About the CSH Supportive Housing Summit
Since 2015, the CSH Supportive Housing Summit has brought together tenants, people with lived experiences of homelessness, service providers, developers, property managers, and funders to discuss innovations in the supportive housing field and to generate new ideas and connections that can advance supportive housing. The conference brings together more than 800 attendees from across the country representing various sectors, roles, and lived experiences.
Previously, this national conference has convened in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. This year, after a pause due to the pandemic, we are excited to be back, hosting this event in-person at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.
Summit Date: May 31, 2022 – June 2, 2023
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
About Supportive Housing
Affordable housing is a critical necessity and one of the most powerful predictors of health, education, economic, and other key factors in a person’s life. Insufficient funding for affordable housing and support services as well as centuries of systemic racism and discrimination mean that people who face barriers due to poverty, race, gender, LBTQIA+ identity, and disability, are denied the right to housing. At this moment, the country is in the midst of a severe housing shortage, which has the greatest impact on the people who already face the highest barriers to accessing housing. In addition, a lack of funding for services paired with overreliance on crisis-based institutions has exacerbated the need for supportive housing.
Supportive housing is a proven intervention that provides affordable housing and services for people who have between 0-15% of the area median income. Quality supportive housing programs connect tenants to a range of services that help them move beyond crisis and to stability where they can thrive. In order to achieve this, programs must be sufficiently funded long-term, and designed inclusively, with an anti-racist approach.
Theme
The CSH Supportive Housing Summit 2023 theme is Building the Field. This theme addresses the urgent need for the resources — funding, training, network, and guidance— that equips the supportive housing field to invest in both quality housing and a sustainable and equitable workforce. The world has irreversibly changed since we convened an in-person Summit in 2019. Therefore, we seek session topics for our 2023 conference that acknowledge these changes and look to the future of supportive housing as a viable and sustainable solution to institutionalization and housing instability. We want sessions that address the housing shortage and explore innovative ways to create units specifically for supportive housing. We seek sessions that acknowledge what is broken in our systems and offer trauma-informed and anti-racist approaches to help, systems, programs, and individuals heal. In addition, our sessions will highlight innovations that are helping the supportive housing field work towards housing justice. We are seeking sessions that honor the voice and the power of the people who live in supportive housing. With the CSH Race Equity Framework guiding our work and that of our partners, we will prioritize proposals that center race equity.
CSH is looking for sessions that touch on the following:
- Increasing the supply of supportive housing,
- Promoting economic security and mobility for people in supportive housing by advocating to increase the availability of employment supports and other income support resources, living wage jobs, and peer support,
- Partnering with people and communities to co-create new approaches that advance equity and housing justice,
- Strengthening the supportive housing workforce to promote equitable and competitive pay, supportive staffing structures, and training opportunities, and
- Acknowledging the impact of systemic racism and are actively building racially equitable polices and programming that produce and sustain racially equitable outcomes.
Applicants will be asked to select one of the following topics for their sessions:
- Economic security in supportive housing
- Providing quality services
- Racial equity and housing justice
- Tenant leadership and inclusion of people with lived expertise
- Health system partnerships
- Justice and child welfare system integration
- Developing and managing supportive housing
- Strengthening the supportive housing field
- Demonstrating impact through data and research
- Innovative partnerships to create more supportive housing units
Session Guidelines
- CSH is committed to racial equity. CSH expects proposals to include diverse perspectives. In addition to having panels that offer diversity of race, gender, and sexual orientation, special consideration will be given to proposals that include people with lived expertise as presenters.
- Proposals must consider the audience first and provide actionable solutions and tools for the supportive housing field.
- Successful proposals will demonstrate clearly how the audience will be engaged as part of the session. We are looking for more than just a presentation, audience engagement is expected.
- Priority will be given to sessions that demonstrate an understanding of the impact racial inequity plays in the provision, access, and utilization of services and housing.
- Sessions will be one-hour in length. We encourage presenters to leave sufficient time for question and answer.
- CSH will provide one comped registration per session panel.
Proposals are due Friday, December 9, 2022. Please contact summit@csh.org if you have any questions.
