Our Mission
We aim to prevent children from entering foster care or lingering in out-of-home placement unnecessarily due to their parents’ inability to afford safe decent housing. We also work to ensure that all young people who age out of foster care have access to safe, decent, affordable housing - not a PLAN for housing - but access.
What We've Achieved
Working directly with ACTION Ohio we designed and delivered necessary changes to HUD’s thirty-year-old Family Unification Program. Due to youth advocacy and sophistication - and HUD’s willingness to listen - we synchronized FUP with emancipation and eliminated geographic disparities in the program. Access to FUP for youth or FUPY is now universal.
We listened and worked directly with current and former foster youth we learned the best way to improve housing programs to prevent homelessness because being ready for independence and hoping for adoption are not mutually exclusive.
More than 3,000 youth (a more than ten fold increase since July 2019) have accessed permanent housing to prevent homelessness and instead begin their journey to economic success.
Over 2,000 children returned to their parents from foster care through due to HUD’s Family Unification Program.
Because all good ideas must be disseminated, we partnered with formerly homeless foster youth, attorneys, child welfare professionals, and public housing authority leaders to train and disseminate knowledge about how to end homelessness for youth and families.
Our work to keep families together and safe has saved the federal government over $54,000,000 in annual foster care costs.
We extended “on-demand” permanent housing subsidies to homeless Head Start families, eliminating the need to navigate the labyrinth of Coordinated Entry only to be told ‘no’ and face the prospect of losing their children to foster care.
NHCW established the “Head Start on Housing” Campaign to encourage landlords to rent to low-income households.
THE NCHCW APPROACH TO SYSTEMS REFORM
NCHCW works at the local, regional, and national level to create cross-agency partnerships to enable communities to respond appropriately to families and youth who are caught at the intersection of housing and child welfare. NCHCW creates the conditions necessary for these partnerships to thrive on three key levels:
Policy : successfully making the case for millions of dollars in housing subsidies dedicated to child welfare families and youth and informing regulatory/policy decisions at HHS, HUD, OMB and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness;
System: developing relationships between housing and child welfare agencies through the NCHCW loaned executive network;
Practice: cross-training front line workers using the Keeping Families Together and Safe curriculum so they can work together to prevent and end homelessness and prevent child maltreatment).
“Independent living without housing is like driver’s education without a car. ”