prioritized subpopulation like veterans or youth, and emerging practices for ending their homelessness.

1.02 Housing and Harm Reduction Approaches to Encampments

As unsheltered numbers have grown in some regions of the country, encampments have become more noticeable and, in some instances, are becoming more entrenched in communities. In this session, speakers will present strategies their communities used to resolve different types of encampments using housing-focused and harm reduction approaches.

1.03 Leading Systems Change

Moving the needle on homelessness in your community requires a culture of systems change at many levels – state and local leadership, infrastructure, data, organizational change, services – which is often left up to CoC leadership and local government leaders. How can these leaders effectively facilitate real change management? This workshop will help leaders to articulate and communicate their goal to different audiences, identify change agents, and plan and execute changes in the face of opposition or changing political climates.

1.04 Rapid Re-Housing for People Who Are Chronically Homeless

Due to a lack of Permanent Supportive Housing, many communities are rapidly re-housing people who are experiencing chronic homelessness or are highly vulnerable in other ways. This workshop will present ways to tailor rapid re-housing to effectively assist these very vulnerable populations in searching for and stabilizing in housing. The lessons from this workshop can be applied to improving rapid re-housing services for other populations as well.

1.05 Start with Data: Analyzing Racial Disparities in the Homelessness System 

Homelessness systems need to know if they are creating racially disparate outcomes. Attendees will learn about tools that can help them analyze their data to identify disparities in service and housing provisions. They will also hear about findings from other communities that have already begun to analyze their data. 

1.06 Identifying, Stabilizing, and Supporting Marginally-Housed Families

Families identified by homeless school liaisons, including those living in motels and temporarily with others, are among the thousands of precariously housed families teetering on the edge of homelessness. This workshop will explore school- and community-based initiatives designed to identify, support and stabilize marginally housed families so they can receive the help they need while avoiding homelessness.

1.07 Stella: HUD’s New Tool for Using Your Data to Enhance System Performance

Data-informed decision-making is critical to improving system performance to prevent and end homelessness. In this session, participants will learn about Stella, a new strategy and analysis tool that will help CoCs understand how their system is performing and model an optimized system that fully addresses homelessness in their community. Using data from the Longitudinal System Analysis (LSA) report, the Stella Performance module provides dynamic visuals to illustrate how households move through the homeless system and highlights outcome disparities to help CoCs develop performance improvement strategies.

1.08 Helping Parents Connect to Employment and Income Support

Most families will need to rely on income from employment to pay for housing. This workshop will explore effective strategies to connect parents to employment and the work supports they require to maintain it. Topics to explore in this session include working with TANF agencies, workforce development agencies, and child care providers.

1.09 Show Me the Money: Successfully Navigating the World of Philanthropy

After attending this conference and doing additional research, attendees will have multiple new ideas to better serve clients and end homelessness in home communities. Some of these ideas require new money. This session will provide an overview of innovative strategies to prevent and end homelessness that philanthropy can offer communities, as well as guidance on how community partners can build successful relationships with philanthropic organizations.

1.10 Best Practices in Landlord Retention and Mediation

Maintaining good relationships with landlords is key to effective housing interventions – especially in tight housing markets. But landlord retention requires a special set of skills, including mediating conflicts with neighbors and managing tenancy issues. This workshop will explore successful strategies for building strong partnerships with landlords across a variety of populations and housing and subsidy models.

1.11 Preparing for Disasters: Surviving a Community's Worst Days

Following a natural disaster, homeless service providers often play a critical role in recovery efforts. How much responsibility should they have for people who were not in their systems prior to the disaster? How can FEMA and other resources be employed (or not) to house those who were homeless prior to the crisis? Speakers will share lessons learned from their experiences and foster a conversation about how to best handle future disasters.

1.12 Rapid Re-Housing for Individual Homeless Adults: Veterans in the Lead

Do you have doubts that rapid re-housing can work for individual adults? One key intervention that has contributed to the tremendous reductions in veteran homelessness is the veteran rapid re-housing program, Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF). This workshop will explain best practices learned from SSVF that can and should be applied to all individual homeless adults.

