Stabilizing Highest-Risk Families

Pairing supportive housing and needed health and social services to strengthen fragile families, prevent child welfare involvement

Over the past two decades, RWJF has been instrumental in pioneering the use of "supportive housing" to help highly vulnerable populations regain stable footing—including those cycling in and out of homelessness, low-income disabled persons, or those reentering communities following release from prison.

In 2007, RWJF and the Corporation for Supportive Housing launched the pilot project Keeping Families Together (KFT) to explore supportive housing as a way to help families facing serious challenges including chronic homelessness, substance abuse and mental health problems, and child welfare involvement. The KFT model turned the usual paradigm for prioritizing affordable housing on its head. Rather than targeting the most “stable” families, KFT sought to house families with the most complicated cases.

The KFT pilot program provided 29 families with a permanent place to call home and the services and support they needed to stay together. Such services included holistic on-site case management, substance abuse treatment, therapy, parenting skills and job training.

Evaluation results, released in February 2011, showed that the majority of KFT families still had stable housing three years later, more than half of all open child-welfare cases among the families were closed, all children in foster care were reunited with their families, and overall reports of maltreatment dropped substantially (87 percent) during the pilot period. Furthermore, participating families also saw additional benefits, including an increase in school attendance among children.These results indicate that supportive housing can bring families back from the brink of major crisis—with hopes of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty, homelessness, and child neglect.

Initiative Expands Supportive Housing

In 2012, following the promising results of KFT pilot effort in New York City (NY), RWJF partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Annie E. Casey Foundation, Casey Family Programs, and Edna McConnell Clark Foundation to jointly fund a new $36 million initiative to demonstrate how supportive housing can stabilize highly vulnerable families and keep children out of the foster care system.

This new initiative seeks to spread to five additional locations supportive housing models that address both housing instability issues and challenges that can often lead to a child being removed from the home and placed in the foster system. The five grantee sites include: Broward County (FL), Cedar Rapids (IA), Memphis (TN), San Francisco (CA), and the State of Connecticut. Partnerships in each site will receive $5 million over the course of five years to implement this approach.

The programs will be formally evaluated to measure the initiative’s impact on housing stability, health and social and emotional outcomes among children and caregivers, and need for involvement with the child welfare system. If successful, RWJF anticipates that this intervention could become mainstream practice for dramatically improving outcomes for some of America’s most at-risk families, with benefits to the system as a whole. 

Keeping Families Together is an example of the Foundation pioneering and testing an innovative solution, and then replicating what works to help even more people and transform systems as a whole," says Nancy Barrand, senior adviser for program development.

Learn more about Keeping Families Together:

• Read the program evaluation about KFT
• Watch Home. Stronger, Together video to see how KFT helped a 13-year-old and her father get the support they needed to stay together
• Visit Corporation for Supportive Housing to learn more about KFT and its impact

Grantees

The five communities awarded grants to develop programs similar to Keeping Families Together:

• Cedar Rapids, Iowa (Four Oaks Family and Children’s Services)
• Connecticut (Connecticut Department of Children and Families)
• Broward County, Florida (Kids in Distress, Inc. – Wilton Manors)
• Memphis, Tennessee (Community Alliance for the Homeless)
• San Francisco, California (San Francisco Human Services Agency)