We at the Alliance see our conferences as key opportunities to promote racial equity, especially since they bring large audiences together to exchange ideas, tools, and practices about ending homelessness. Although it has now been a couple of weeks since our February conference on unsheltered homelessness, I want to keep the conversation about racial equity active and highlight the work and ideas that were conveyed during some of the sessions. Hopefully, these sessions inspired the field to either start or keep working on racial equity as a strategy to end homelessness.

Here are some highlights from sessions on racial equity:

Current Federal Efforts to Support Racial Equity

This session highlighted the advancements made at the federal level to support racial equity. Most notably, for the past few years, racial equity has been a part of scoring at the federal level through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO).  The NOFO incentivizes Continuums of Care (CoCs) to analyze their homelessness systems for racial disparities in services and outcomes, and to develop action plans to address them, if found.

Effective Strategies to Serve Native Americans and Alaska Natives

This session explored the need for organizational change in hiring practices to appropriately meet the needs for Native and/or Indigenous groups experiencing homelessness. Specifically, it called for a shift in the mindset that valuing cultural awareness is a “good to have” rather than  a “must have.” The panelists also urged the audience to extend this shift to adopt culturally appropriate interventions to address the unique challenges faced by this population.

Building Connections and Addressing Racial Trauma to Improve Services to BIPoC Experiencing Unsheltered Homelessness

Along the same lines, this workshop set out to define racial trauma and how it intersects with the trauma of experiencing homelessness. The panelists discussed culturally specific models for services that could improve client retention, longer periods of service engagement, fuller use of services, and how shared (racial/cultural) identity could have a positive impact on client outcomes.

Read the full article about racial equity and homelessness by Chandra Crawford at National Alliance to End Homelessness.