Safety Starts with Anti-Racism. Click here to read more.

Key Approaches to Address the Barriers to Safe Housing

Safe housing is essential to survivors’ ability to recover from violence and move forward with their lives. Ensuring access to safe and affordable housing, whether short- or long-term, subsidized or unsubsidized, private or public, requires a range of strategies and approaches that help restore survivors’ safety, stability and self-determination.

We can ensure that all survivors of domestic and sexual violence have access to safe housing across the spectrum of the housing system by employing these four key strategies: 

Creating Safe Temporary Housing

Increase accessibility in emergency shelter and transitional housing programs for survivors who might not otherwise be eligible for housing, including those with substance use disorders, mental illness, limited English proficiency, physical or mental disabilities, as well as to LGBTQ survivors, male survivors, large or non-traditional family structures, survivors with poor credit or criminal histories, returning citizens, and others from marginalized or underserved populations.

 

Facilitating Access to Safe Permanent Housing

Work with housing providers, landlords, and homeless housing programs to ensure access for survivors to permanent, affordable housing and ensure all housing programs are safe, confidential, and trauma-informed.

 

Preventing Homelessness

Reach survivors before they are homeless to help them remain safe and stable in their own communities, through assistance with flexible funding, access to housing protections, and housing advocacy.

 

Survivor-Centered Services

Employ trauma-informed, culturally inclusive, voluntary services, as well as safety and wellness planning, to ensure survivor safety, promote healing from violence, and ensure survivor self-determination and dignity.

Copyright 2020 SafeHousingPartnerships.org. All rights reserved.

Terms & Conditions  |  Online Contact Form

This project is sponsored under Family Violence Prevention and Services grant awards from the Office of Family Violence Prevention and Service within the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office on Violence Against Women and the Office for Victims of Crime at the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The interagency collaboration established this domestic violence and housing technical assistance consortium to provide national domestic violence and housing training and resource development.