1.13 This Is What Progress Looks Like: Systemic Responses to Youth Homelessness

As with any population, the most effective way to end youth homelessness is through a housing-focused systemic response that includes diversion and prevention; crisis and permanent housing intervention; and connections to mainstream services and supports. This workshop will highlight lessons learned from the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) communities and others that have improved data analysis, outreach, crisis response, permanent housing and service connections, and mainstream partnerships to fundamentally change the way we address youth homelessness.

2.01 Getting Rid of the Waiting List to Nothing: Dynamic System Management

The homeless response system’s primary goal is to move people from homelessness to housing quickly and efficiently. But because of scarce resources, an unintended consequence of moving towards a systemic approach to ending homelessness has been putting people on waitlists for interventions they will likely never receive. This workshop will explore dynamic system management, a prioritization process wherein all available housing resources for persons experiencing homeless in a given community are flexibly and immediately offered to the individuals who need them most acutely in that moment, regardless of whether the individuals might be better-served in the future by a type of program not presently available to them.

2.02 Helping People Pay the Rent

Temporary financial assistance, or PAY, is one of the three core components of rapid re-housing. This workshop will examine how communities and programs are structuring financial assistance to provide services that are flexible and individualized to the needs of each household. Speakers will also share how they prepare individuals and families to transition off rental assistance as services end.

2.03 You Have Analyzed Your Data and Found Racial Disparities: Now What? 

The purpose of analyzing your own HMIS data is to ensure the homelessness system itself is not perpetuating racial inequity.  If you do find disparities, what should your system do to address them?  Attendees will hear about action steps other communities are taking to achieve equitable outcomes for all people experiencing homelessness. 

2.04 What Happens after Shelter Opens: Lessons about Creating Housing Exits

Many communities are opening new shelters to meet emerging unsheltered crises. What happens after the shelter opens? Without thinking from the start about how people are going to exit to housing, new shelters will just fill up quickly and stay full. This workshop will feature lessons learned from building shelters without a housing exit strategy, how to design a housing-focused shelter from the start, as well as how to create a new culture of housing in traditional shelters that have not focused on housing people in the past.

2.05 Transparent Decision-Making: Using Data Dashboards to Make System Design and Funding Decisions

Data dashboards are often used by communities to show how their programs and system are performing. Dashboards can also help policy-makers see how a new or innovative program is working compared to more traditional interventions. This workshop will provide the step-by-step process for using performance dashboards to create a culture in which funding and policy decisions are driven by data. The discussion will include how to form performance evaluation workgroups, create scorecards for programs, benchmark progress, and use the evaluation process to shape a better system.

2.06 Reducing Homelessness and Returns to Jails and Prisons: Housing Is the Solution!

People who reenter communities from prison are at much higher risk of homelessness because their criminal records create barriers to housing, social services, and employment. People of color are disproportionately affected by this trend.   Without stable housing and employment, risk of criminal recidivism and reincarceration rises dramatically. This workshop will highlight innovations at the state and local levels that end the recidivism cycle for people reentering. It will also explain how communities can access federal resources to improve their own reentry responses.

2.07 Enhancing  the Role of Day Centers and Drop-In Centers

Day centers and drop-in centers can be an important point of engagement and outreach for people experiencing homelessness, and the evidence of their utility is particularly strong for youth. This workshop will explain the historic role of day centers and drop-in centers for all populations and the important daily survival resources they can and should provide. It will also highlight ways that day centers and drop-in centers can be re-oriented to become important housing-focused homeless system access points.

2.08 Housing First, Harm Reduction, and Positive Youth Development

Housing First and harm reduction are highly effective strategies for ending homelessness among adults, but are not fully embraced for youth - even though these strategies work well with a key approach to youth homelessness: Positive Youth Development. This workshop will provide a deeper understanding of all three approaches and how to make them the cornerstone of coordinated community responses to youth homelessness. We will also highlight the challenges of implementing effective Housing First for youth, including adultism, and best practices in overcoming those challenges.

2.09 Uniting Homeless Service Partners Around a Common Vision to End Family Homelessness

Effective homeless service systems rely on each participating organization doing its part to ensure families have immediate access to a safe place to stay and the help they need to reconnect to housing. This workshop will explore how homeless service leaders are working to develop a common vision on the role of the crisis response system while getting buy-in from critical stakeholders, including skeptical shelter and transitional housing providers and their boards.

