Giving Compass' Take:
- Brad Gunton spotlights New York City’s Every Child and Family is Known initiative, which supports students in unstable housing.
- How can the strong relationships at the heart of this initiative be backed up by strong support systems for students and families who are unhoused or in unstable housing?
- Search for a nonprofit focused on homelessness and housing.
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When a student is in crisis, the hardest problems are easier to solve when someone already knows their story, and trust is already there.
The heart of New York City’s Every Child and Family is Known initiative are the caring adults in schools who check in with students living in temporary housing, build relationships with families and help connect them to support during difficult moments.
Every public school and Department of Homeless Services shelter in NYC has access to the Portal by New Visions, a planning, case-management and interagency operations platform. It’s built to let school teams, shelters and partner organizations do the daily work of moving individual students toward promotion, graduation and postsecondary outcomes.
The success of this initiative has reinforced for me how relationships need infrastructure behind them to translate into system-wide change. That’s now at risk as the city considers cutting funding for the portal.
The Portal integrates student data from NYC Public Schools with families’ shelter information from DHS, helping school staff better understand how to support students living in temporary housing conditions. The ECFIK initiative builds additional features and functionality into the Portal by supporting the day-to-day work of caring adults — social workers, teachers and other school staff who volunteer to serve as the primary point of contact for a student in temporary housing. This allows these adults to document check-ins, coordinate referrals and access key information in one centralized place.
Families experiencing housing instability are often already carrying enormous burdens. The last thing they need is to repeatedly retell painful situations to different people because systems are disconnected. Having one caring adult serve as a single point of contact solves part of the problem, freeing families from having to navigate a rich but labyrinthine system of available resources across nonprofits and agencies throughout NYC.
Read the full article about supporting students in unstable housing by Brad Gunton at The 74.