HSWH-RP lights the way forward

The Homework Starts with Home Research Partnership (HSWHRP) aspired to make the impacts of housing instability for school-age children and youth and their families more visible, and to do so across a broader range of domains than is typically possible for any one data system, agency, funder, or researcher to do alone. Its success is demonstrated not only by shaping a more holistic, whole-person understanding of housing instability among young people, but also by energizing deeper interest in boundary-spanning research on homelessness, developing the technical capacity and nuanced semantic understanding of how to do so, and growing the appetite for ways integrated data can achieve policy and programmatic objectives not possible otherwise. Those objectives include creating more trauma-informed responses, which don’t require people to relive and retell the same information to every resource gatekeeper to access needed services, and leveraging information that would otherwise be siloed to create opportunities for earlier interventions and prevention efforts. While much work remains to seize these opportunities fully, the HSWH-RP showed what’s possible and helped light the way forward. It certainly informs the work I and my colleagues continue to advance every day.

— Eric I. Grumdahl, assistant commissioner, Homelessness, Housing, and Support Services Administration, Minnesota Department of Human Services