2.10 Partnering with Providers of Mental and Behavioral Health Services

This session will explore common mental and behavioral challenges experienced by people in homeless services systems. What clinical and therapeutic supports are available to them? How are they best integrated into homeless services? What are some best practices for partnering with relevant agencies in your community? This workshop will help answer these questions and more to improve partnerships and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness.

2.11 Building a Better Balance of State

Implementing an effective systemic response to homelessness in rural areas requires a strong, well-governed Balance  of State Continuum of Care (CoC). This workshop will explore best practices in governance, policies, and procedures of high-performing Balance of State CoCs – practices that all CoCs can learn from.

2.12 Cross-System Advocacy: Building Partnerships to Prevent and End Family Homelessness

Preventing and ending family homelessness requires the support and resources of many state and local mainstream partners. This workshop will examine how homeless service providers and leaders have developed relationships with public agency leaders and officials – efforts that have led to new resources for at-risk and homeless families. Speakers will share how their advocacy efforts have improved families’ access to services provided by TANF and workforce development agencies, which strengthened their system’s response to homeless families.

2.13 Embracing Harm Reduction for Families

Can low-barrier, harm reduction programs truly be child- and family-friendly? Speakers will share how they lowered barriers in their own programs, embracing harm reduction responses while retaining safety for families. This session will also explore how to helping board members, funders and staff to understand and support the transition to a harm reduction approach.

3.01 Need Affordable Housing? You Have to Share!

Sharing housing costs may be the best way to ensure affordability, for people experiencing homeless and everyone else, too! This workshop explores all facets of shared housing, including facilitating and mediating roommate arrangements, designing leases, and working with landlords.

3.02 Research on Unsheltered Homelessness

Over the last five years, unsheltered homelessness has been on the rise—even though the overall number of people who are homeless has gone down. Despite the urgency of the issue, very little is known about the people who are living unsheltered, community responses, or best practices for addressing the challenge That is starting to change. Come hear about existing and emerging research in the field.

3.03 Evaluating Coordinated Entry

Continuums of Care are required by HUD to evaluate their Coordinated Entry System (CES) annually. Many communities have now conducted extensive evaluations of their CES and learned what is working well. They are also observing the unintended consequences of certain design decisions. This workshop will explore how to conduct a thorough evaluation of your CES, including users’ experience and the entity that operates the system. 

3.04 Awesome Rapid Re-Housing Case Management

Great case management is the secret to high-performing rapid re-housing (RRH) programs, but it requires a fundamentally different approach to working with clients than stairstep models. This workshop will provide a space for RRH providers to discuss case management challenges and come up with effective solutions informed by the work of long-time RRH programs. Share your struggles and your ideas for overcoming them.

3.05 Advanced Data Usage

Want to explore the limits of what you can do with your homeless data? Maybe you are already incorporating data into your work but want to learn how you could do more. Maybe you are just getting started but want to set ambitious goals about where you want to go with your data usage. This is the session for you. Panelists will share examples of advanced data usage in homeless services systems.

3.06 Creating Racial Equity in Your Organization 

Embracing diversity, equity and inclusion in your organization and programs is a way to intentionally create space for positive outcomes. In this session, organizations that have done the work will share ideas about how to build these core values into their programs. 

3.07 Best Practices in Youth Rapid Re-Housing: Programs and Systems

This workshop will explore the rewards and challenges of youth rapid re-housing, including special considerations for tailoring the Housing First model to the needs of young people. It will also demonstrate how adding youth RRH to your system will help get it “unstuck,” by moving more young people off the streets and into their own housing faster.

3.08 Veteran Homelessness: What's Next?

Now that there has been so much progress on reducing veteran homelessness, what are the next steps? This workshop will explore lessons learned and recent innovations on veteran homelessness, including communities that have transformed their GPD programs to low-barrier, permanent-housing-focused crisis interventions; and the latest developments on the Veterans Administration’s Rapid Resolution pilot. It will also highlight best practices in the VA and Continuums of Care integrating coordinated entry and sharing data.

3.09 Ending Unsheltered Family Homelessness

What does it take to end unsheltered family homelessness? This workshop will examine frontline practice, programmatic, and system-level strategies to reduce the number of families living in cars or other places not intended for human habitation. Outreach, improving shelter, and helping families connect directly to housing from unsheltered locations will be among the strategies explored.

