CSH 
and The U.S. Department of Human Services Administration for Children and Families (ACF) are pleased to release: Early Childhood Self-Assessment Tool for Family Supportive Housing – A Guide to Support the Safe, Healthy Development of Young Children.
Supportive housing for families with young children is an ideal environment to increase parent/caregiver understanding of how they can positively impact early learning. Being exposed to a safe, stable, and developmentally appropriate environment while young is important to healthy child development. This new tool contains recommendations for making supportive housing, both scattered site and single site, safe and developmentally appropriate for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
Recommendations in this tool can be applied to community rooms, offices of service providers and property management, conference rooms, class rooms, lobbies and other shared spaces in supportive housing. Many of the recommendations can be carried over into goal and service plans developed with parents and caregivers and practiced within their individual family units. (For instance, during move-in, orientation, home visits and parent coaching.)
Your comments are important, and we hope you will contact us with questions or requests for implementation assistance by emailing either leah.rhea@csh.org or Marsha.Basloe@acf.hhs.gov. We have big plans for the Guide, which include further updates and the development of a virtual training that will help users fully understand the many ways it can be leveraged to enhance child development.
CSH and ACF are grateful to the many experts who contributed to this tool. We look forward to its wide distribution and use in the field, and are eager to receive feedback that will allow us to continuously refine it to bring maximum benefit to those we care about most: our families and young children in supportive housing.
