Charlotte Family Housing

Charlotte Family Housing, Inc. is a private, not-for-profit enterprise which works to solve family homelessness through a confidence-building empowerment approach. Charlotte Family Housing focuses on the strength of families and transforms past cycles of trauma through formative, confidence building opportunities of growth and validation. CFH is rooted in empowerment and trauma informed care. At its founding, CFH reimagined a new self-sufficiency pathway (for working families experiencing homelessness) that examined clinical brain research linking trauma and poverty and healthy trauma-informed interventions.CFH provides each family with the opportunity to achieve housing stability and economic confidence through three integrated services: 1. Housing: Families begin in a home-like shelter where barriers to obtaining housing are addressed. Without worrying about where their child will sleep at night, parents can concentrate on goals. CFH assists families in finding rental housing and provides subsidies, preparing them for stable independent housing within a year or two.2. Trauma Informed Care: CFH's Masters-level clinical social workers (LCSW) provide wraparound services grounded in the practice of recognizing the trauma its families have experienced. Through collaborative, safe relationships anchored in trust, LCSWs address barriers to family stability and facilitate a two-generational pathway to financial literacy, parenting, health, and job readiness. Additionally, CFH families have access to counseling.3. Empowerment Tools: CFH incorporates a stepped approach to empower families to move out of poverty. E.g.: Access reduced rates for critical goods and such as car repairs, computers, and home furnishings Connection to 1:1 financial counseling and banking services Earn Motivational Achievement Points for completing program goals which can be cashed in for gift cards, household items, and transportation gift cards Have savings matched upon program completionCharlotte Family Housing solely focuses on working families who are experiencing homelessness in Mecklenburg County. Soaring rental prices throughout Mecklenburg County are forcing more and more families out of their current residences and into housing and homelessness instability. Due to the current housing and rental market, unforeseen events or chronic circumstances (like a loss of income, illness, family breakup, death in the family, or domestic violence) can result in homelessness. In response to the current housing market, CFH has focused on two different initiatives. First, CFH is working hand in hand with developers to secure access to tax credit units. Partnerships with real estate developers allow access to rental units that might otherwise be inaccessible to the families CFH serves. These new partnerships are expanding the affordable housing inventory. Second, acknowledging that CFH can only minimally impact the affordable housing stock, CFH has placed a greater emphasis on career growth, income increases and work force development. By increasing wages, CFH families are able to better afford housing. CFH measures its progress and success by evaluating how many families maintain housing upon leaving its program. Using Salesforce software for data collection, CFH documents a family's progress at three-month intervals with post-exit surveys for two years after program completion.