Housing Task Force

 

Graphic silhouette of a house's roof line above text reading, NASMHPD Housing Task Force.

We have developed this page to post documents and resources to assist your housing work and make sure you are up-to-date with the happenings of NASMHPD's Housing Task Force.

The 2021 Housing Task Force calls will happen on:

  • Wednesday, October 6th, at 2p ET
  • Wednesday, December 15th, at 2p ET

Housing Task Force Resources & Past Agendas

Housing is a priority through NAMSHPD's advocacy, technical assistance, and collaborative relationships. The following are a few examples of NASMHPD's housing work

Technical Assistance

  1. NASMHPD has teamed up with the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) to co-host two (2) regional Supportive Housing Leadership Forums: 1) a 12-state forum for the Northeast in Providence, RI and 2) a 8-state forum for the Midwest in Chicago, IL.
  2. NASMHPD sponsored two policy academies in Memphis that focused on leveraging funds and building relationships to create housing for people with mental illness. Twenty-one states participated in these two academies.
  3. In 2007, NASMHPD co-hosted a webcast with the National Governors Association and Advocates for Human Potential entitled Supportive Housing for People with Mental Illness: Regaining a Life in the Community. In an effort to educate Governors' Health Policy Directors to the importance housing plays with this population of vulnerable Americans, NASMHPD published a comprehensive briefing document for this webcast.

Advocacy and Key Collaborative Relationships

NASMHPD actively participates in the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) Housing Task Force and advocates on behalf of critical housing programs such as the Section 8 program, Section 811 program, and the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance grant program. It also collaborates with many housing organizations such as CSH, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), the Technical Assistance Collaborative (TAC), the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and the National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA).

In 2006, representatives of seven state housing finance agencies (HFA) and seven state mental health agencies held a Housing and Mental Health Summit in Washington, DC, to discuss state efforts to coordinate housing and mental health services. They were joined and assisted by representatives of the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices, CSH, TAC, and NAEH. This summit produced a joint Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between NASMHPD and NCSHAand a commitment to share information at national conferences and other meetings on the need for state housing and mental health agency collaboration and how to replicate and build on successful collaboration models. Since that meeting, members of our two organizations have presented at each other's national meetings on four separate occasions around the nation.

Outcomes

With outcomes such as the following, it's clear that more state mental health authorities have made housing a greater priority over the last few years and NASMHPD's housing efforts are growing fruit. The NASMHPD Research Institute (NRI), our research arm, has reported these measures of progress over the last several years:

  • An increase in the number of fulltime Housing Directors within State Mental Health Authorities,
  • An increase in the number of states using state general revenue dollars, state mental health block grant dollars, and Medicaid dollars to provide housing support services, and
  • An increase in the number of interagency agreements between state mental health authorities and state housing agencies.

 

Contact Information

Please contact David Miller, NASMHPD's Project Director, with any questions or comments regarding the Housing Task Force. Mr. Miller's contact information is as follows:
David W. Miller 

Senior Operations & Project Director
(703) 682-5194
david.miller@nasmhpd.org

Man in business suit holding a model home in his hands