3.10 Right Now Solutions

With highly visible unsheltered homelessness and encampments on the rise public and political pressure to do something “right now” is strong. Failure to properly address it may lead to the costly loss of public and political support. This workshop will allow attendees to explore and propose “right now” solutions that address the need to do things with visible results without falling back on criminalization or negative and ineffective responses.

3.11 Capitol Hill Day 2019: Your Voice on the Hill

How can you increase homelessness funding in your community? One way is to establish relationships with the federal lawmakers who control it! Capitol Hill Day will give you the opportunity to meet with your Members of Congress and staffs in their DC offices. It will prepare you to describe homelessness in their districts, explain how federal funding impacts it, and ask for their help in terms of specific policies. You will also get the tools to organize broader advocacy support when you return home after the conference.

3.12 Innovations in Rural Homelessness: What All Communities Can Learn

Outreach to unsheltered people, crisis response, diversion, and permanent housing --all these parts of a systemic response to homelessness require innovation in rural places due to large geographies, small populations, little infrastructure, and few resources . Leaders and programs in urban and suburban communities can learn a lot from innovative rural leaders and programs. Find out how much in this workshop.

3.13 Tailoring Interventions to Support Young Parents

Families headed by young mothers make up a significant proportion of the homeless family population but few programs specifically tailor interventions to their unique developmental needs and life stage. Speakers in this workshop will share lessons learned from helping young families remain, or return, home through offering tailored diversion and self-resolution support. Speakers will also share lessons in helping young mothers successfully establish and sustain their first independent homes.

4.01 The Best Way to Reduce Inflow? Target Your Prevention Resources!

Can upstream resources be better targeted to help prevent imminent homelessness? This workshop explores recent pilot efforts to prevent homelessness and reduce inflow and first-time homelessness. Presenters will share strategies for targeted prevention including access to legal representation to prevent eviction, emergency assistance funds, and mainstream system programs that help stabilize people at risk of homelessness.

4.02 Research on the Aging Homeless Population: It Is the Future

Recent research reveals that homelessness programs and systems will very soon be serving a much higher percentage of older people – and people with quite different needs than the current population. This session will explore emerging research on aging adults—their numbers, their health, and their prospects, as well as research-based methods for serving them well.

4.03 Innovative Ways to Build Housing

Communities are finding innovative ways to get new housing models online fast and cheaply, even in incredibly tight housing markets. Learn how to build permanent supportive housing, affordable housing, and shared housing projects while using innovative approaches such as leveraging existing community development funding streams, building without using tax credits, and turning low-cost homes into shared housing for youth.

4.04 Problem-Solving Coordinated Entry

This interactive session will provide the opportunity to participate in small group peer discussions and share solutions to the most common challenges of operating coordinated entry systems. Led by knowledgeable facilitators, participants will be able to problem-solve with their peers around issues including prioritization of interventions, serving people with lower vulnerability, breaking through scoring “buckets,” integrating shelters, and eliminating waitlists.

4.05 Confronting and Defeating NIMBY-ism in Your Community

Helping people find temporary and permanent places to live is central to our work. Unfortunately, potential neighbors often discriminate against homeless clients due to their housing status, health status, and/or race. Panelists will discuss NIMBY challenges and how some communities have overcome them, helping more people experiencing homelessness find shelter and also a place to finally call home.

4.06 Ladies First: Research Related to Women Experiencing Homelessness

Women walking through the doors of homeless services systems are more likely than other women to have lived through recent trauma and domestic violence. Single adult women experiencing long-term housing instability have greater health challenges and may be living unsheltered. This session will explore currently available research on women experiencing homelessness. Practitioners will also discuss successful approaches to meeting their unique needs.

4.07 Harnessing the Power of Workers with Lived Experience

Workers and volunteers with lived experience are invaluable to programs and efforts to end homelessness. They work with clients, advocate, organize, and serve on boards. In this session, a panel composed of workers with lived experience will discuss best practices for investing in workers with lived experience—recruitment, retention, and professional development. The discussion will further explore how these valuable human resources are advancing organizational missions and helping others cycle out of homelessness.

4.08 Ensuring Stability After Assistance Ends

How can programs make sure people do not return to homelessness after interventions end? This workshop will provide tools and strategies to prepare staff and clients for the transition away from financial and case management assistance from homeless programs. Learn ways to help clients achieve ongoing housing stability and where they can get additional assistance if they need it.

