Policy Agenda

Our Policy Agenda guides our policy and advocacy work to end family homelessness.

Our mission at Compass Family Services is to help homeless and at-risk families achieve housing stability, economic self-sufficiency, and overall wellbeing.

We must support each family to build stability in their housing, income, childcare, and wellness

• We must invest in family housing as the primary solution to family homelessness.

• Our workforce systems must provide permanent pathways out of poverty for job-seeking parents, including in the human services sector.

• Our childcare systems must offer full-day, enriched childcare options in safe environments, supporting early care educators in the process.

• Our homeless response and healthcare systems must coordinate to bringtrauma-informed, low-barrier treatment to parents and kids.

We must improve systems, increase resources, and apply an anti-racist lens to data, outcomes, and structural problems

• Our homeless response systems must welcome families in, not keep them out until they are “homeless enough” to gain entry.

• Federal and state entities must make substantial, ongoing investments in family stability, with sufficiently flexible revenue streams.

• All systems that intersect to serve families must prioritize racial and economic justice and promote anti-racism “upstream.”

We must build leadership and amplify family voices in the decision and policymaking that impacts their lives

• Families with lived experience of homelessness must have regular, compensated opportunities to participate in public policymaking.

• The human services sector must build a culture of capacity building, leadership development, and policy advocacy that values racial equity and lived experience.

Read Homeless Emergency Services Providers Association (HESPA)’s Five-Point Racial and Economic Justice Agenda: