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Program Summary:
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The Corporation for
Supportive Housing (CSH) was established in 1991 with funding from The Pew Charitable
Trusts, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Ford Foundation to support developing
service-supported housing for vulnerable populations. CSH helps communities
create helps
communities create permanent housing with services to prevent and reduce
homelessness, bringing together people, skills, and resources. It provides advice and
development expertise, makes loans and grants to supportive housing sponsors,
strengthens the supportive housing industry, and reforms public policy to
make it easier to create and operate supportive housing. In coordination with broader national
efforts to end homelessness, CSH will help communities create 150,000
units of supportive housing during the next decade, targeted to those
most in need: people coping with homelessness and extreme poverty,
as well as chronic health conditions such as mental illness, addiction or
HIV/AIDS.
CSH raises dollars from
national and local foundations in order to provide grants and
predevelopment, project initiation, and acquisition loans. Among the
foundations now supporting its work are Conrad N. Hilton Foundation,
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, McKnight Foundation, The California
Endowment, JEHT Foundation, Open Society Institute. It also leverages major
investments of federal, state, and local public and private sector
financing for capital, operating, and service needs. It partners with enterprise community
partners on the Supportive Housing Investment Partnership (SHIP),
providing project sponsors with a unified resource for grants,
low-interest loans, technical expertise, low-income housing tax credit
investments, and advocacy.
The national resource
center operated by CSH maintains state-of-the-art information on a wide
array of supportive housing issues, and responds to hundreds of requests
annually from throughout the United States. The organization’s website provides
many online resources, including a Toolkit for Ending Long-Term
Homelessness, a Financing Supportive Housing Guide, a Resource Library,
Policy Updates, and a listing of its trainings. Training sessions
with thousands of participants each year are a collaborative effort
between CSH and a number of nonprofit and government partners, including
the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A set of curricula developed with HUD,
for example, provides best practices and guidance on supportive housing
development, operations, and services.
Each curriculum provides a one-day training to enrich the skills
of supportive housing developers and providers. Finally, CSH reshapes public policies
and public systems to improve the nation’s response to long-term
homelessness. It helps supportive
housing advocates speak out—and be heard—on behalf of increased
government investments in supportive housing.
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