Families and Youth
All children and youth deserve a stable home where they can thrive with their families. Our work aims to bring multi-sector partners together to ensure children, youth, and families have a safe place to call home and the services they need to thrive.
CSH collaborates with our partners to develop solutions that increase housing stability for families and youth while reducing the risk of child welfare interactions.
Families with children and youth, including unaccompanied, expectant, and parenting young people, are significantly impacted by experiences of homelessness. These experiences are further exacerbated by interactions with institutional and crisis settings.
These institutions and crisis systems include child welfare, foster care, juvenile justice and behavioral health settings, as well as experiences related to poverty, violence, and family rejection due to LGBTQIA+ identities.
CSH’s Initiatives for Housing Stability and Child Welfare Reform
Harnessing collaboration for systems reform
Below are highlights and resources from CSH’s initiatives that have helped families, children, and youth access housing and services.
Keeping Families Together (KFT)
The CSH Keeping Families Together (KFT) model uses supportive housing to bring stability to families at risk of recurring involvement in the child welfare system. KFT increases access to affordable housing and essential wrap-around services for the whole family. Services available through the KFT model can help parents struggling with the overwhelming burden of poverty and complex health needs to improve their lives, family stability, and overall wellbeing.
Research into this supportive housing model shows that a home is the foundation that keeps families intact and reunites children with their families.
One Roof
One Roof centers on better connecting child welfare and housing sectors, with a significant focus on increasing equitable access to affordable housing aligned with services.
The success of One Roof is built on community collaboration, partnerships, and by leveraging common goals between housing, child welfare, and other partners to prevent and end unnecessary impacts of homelessness and child welfare involvement. The One Roof coalition website offers a Housing and Child Welfare Resource Hub and showcases Featured Efforts in local jurisdictions.
Identifying, Screening, and Addressing Family Housing Stability
CSH and our partners call for community-based family service organizations and public child welfare agencies to ensure families in crises remain in safe, quality, and affordable housing. CSH provides information and support for child welfare and community-based family support agencies on how to integrate the Family Housing Stability Framework for screening in their case management protocols.
Supportive Housing for Youth and Young Adults
CSH and partners work to increase high quality supportive housing opportunities for young people ages 18-25. CSH convenes and supports multi-sector partners, policymakers, researchers, communities in planning, implementation, scaling, and related systems transformation and policies to ensure that young people have developmentally and culturally appropriate and accessible housing and services. CSH advances these efforts through our lines of business, including policy and advocacy, investment, and strengthening the supportive housing field.
A couple of examples include:
