In 2021, the Center for Housing and Health (CHH) played a vital role as a direct service organization and systems-change leader.

CHH organizes the funding of housing services directly to partner agencies across Chicagoland through an integrated system for families and individuals experiencing homelessness.

Together, we expanded essential partnerships to bridge healthcare and homeless services, ensuring robust service coordination across systems for all participants.

Last year, our essential workers–case managers, housing specialists, counselors, and other service partners ensured that 675 households had continued access to housing, food, utilities, and transportation.

We are so grateful to our dedicated direct service staff, who went above and beyond to ensure our participants felt connected and supported as the pandemic continued.

CHH’s largest project, the Flexible Housing Pool (FHP), coordinates partners from Chicagoland’s housing and healthcare systems to reach marginalized individuals with complex needs. FHP leverages cross-sector investments to fully integrate these housing and healthcare systems and improve its participants’ health outcomes. In 2021, with funding from Polk Bros. Foundation and in partnership with Point Source Youth, CHH launched a Youth Learning Collaborative. The Collaborative combines the insights gained between youth participants, service providers, and partners to implement best practices for youth tenants.

CHH recognizes the importance of centering racial equity and justice as critical to ending homelessness and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, in partnership with its parent organization AFC, CHH launched a process to develop and implement a Race Equity Action Plan. Since the plan’s launch, CHH has begun work to embed racial equity into all policies and administrative practices and root racial equity in all programs, relationships with our partners and participants.

The core part of CHH’s work addresses the lack of interaction between healthcare, housing, behavioral health, and other supportive service systems. As we move forward, CHH will continue to listen to the essential voices to promote systemic change and work to help all Chicagoans meet their critical housing and health needs.