The Early Childhood Self-Assessment Tool for Family Shelters
Thursday, May 21, 2:30 - 3:30 PM ET
 The Early Childhood Self-Assessment Tool for Family Shelters, developed by the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is intended to help shelter staff ensure their facilities are safe and appropriate for the development of young children. Family shelters provide essential services to the entire family - including infants, toddlers, and preschoolers during a difficult time in their lives. As you work to connect families to permanent housing, you can ensure that your shelter environment assists the physical, socio-emotional, nutritional, and intellectual development of children ages 0-5 to support these children through their experience of homelessness. Creating a safe, developmentally appropriate environment will assure that the infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in your shelter have the best possible start to a bright future as they exit homelessness into permanent housing.
To support the use of the tool, USICH is hosting a webinar -- The Early Childhood Assessment Tool for Shelters: Success in Practice -- on Thursday, May 21, 2:30 - 3:30 PM ET. In addition to leaders from HHS and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, community presenters from housing and early childhood will highlight their experiences with joint implementation of the assessment tool and the benefits it has yielded for their shelters in support of the overall goal of ending homelessness among families.
Speakers:
- Jasmine Hayes, USICH
- Norman Suchar, HUD
- Ebony Rankin, HUD
- Marsha Basloe, HHS
- Shannon Rudisill, HHS
- Grace Whitney, CT Head Start
- Susan Compton Agamy, Spooner House
- Jamie Peterson, TEAM Early Education
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The Supportive Housing Opportunities Planner Tool: Setting a Path to End Chronic Homelessness Locally
Tuesday, May 26, 1:00 - 2:15 PM, ET
The Obama Administration is committed to ending chronic homelessness nationally in 2017. Achieving this goal nationally is only possible if we achieve it locally. To do so, communities across the country must have enough available permanent supportive housing units to serve people currently experiencing chronic homelessness and to prevent people with disabling conditions from becoming chronically homeless in the future.  To help communities set a path to end chronic homelessness locally, USICH recently released the Supportive Housing Opportunities Planner (SHOP) Tool. The SHOP Tool helps communities identify the specific set of strategies, such as increasing the prioritization of existing turnover units and creating new supportive housing, needed to achieve the goal in 2017 or earlier. Specifically, the tool allows communities to set different targets for prioritization and creation of new permanent supportive housing units for people experiencing chronic homelessness, and assess the impact of those targets on the projected number of people experiencing chronic homelessness each year until 2017. To support the use of the tool, USICH is hosting a webinar -- The Supportive Housing Opportunities Planner (SHOP) Tool: Setting a Path to End Chronic Homelessness Locally -- on Tuesday, May 26, 1 - 2:15 PM ET. The USICH team will be joined by community presenters who will talk about their plans for implementing the SHOP Tool to determine the right strategies for increasing permanent supportive housing availability locally.
Speakers:
- Richard Cho, USICH
- Lindsay Knotts, USICH
- Marcy Thompson, HUD
- Eric Gammons, Catholic Services of Acadiana in Louisiana
- Manny Sarria, Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust
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