HOUSING FAMILIES

Helping Homeless Families Build Successful Futures

Since 2000, we’ve been addressing the problem of family homelessness in Washington state with an innovative approach called supportive housing—affordable housing paired with on-site services like domestic-violence counseling, job coaching, and parenting-skills training. With numerous partners, we launched the Sound Families Initiative, which provides homeless families with this service-enriched housing in the Puget Sound region in order to help them prepare for a stable and self-sufficient future.

Over the years, Sound Families has achieved promising results. More than two-thirds of families go on to secure permanent housing. Heads of formerly homeless families tend to get jobs and raise their incomes, and recent evaluation data show that they keep the jobs and the higher wages years after they leave the program. Children whose families are in the program attend school more regularly, which greatly increases their chances of building a successful future.

In 2005, partly on the strength of these results, the state legislature launched the Washington Families Fund (WFF) to extend this approach to families across the state. Now with $11 million in private and public support, WFF provides long-term funding for services so families needing additional support aren’t forced to go back out on the streets.

But not all families have benefited equally from this approach. In particular, some families need more intensive services like mental health assistance or substance abuse counseling. In 2006, we received an evaluation of families who were asked to leave the program, “Early Exits: Lessons Learned from Families Asked to Leave Supportive Transitional Housing Programs.” This report has been crucial to our learning as we consider strategies that recognize that families have different needs.

As the Sound Families Initiative winds down, we are in the process of developing a new strategy that builds on what we’ve learned from our Sound Families experience—lessons vital to making sure we can reduce family homelessness in Washington state.