Housing Stability Boosts Child, Youth, and Family Well-Being
Secure and affordable housing minimizes family engagement in child welfare systems, enhancing children’s welfare and reducing expenses for public services. It is crucial for state authorities to incorporate housing into their welfare plans.
Join One Roof to advance the role of housing and services as a critical strategy to reimagining child welfare and investing in strengthening families and communities.
Key Strategies
To achieve One Roof’s goals, CSH and partners are using an approach that relies on communication and engagement, programmatic implementation, and promoting systems and policies that align efforts to secure resources.
The One Roof Advisory Board has prioritized these strategies that include:
- Inspire system transformation to uniformly identify family housing needs and match them to housing resources
- Promote new housing resources through emerging state and federal opportunities
- Elevate role of housing for families and youth in advancement of Social Determinants of Health and Racial Equity
- Encourage Federal Agency action to elevate the promise of housing for families and youth through engagement, guidance, and crossover issues
Results
One Roof measures success based on the number of national and local efforts that support its mission along with the creation of housing resources for families and youth at the intersection of homelessness and child welfare involvement. The efforts of One Roof partners through development of new housing and services resources, collaborations, and systems and policy changes contribute to positive long-term outcomes and measurable impacts on children, youth, and families. The impact of stability and having a safe home ultimately changes their life trajectory, closes equity gaps and breaks intergenerational cycles of poverty, homelessness, and child welfare involvement.
Common indicators for measuring progress on national and community levels:
- Increase housing stability among families and youth.
- Decrease the number of encounters with the child welfare system.
- Increase the number of children who safely remain with their parents.
- Decrease the number of days that a child or youth spends in foster care.
- Increase the number of children and youth who reunify with their families.
- Improved health and well-being of parents, children, and youth.
- Improved educational outcomes; reducing chronic absenteeism and increasing school attendance.