Smart Start Conference Spotlight: Early Childhood Homelessness and Housing Insecurity
Did you know that more than 450,000 infants and toddlers and their families are homeless in the US including more than 28,000 in NC? And that’s just the ones we have officially “counted”. We know that number is much higher and includes hundreds of thousands more families and expectant parents who are housing insecure – living in their car, a cheap motel room, or on someone’s floor or couch.
And did you know that you are more likely to be evicted before the age of one than at any other time of your life? Can you imagine the trauma of a baby starting off life like this or the stress of a parent in not knowing where they will securely lay their child every night?
These are the key points that were raised at the Smart Start Conference featured session on Early Childhood Homelessness.
Melea Rose-Waters, Prevent Child Abuse America, kicked off the panel with a discussion of a national initiative, Thrive From the Start, focused on Prenatal to Age Three homelessness and housing insecurity and what is needed in terms of policy and programmatic changes at the local, state and national level to impact this very real issue. Melea brought a framework of child welfare prevention to her remarks and the need to support families with young children and beginning prenatally to assure they are housing secure.
Laura Hewitt, the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education, and Angela Lewis, North Carolina Partnership for Children, shared the great work that NC is already doing to reduce early childhood homelessness through its Early Childhood Homelessness Action Plan and its YAY Babies Initiative as well as the work occurring through the local Smart Start partnerships and the training that is available to assess local shelters and their support for young children in shelters. North Carolina leaders are to be commended as no other state in the country has an Early Childhood Action Plan.
Cheri Neal, the Continuum of Care Coordinator for the Guilford County Department of Health and Human Services, shared very real examples of the work in her community and how they are working collaboratively across early childhood services, housing developers, transportation leaders, community nonprofits, and public health to mitigate homelessness for families with young children and to solve this problem once and for all.
We wrapped this discussion with comments from the audience about what is happening in their own communities and the role that each and every one of us can be playing to deal with this huge problem.
Whether you attended the session or just heard about it, we hope you will think about the role you can play in your own state or community. Take advantage of the resources being developed under the Thrive from the Start campaign:
National and State Policy agenda
Infant and Toddler Homelessness across 50 States
Prenatal-3 State Policy Roadmap