4.09 Medicaid Is Here to Help

People with complex medical and mental health needs often require a range of services. Programs that serve them typically scramble to find the funding. In this session, hear how to get the most out of your state's Medicaid program for clients with the most complex needs, including the elderly, people with disabilities, and those experiencing chronic homelessness.

4.10 Race, Gender, and Homelessness: Improving Outcomes for Black Men 

One of the most striking disproportionalities among people experiencing homelessness is among African American men. Feeder systems like criminal justice contribute to these numbers.  Given the systemic barriers they often face, more attention should be given to the specific needs of Black men experiencing homelessness. Attendees will learn why Black men are more likely to be overrepresented in the homelessness system and ways providers can address their unique needs.   

4.11 Using Problem-Solving to Reconnect People Experiencing Homelessness to Housing

Problem-solving not only prevents people from experiencing homelessness, but it can also help those currently experiencing homelessness to reconnect to housing. Workshop speakers will explore research and practice on using problem-solving and flexible financial assistance to help individuals and families experiencing homelessness reconnect to housing. 

4.12 Serving Unaccompanied Minors via Cross-System Collaborations

Unaccompanied youth who are under 18 years old show up in homeless systems. Given their age, child welfare agencies, juvenile courts, and schools have a shared interest in their well-being. However, limited resources, siloed systems, and varying eligibility has historically led to a disjointed response. This session will highlight communities that are turning the tide and forming cross-agency partnerships to prevent and end unaccompanied youth homelessness.

4.13 Scaling Up Rapid Re-Housing for Families

Rapid Re-housing should be available to every family that requires assistance to exit homelessness. Speakers will discuss how they redesigned their homeless service system and expanded rental assistance to serve more families. Accessing TANF funds for rapid re-housing will be among the strategies explored.

5.01 Go with the Flow

Good system flow results from managing the way the parts of the homeless system work together to move people through shelter and into housing quickly. If done properly it achieves the goal of making homeless rare, brief, and one-time. This workshop will illustrate how each intervention and part of the system can be an accelerator or a barrier to system flow. The discussion will help you diagnose imbalances in your homeless response system, identify gaps, remove bottlenecks, and right-size interventions, in order to better divert people from shelter, shorten the time people spend homeless, and send more people to housing.

5.02 Housing First: It Is Also for People with Opioid Addictions

Housing is critical to stabilizing lives, including for those addicted to opioids. This session will explore the importance of Housing First in addressing this national crisis. Providers will further discuss their model efforts to serve the population. Recent federal legislation addressing recovery and housing will also be highlighted.

5.03 More Affordable Housing Now!

Opportunities Starts at Home (OSAH) is a large, multi-sector campaign demanding new federal investment in affordable housing NOW! Learn about the progress being made with Congress and the research that is being used to build the case. Explore how you can join the movement and make a difference at the federal, state, and local levels to increase affordable housing.

5.04 How Rapid Re-Housing Can Be More Rapid

A key goal of rapid re-housing is to reduce the length of time people experience homelessness. Unfortunately, waiting for Coordinated Entry assessments, referrals, housing search assistance and inspections all contribute to lengthy shelter stays. Come ready to learn strategies that communities are using to reduce the time it takes to reconnect people to housing. Be ready to share your own ideas for making rapid re-housing “rapid” again.

5.05 Think Before You Build: Assessing Your Crisis Response

If you have people who are unsheltered in your community, you may be wondering if you need to expand shelter capacity. Or, can you get more beds by ramping up your housing exits, thus turning over beds more often and helping more people? Learn ways to assess your community's need for shelter, how to evaluate your current shelter system's performance, and what factors to consider when designing new shelter and the housing resources that will need to accompany it if people are to exit faster.

5.06 Unraveling the Mysteries of Workforce Systems and Building Partnerships

Though they are natural partners in ending homelessness, CoCs and public workforce systems often lack meaningful connections. The first step towards change is getting to know one another. Panelists will provide an overview of the functioning of employment programs. They will further explore how such systems can collaborate with homeless services providers.

