Recap Roundtable Event: Six Years of Building Effective and Robust Cross-Sector Partnerships

Stephanie Love-Patterson, CEO and President of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), opened the event with a history of NNEDV’s involvement with the campaign and its shift from participating as a Roundtable member to serving on the Steering Committee. She emphasized the importance of safe, affordable housing for survivors of domestic violence and the power of cross-sector partnerships. Chantelle Wilkinson, Campaign Director, provided an overview of the campaign’s work over the past six years and what the campaign has accomplished. Sarah Saadian, Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Field Organizing at NLIHC, gave attendees an update on the campaign’s priority bills and plans to advance those bills in the coming year.

Julie Walker, Campaign Coordinator, moderated a panel that highlighted the partnerships between the campaign and leaders in domestic violence prevention, early childhood development, food security, and education. Dfox, Collaborative Approach to Housing for Survivors (CASH) Senior Specialist at NNEDV; Patricia Cole, Senior Federal Policy Director at ZEROTOTHREE; Robert Campbell, Vice President of Policy at Feeding America; and Barbara Duffield, Executive Director of Schoolhouse Connection joined the panel to discuss why their organizations joined the Roundtable and how they have engaged with the campaign over the years. The event concluded with time for Roundtable members to discuss ideas for continued collaboration in 2025.

The Opportunity Roundtable is made up of representatives from 122 multi-sector organizations and enables the campaign to raise awareness about the intersections of housing and other sectors, continually expand its multi-sector network, and reach a diverse array of new stakeholders.

Campaign Releases Fact Sheet on Housing Needs of Survivors of Domestic Violence

Recap of 9/19 Webinar on Housing Policies and Intergenerational Poverty

Intergenerational poverty occurs when children who grow up in families with low incomes experience low-income status in adulthood. Analysis of intergenerational poverty requires long-term data collection, for which researchers gather data on children and as they move into adulthood. The data used in the report found that approximately a third of children who grew up in families with low incomes had low incomes in adulthood – twice the share found among those who did not group up poor. Households in the bottom 20% of the income distribution according to IRS tax records were considered low income.

During the webinar, Dr. Patillo emphasized that housing is foundational to many components of a child’s environment affecting their development: schools, safety, businesses, parks, transportation, health care, childcare, and air quality. She also discussed how the housing unit itself is relevant to intergenerational poverty since income affects housing crowding, housing stability, and housing affordability. She went on to highlight racial disparities in household mobility, concentration of poverty, housing quality, and housing cost burden. Among other disparities, the report finds that Black and Native American children are more than seven times as likely, and Latino children more than four times as likely, as white children to live in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 30% or more.

Dr. Patillo also reviewed the standards used for the report’s policy recommendations: the direct evidence standard (evidence of long-term outcomes into adulthood) and the strong evidence standard (causal evidence that a policy improves a correlate of adult poverty, e.g. earnings, health, or education completion). Based on these standards, the report finds promising evidence of the benefits of the “Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act” (FSOVA), which would expand the Housing Choice Voucher program to an additional 250,000 families with children under the age of six and couple vouchers with customized counseling services to enable families to access well-resourced neighborhoods of their choice.

The FSOVA is a top policy priority for the campaign, and its enactment would represent a major step forward in tackling the nation’s housing crisis.

National Fair Housing Alliance Releases Health and Housing Equity Report

For healthcare entities, the report provides an overview of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) mandate and outlines steps to align their work with fair housing stakeholders to build community health improvement partnerships. The guide also gives fair housing stakeholders an introduction to community health needs assessments (CHNAs) and guidance to engage and build relationships with healthcare entities. The report features case studies, evidence-based approaches, and recommendations from practitioners who have facilitated successful partnerships.

The report was created in collaboration with Health Management Associates to outline the parallels between the goals of AFFH and CHNAs, including the requirement to allocate resources to best meet community needs. A CHNA provides state and local health entities and community members with detailed information about a specific community’s health status, needs, and assets. The assessment serves as a guide to decide where resources should be allocated and can be combined with AFFH and broader health planning processes to create an intersectional approach to addressing fair housing issues and their health impacts.

Fact of the Month: Strong bipartisan majorities in Ohio and South Carolina favor a variety of policies included in the campaign’s National Policy Agenda. 

Source: OSAH