Fighting Childhood Homelessness in the Orlando Metropolitan Area - CHOP

Hello!

For my 'Building Resilience in Individuals and Communities for Public Health' Course, I was tasked with creating an intervention aimed at building resilience in a community focused on a particular critical public health issue. The issue I choose to focus on was childhood homelessness.

In the United States, 2.5% of school-aged children are homeless (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). Florida is doing far worse in this health issue. Florida is ranked 40th in the country in childhood homelessness where roughly 2.8 of public school students report being homeless in 2020. This means that 79,949 children attending public school experienced homelessness with their family and 6,952 were classified as experiencing homelessness without the accompaniment of a parent or legal guardian (U.S. Department of Education, 2020). This accounts for roughly 3% of all Florida public school students. Unhoused children experience significant trauma that can affect their health in a variety of ways. First, environmental exposures result in unhoused children having a higher risk of asthma, lead poisoning, and infectious diseases such as diarrheal infections and tuberculosis (Hart-Shegos, 1999). Children who are unhoused generally experience significant emotional and physical trauma related to their experience from an unstable housing situation including family separation and witnessing or experiencing abuse and neglect (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2022). Finally, children who experience homelessness have increased rates of developmental delays and behavioral development (Frick, 2019). My intervention will be targeting the Orlando Metropolitan Area which includes Lake, Orange, Osceola, and Seminole Counties which accounts for roughly 14% of all homeless children in Florida (Florida Department of Education, 2020).

My intervention systematically addresses childhood homelessness through the placement of 'counselor-advocates' in each public school in Lake, Orange, Osceola, and Seminole county. These advocates will provide services addressing the individual and relationship level of the social ecological model which project staff will work together to address the community and societal levels.

Individual Level:

• Individual counseling for students
• Student advocacy
• Academic advising

Relationship Level:

• Family counseling
• Group tutoring
• Advocacy in child custody cases
• Assistance in applying to federal and local assistance programs

Community Level:

• Creating a Childhood Homelessness Task Force (inter-organizational collaboration)
• Training of members from the target community to be part of the project team or to be counselor-advocates

Societal Level:

• Local Policy:
  • Expansion of school funding for ‘counselor advocates’ to increase sustainability of the program
  • Reformation of local laws criminalizing homelessness
  • Expansion of public services related to housing & homelessness
• Federal Policy:
  • Expanded funding for Housing & Urban Development
    • Specifically family housing solutions that are sustainable and trauma-informed
  • Expansion of SNAP & Medicaid
  • Laws to protect families from being separated due to unstable housing.