5.07 Ensuring Inclusivity: Best Practices for Ending LGBTQ Homelessness

LGBTQ young people are much more likely to experience homelessness. And the experiences of homelessness are much more likely to include violence and exploitation for LGBTQ people of all ages. It is therefore all the more important that homeless programs and systems are safe, welcoming, and affirming regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. This workshop shares the latest research on LGBTQ homelessness and provides recommendations from experts about policies that promote inclusivity and justice, including ensuring successful implementation of HUD's Equal Access Rule.

5.08 A Man-Session: Research on Marginalized Men and Why So Many are Homeless  

Men, and especially men of color, are overrepresented in homeless systems.  Why?  Researchers may have some of the answers.  Panelists at this session will discuss current knowledge about men living on margins, including the challenges they face and best practices for addressing their needs.

5.09 Lowering Barriers, Not Expectations: Engaging People in Emergency Shelters

There are challenges for low-barrier emergency shelters focused on housing people: maintaining safety with fewer rules, engaging people who do not seem ready to discuss housing, training staff on the skills needed to help people exit on their own, and deciding what behavior should trigger an exit – among many others. This workshop will provide guidance on how to maintain safety, proactively engage people without mandating participation in housing-focused services, and safely exit people who are unable to meet the expectations of even a low-barrier shelter.

5.10 Maximizing Community Resources for Homeless Youth: The Role of Host Homes

Host homes is a highly flexible, community-based model for addressing youth homelessness. This workshop provides everything you need to know to recruit, train, and support host home providers and the young people they are hosting. It also highlights lessons learned from implementing informal host home arrangements that can translate to a dynamic diversion practice for young people.

5.11 Building Staff Capacity to Re-house Families Across Homeless Service Interventions

Outreach workers, shelter staff, and transitional housing providers are now all part of the effort to help families quickly reconnect to permanent housing. This workshop will explore how staff in a variety of roles are incorporating re-housing as a core component of their work. Workshop speakers will also examine how program leaders can help staff make the shift to new approaches and responsibilities. 

5.12 Indigenous Homelessness:  Small Numbers - Alarming Rates 

Most minority groups make up a disproportionate share of the homeless population.  Indigenous peoples have the highest rate of homelessness in the nation.  Attendees will learn about the root causes of Indigenous homelessness.  They will also hear about the particular needs of Indigenous people, and effective ways to meet those needs. 

5.13 Promoting the Resilience and Educational Development of Children

Housing instability and homelessness are disruptive by nature and can undermine the consistency and sense of security that help children thrive developmentally. Speakers will describe how to develop partnerships with Home Visitation Programs, which strengthen the development of young children, parents and the parent-child bond. Speakers will also describe children’s rights to continue to attend their schools of origin and access supports to help them achieve academic progress.

6.01 Creating a Culture of Diversion Across Your Community

How do you create a service culture in which every point of contact is seen as an opportunity to solve people’s housing problems so that they do not have to enter shelter? How do you make consumers feel that diversion is helping them, not denying them help? How do you engage other systems to support people so they do not have to enter the homeless system? This workshop will explore the kind of significant cultural shift that is necessary to get the buy-in to move your homeless response system and other community partners towards diversion as a system-wide strategy.

6.02 Exploring Approaches to Assessment in Coordinated Entry

Assessment within your community must be standardized and coordinated. But every community needs something different from its assessment tool based on the unique capacity, goals, and configuration of its system. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to assessment and resource allocation. This workshop will explore various assessment strategies that can help ensure person-centered, housing first-oriented, trauma-informed, reliable, and transparent service delivery.

6.03 Serving an Aging Population in Permanent Supportive Housing

What health challenges are common to aging residents and what types of services would best meet their needs? What new partnerships can be fostered to improve the quality of life of older tenants? How can units and buildings be updated and financed so residents can age in place? Which policies best support this work? Speakers will share the strategies that work. Please come prepared to share your own successes and unique challenges.

6.04 Finding Housing When It Seems Impossible

How are providers finding rental housing for people exiting homelessness in tough housing markets, such as areas with extremely low vacancy rates or high rental costs or in rural areas? Speakers will share their successful strategies in this highly interactive session. Please come prepared to share your own successes and unique challenges.

6.05 Reaching the Mark on Outreach

Successful outreach can be a challenge. Ideally, outreach would reach all unsheltered people. Preferably it would connect many of them directly to housing and any needed services. At a minimum it could offer people space in shelter. If well run, good data collection would inform ongoing service improvements. Come hear from practitioners who are making all these elements work in outreach programs for individual adults, youth, and families.

6.06 Health Care Systems = Opportunities

As health care policy and services continue to evolve, so have opportunities to ensure crucial services for people experiencing homelessness. This includes housing or housing-related services. Attendees will learn about how the housing and health care sectors are developing effective community partnerships to both end homelessness and promote better health outcomes. They will also explore concrete steps they can take to develop or improve these partnerships in their own communities.

6:07 The Incremental Strategy of Harm Reduction

This workshop will help attendees identify the positive short and long term effects of harm reduction and the components of harm reduction that make it a successful tool. It will also address those aspects of harm reduction that could be challenging to professionals and agencies and provide attendees with strategies to overcome those challenges.

6.08 Domestic Violence, Coordinated Entry, and Homeless Service System Leadership

Is your homeless service system compliant with requirements under the Violence Against Women Act? How do you ensure that survivors of domestic violence have immediate access to services that are safe and trauma informed? Are you able to make emergency transfers when survivors’ safety is in jeopardy? How do you accept referrals from domestic violence providers and prioritize survivors for housing interventions? This workshop will examine how to strengthen your system’s response to domestic violence.

6.09 How to Use Shallow Subsidies

Shallow subsidies may provide a light-touch solution to challenging housing problems including: people who do not need or will not get rapid re-housing; people who do not need services and are on fixed incomes; or people who have trouble paying the rent after rapid re-housing ends. Explore different approaches to structuring shallow subsidies and flexible financial assistance in various types of communities and situations, how this assistance is different from rapid-rehousing, how to target it, and how to evaluate its effectiveness.

6.10 Reconnecting Youth with Family

Youth homelessness often results from conflict with family, but the solution to youth homelessness can also lie with family. This workshop provides an overview of the role families play on both sides of the homelessness equation. It also explores effective models of family mediation and reunification that can function as prevention, diversion, and even permanent housing placement.

6.11 Reaching Overlooked Unsheltered Individuals

Traditional outreach strategies may miss highly vulnerable individuals whose safety is at risk. This includes youth, sex workers, individuals who are being trafficked and those with serious and active substance use disorders. Speakers in this workshop will discuss how to target outreach services to often overlooked individuals so they can be connected to safe shelter and housing options. Reliance on peer outreach will be among the strategies explored.

6.12 Partners, Not Tokens: True Collaboration with People with Lived Experience

Is your program as consumer-centered as you want it to be? Are you able to respond to consumer advisory and youth action boards whose members have lived experience? From practice to policy, consumer perspectives improve all our work. This workshop will highlight ways that CoCs and programs can support people with lived experience of all ages and populations in not only sharing their stories but also in becoming informed professionals in the homelessness field.

6.13 Family Friendly Shelter Policies and Facilities

Minimizing family separation, reducing moves across shelter programs, and helping families remain connected to their social networks are steps homeless service programs can take to minimize the trauma of homelessness on children. Speakers will explore how programs are overcoming challenges to achieve compliance with the Equal Access Rule and avoid the separation of fathers and adolescent boys from other family members.

7.01 Problem-Solving Housing Crises: How to Have the Diversion Conversation

Facilitating a problem-solving conversation to resolve someone’s immediate housing crisis is the most critical component of effective diversion practice. This interactive session will take a deep dive into it by demonstrating what an effective problem-solving conversation sounds like, how to train staff to facilitate this kind of activity, and how to avoid some basic pitfalls of poor diversion practices.

7.02 Knowledge is Power: Dispelling the Myths of Who Is Eligible for HUD Homeless Assistance

Think couch-surfing youth are not eligible for HUD homeless assistance? Think people have to sleep under a bridge before they can get into PSH? Think need documentation to be helped? Think again! This workshop will correct common misconceptions about definition, eligibility, and documentation requirements and help you understand the robust array of options your community has for using its homelessness assistance funding to help those who need it.

