FamilyAid Boston, Inc.

1) To prevent as many children and their parents as possible from becoming homeless in the Greater Boston Area. In pursuit of this goal, FAB is expanding the reach of its existing homelessness prevention program to provide 100 additional families, for a total of 300 served, through a new cross-sector partnership with the Boston Public School System, the City of Boston, and local hospitals. Families at imminent risk of homelessness will receive crisis intervention, rapid-response early interventions- flexible funding, targeted referrals, and ongoing supportive services - before they enter the summary eviction process. This program will enable families to maintain their housing and will mitigate the effects homelessness has on children.

2) To provide more families residing in our shelters in the Greater Boston area with permanent housing solutions. In pursuit of this goal, FAB is working with city, state, and other human service organizations to increase the availability of low-income housing.

3) To assure those families placed in permanent housing by FAB, or otherwise supported through FAB’s programs, provide consistency for their children, sustain their housing situation, and not relapse into homelessness. Families who receive case management from FAB's expert staff and are placed in stable housing will receive all the support they need to ensure at least a 90% housing retention rate for more than a year.

4) To better meet the needs of children who are traumatized by housing instability in the Greater Boston Area, assuring that they have adequate mental, physical, and emotional health support services. FAB will further train its expert staff, and hire additional staff members, to provide the children in its program with trauma-informed care, increase each child's access to health-based community organizations, and deepen our relationship with hospitals and MassHealth – providing access to PCPs, mental health professionals, and more.

5) To deepen relationships with partner agencies, advocacy groups, and city and state officials to better understand the causes of family homelessness and more effective methods to prevent loss of housing.

Once families become homeless, their average stay in shelter is close to one year, costing taxpayers nearly $40,000 per family. Due to displacement from their established resources, families in shelter also pay more for necessities like food, transportation, and childcare. When families are forced to move, the expense of up-front rent and moving costs can run well over $5,000. Furthermore, housing instability and homelessness takes a psychological toll on families.

For 90% of families who enter shelter, homelessness could be avoided with approximately $1,500 in emergency funding and wraparound services. This is exactly why FAB has become Boston’s largest provider of private homelessness prevention resources, delivering crisis intervention, emergency funds, and ongoing support services to families. To expand its homelessness prevention program, to serve more families in Boston, FAB has created an innovative pilot program in cooperation with the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and the City of Boston. We approached both entities proactively based on the aforementioned research, to ultimately reach and serve 900 children before their families losing their housing.

The pilot, titled the Early Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (EHIP), will provide 100 school-age children and their families with “upstream,” pre-eviction interventions including: rapid-response early interventions- flexible funding, targeted referrals, and ongoing supportive services - before families enter the summary eviction process in order to keep families in their homes and mitigate the effects of homelessness on children. Referrals for the pilot will come directly from the homeless liaisons at BPS, who have the ability to identify children on the verge of homeless as quickly as possible and refer them to FAB’s expert care team, who will deliver the services that they need to avoid an eviction.

Along with launching the EHIP pilot, FAB will continue to provide families with crisis intervention, emergency funds, and case management support to stabilize their housing and begin to work towards long-term stability.

FamilyAid Boston ensures the sustainability of our agency and programs by investing in high-quality, experienced, and dedicated staff and cultivating a variety of partnerships and revenue streams.

In order to maintain high-quality staff, we provide an environment that is supportive to staff and conducive to professional growth. We have a strong supervisory structure, including licensed social workers who provide required supervision hours to those pursuing licensures. We also maintain strong partnerships with several master’s in social work programs, connecting us with high-quality interns to support our staff as well as a pipeline for new talent. Our management team supports a robust training program and professional development opportunities for staff in all departments.

We maintain strong relationships with our government partners, collaborating on both existing programs and new opportunities. These relationships also allow FamilyAid Boston to play a prominent role in government and policy discussions that directly affect our agency, programs, and the families we serve.

Over the past five years, we have engaged in a concerted effort to grow and diversify private fundraising. Unrestricted funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and events provide us the flexibility to innovate programs to best meet the needs of our client population and to ensure that we do not rely too heavily on any single funding source to sustain these programs. As a result of these efforts, we have more than doubled private fundraising since 2014 and we are continuing to grow our efforts in this area.

Lastly, FamilyAid Boston is a legacy organization, with a board who has been committed to helping support the poorest families in Boston for more than 100 years. The board includes members whose parents were board members in the past. Their commitment ensures above all else, the sustainability of the organization.

FamilyAid Boston provides 1,600 children and parents with emergency shelter, homelessness prevention, and housing supports along with individualized case management, designed to address the root cause of family’s crisis each year, while also creating long-term housing stability and positive outcomes for children. Highlights of the agencies accomplishments include:
• 687 children and parents received emergency shelter and support services.
• 617 children and parents retained their housing through our prevention and stabilization efforts
• 725 children and parents received housing stabilization support services.

With a committed Board of Directors; an accomplished and visionary new President and senior management team; and a dedicated, expert staff, FamilyAid Boston worked strategically over the past year to assess needs and opportunities in our community. As a result, FAB has significantly deepened its services for children, established and renewed key relationships with public officials, local schools, and partner agencies.

Over the past year, FamilyAid Boston assessed the state of homelessness in Massachusetts and worked to develop new strategies to stem homelessness at its root. Through an external and internal research analysis FamilyAid Boston concluded that the most cost-effective and humane solution to ending the child homelessness crisis is to stop homelessness before it even starts. In pursuit of this strategy, FAB has developed a new project and partnership with the Boston Public School System and the City of Boston, which will result in a major expansion of our prevention work in the years to come.

FamilyAid Boston is now the largest provider of private, flexible, rapid homelessness prevention funding and direct services in Boston, providing more than $300,000 in financial assistance along with support services to more than 600 children and their parents each year. Its Homelessness Prevention program has a 90% housing retention rate after 12 months, tracking well above the national average of 75%.