7.03 Adapting Permanent Supportive Housing for the Most Vulnerable

Though it was designed to serve people who are chronically homeless, permanent supportive housing (PSH) does not always have the services needed to house the most vulnerable people. Frequently, PSH programs are not equipped to serve high-need people being referred to them by coordinated entry, or to meet the needs of people aging in their units . . In this workshop you will learn how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your PSH programs beyond simply their housing retention rates . You will also learn how PSH can be re-tooled to help people with serious illnesses, behavioral health issues, physical disabilities, and people who are elderly maintain housing stability.

7.04 Prioritizing New and Emerging Interventions

Many communities are expanding their homeless response interventions to include Diversion, Rapid Resolution, Shallow Subsidies, Shared Housing, Relocation/Family Reunification, TH-RRH Joint Component, and others. How are these different intervention types prioritized and targeted? Panelists will explore how these new strategies fit into your system and how should they be targeted compared to the more traditional rapid re-housing and permanent supportive housing programs.

7.05 Public Housing Authorities: Their Role in Ending Homelessness

Public housing authorities (PHAs) have a clear role to play in ending homelessness. However, competing priorities and pressures are preventing some from fully stepping into that role. This session will highlight Continuums of Care and PHAs that have successfully navigated these challenges, working together to improve housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness.

7.06 Serving Immigrant Communities in an Age of Enforcement

The nation is in an era of elevated immigration enforcement. Many undocumented immigrants fear deportation when interacting with government and government-adjacent agencies. There is a looming possibility that immigration enforcement efforts will complicate homeless services providers' ability to provide help. This session will explore the current state of the law and how providers are responding to existing challenges.

7.07 Let's Go to Work: Connecting Clients to Jobs

Seeking to connect homeless jobseekers to employment? Many of our clients face barriers rooted in education, skills, criminal records, and racial discrimination. This session will offer different strategies for addressing these challenges and incorporating employment services within programs. Panelists will also discuss how to recruit and engage employers in your community.

7.08 Building a More Sophisticated Relationship with the Media

As homelessness becomes a higher priority issue in communities, the media has an increasingly important role to educate and inform the public. Yet, they often cover hot-button incidents, rather than the big-picture story of how your community is ending homelessness. How can you give your local media a better framework for understanding the issues? Learn from reporters what data is most helpful for their needs, which sources have proven to be the most valuable, and what kind of stories have most effectively shifted the dialogue on homelessness among their readers.

7.09 Improving Education and Employment Outcomes for Youth Experiencing Homelessness

At its simplest, homelessness is a mismatch between income and the cost of housing, and can be addressed on both sides of that equation. Demographic data reveal it is important for young people, particularly, to connect to productive career paths in order to avoid ongoing struggles with housing costs and homelessness. This workshop highlights best practices in supporting young people to finish high school, get post-secondary education and training, or get connected to mainstream systems that help them find jobs in their communities.

7.10 Making the Connection: Outreach to Young People

At least half of youth who experience homelessness are unsheltered, and living on the streets is very dangerous for them, especially for youth of color and LGBTQ youth. But it can be difficult both to find homeless youth and to engage them in services. This workshop will highlight innovative ways to engage young people, including those who may be being sexually exploited. It will explore the role of drop-in centers, technology, and various street outreach models, and how to ensure all these practices are appropriately serving youth of color and LGBTQ youth.

7.11 A Challenge That Is Getting Old: How to Best Serve Older Adults

The number of aging adults in homeless services systems is growing. Also growing are the questions about how to best serve them. How do providers determine which type of housing placement is appropriate for individual clients? How can they best assist in addressing their health needs? How can they facilitate family connections? Panelists will explore these issues and other best practices for serving aging homeless adults. 

7.12 Meeting the Housing Needs of Survivors of Domestic Violence

New resources and tools, such as the Joint Component, dedicated Rapid Re-Housing, and Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) funding, are transforming how providers respond to survivors’ housing needs. Explore the takeaway lessons from speakers using these tools to tailor and expand interventions to prevent and end homelessness for survivors of domestic violence. Speakers will also discuss strategies that can be used across homeless service interventions to ensure that survivors have access to the supports they require to remain safe and sustain permanent housing.

7.13 Connecting Families to Housing: Allocating the Most Intensive Housing Interventions

How are families prioritized for more intensive housing and service interventions? This workshop will examine how localities determine which households are prioritized for transitional housing, permanent rent subsidies, and permanent supportive housing. Speakers will also explore how progressive engagement is being used to allocate permanent housing resources.

TBA