About Us
Here you will find a few words about:
Housing Help Association of Ontario
Resources Exist for Networking and Training (RENT) builds the capacity of the housing help sector by facilitating the housing workers' peer-learning network in which coordinated resource development is a priority.
The role of housing in our lives cannot be underestimated. It is the foundation for family life, social interaction, and community development. It is central to improving our physical and mental health, and our educational achievements. It allows us to enhance our income security and contribute more effectively to the labour force. Housing is key for immigrants to succeed in the process of adaptation and integration.
The search for housing is the basis from which to build one's life. Housing help workers are conscious of all the aspects of one's life that are affected when the central piece of housing is de-stabilized. The housing help sector assists people to improve their current housing status, and to prevent those who are housed from losing their housing.
Housing Help workers can be found in Housing Help Centres, Shelters, Drop-Ins, Outreach Programs, Supportive Housing providers, and multi-service organizations. Wherever they are located, they have six roles to fulfill in their work:
• Facilitators of Holistic Assessment
• Case Managers
• Advocates
• Mediators
• Community Developers
• Administrators
Essential Skills are required in order for Housing Workers to develop the core competencies necessary for their work:
- Holistic Assessment and Case Management
- Anti-Oppression and Cultural Competency
- Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Programs
- Seniors Income and Support
- Money Management
- Eviction Prevention
- Property Standards
- Mental Health and Addictions
- Stress Management
- Subsidized Housing
- Working with Landlords
Six Social Service Sectors intersect regularly with the Housing Help Sector:
- Housing - subsidized and supportive housing providers, private landlords
- Income Support - Ontario Works, Ontario Disability Support Program, Special Funds, Employment and Training Centres and Opportunities
- Legal Services - Community Legal Clinics, Tenant Advocacy Organizations
- Health Sector - Public Health, Community Health Centres, Mental Health Programs
- Family Services Sector - Child Protection Agencies, Family Support Programs
- Settlement Services
RENT is funded by federal Homelessness Partner Initiatives and provincial Homelessness Initiatives Funds administered through the City of Toronto, Shelter, Support and Housing Administration.
In September 2000, ninety housing workers from 80 organizations in Toronto gathered for a networking meeting to discuss their orientation, training, and ongoing staff support needs. These workers were on the frontline of an exploding homelessness crisis, witnessing increasing numbers of people homeless or at risk of homeless, since 1995, but had no real training to address the work they did.
Workers learned by doing, and by connecting with those who had been doing housing work longer than themselves. Housing workers agreed that the best way to share information, skills, knowledge, and the practices that were working best in the sector was to organize time to come together for workshops and networking.
East York East Toronto Family Resources took the lead in applying for funding, forming Resources Exist for Networking and Training (RENT), and making the housing workers’ ideas a reality.
RENT began by simply organizing monthly sessions in which networking was a key component. From these monthly workshops, and the ideas that arose during networking with one another, RENT has continued to respond to the sector’s orientation, training and ongoing staff support needs as housing workers have defined them.
www.housingworkers.ca is the hub of communication, programs and resources offered by RENT. RENT now provides the following services and resources for housing workers:
Training
- Training Essential Skills for Housing Work (TESH) – 12 Workshop Series
- Specialized and Topical Workshops
- Networking Sessions between housing, income support, legal services, health, family services, and settlement sectors
- Video Library of Core Trainings
- Onsite Presentations
- Mentors available for Job Shadowing – an excellent orientation or staff development opportunity
- Cross-Sector Presentations on “What is Housing Help?”
Online Resource Materials
- Housing Network News - an online newspaper
- Bi-weekly eBulletin: News and Resources from RENT and across the City
- Practical Resources - Useful information recommended by housing workers
- Postings of Other Trainings, Advocacy Campaigns and Job Postings of interest to housing workers
- Weekly Job Postings in the Housing Sector
- Searchable Database of members by work context, client population, language, and location
Online Discussion and Connection
- Online Discussion Area - to post questions and share information with mentors and colleagues
- Unique Online Workspaces – created as separate discussions for particular groups and projects in the housing sector who need to communicate, organize, and work together across distances
www.landlordconnect.ca is a RENT resource, piloted in 2006/07 to further reduce homelessness through the on-line connection of landlords with affordable units, who are willing to work with housing workers with clients looking for housing, who will work to maintain tenancies and prevent eviction. In addition, the website is a centre of information providing support to partnerships between landlords and housing help services. The aim of landlordconnect.ca is to have more units of housing in the private rental market found and kept by the clients served in the housing help sector.
For landlords, landlordconnect.ca provides free rental advertising, a connection to housing workers, assistance with arranging housing follow-up services, and a forum to register issues and successes they have when working with community agencies. For housing workers, landlordconnect.ca compiles and maintains up-to-date information on housing available for their clients, introduces relationships with new and existing landlords, provides housing vacancy information, and a forum to register issues and successes they have when working with private landlords.
Housing help services are a critical link between people precariously housed and affordable housing units. They help people at risk of losing their housing by mediating relationships with landlords, ensuring that tenants make connections with income supports, specialty funds, and/or the community services they require to keep their housing.
Housing workers use independent processes to find landlords and develop relationships with landlords. While effective, these approaches can result in duplicated efforts, missed landlords that may be willing to rent to homeless or at-risk clients, or inadvertently inundate landlords in certain neighbourhoods with frequent inquiries from multiple housing workers.
Landlordconnect.ca is a coordinated resource. It does not replace individual or localized efforts currently made by housing workers, but links and augments the work of housing help agencies. Its goal is to support frontline work by providing more housing options to all housing services across the city, which, in turn, will give workers more time to devote to supporting and providing follow-up services with their clients.
Housing Help Association of Ontario (HHAO)
www.findhousinghelp.ca
In 2007, RENT began to incubate the establishment of The Housing Help Association of Ontario. The HHAO is the organization representing Housing Help Service Providers as a result of 30 years of efforts through out the province. After the Ontario Ministry of Housing Programs and Community Partners Program which began in the late 1980’s, Housing Access Network of Ontario (HANO) was formed. HANO sponsored annual conferences, facilitated communication between members, and consulted with the Ministry on housing access program and policy development
With provincial funding for housing and homelessness initiatives was downloaded to the municipalitiesstarting in the late 80’s, the province ceased its direct funding of the coordinated HANO and regular provincial trainings for housing help programs. Despite each municipality choosing its own service models, sometimes meaning the closure of some housing help centres, homelessness continued to increase as the removal of rent controls, a 20% cut to social assistance rates, and a frozen minimum wage, were implemented.
During that period, Housing help services were often isolated and, the loss or under-funding of the housing help sector only served to further exacerbate the growing homelessness crisis which came to public attention at the turn of the century and continues with us today. Without a provincial network, or association, there was a lack of housing help service integration, no coordination, no training resources, and no way of sharing best practice, program and policy development information. Collective knowledge and expertise in the sector was being lost precisely when the need for housing help was increasing.
In response, several housing help services began to work on coordinating the sector. In 2003, Lutherwood Housing Action Centre in Waterloo Region compiled a list of housing help services across the province that was used to begin organizing semi-annual meetings for agencies that could afford to do so.
At the same time, RENT went online with more dynamic tools for communication, resulting in contact with provincial planning groups by 2004, including HANO. Housingworkers.ca provided the catalyst to bring housing help service providers together. Momentum continued to build, to the Hamilton Housing Conference in 2006 when the HHAO was formed.
The HHAO successfully applied for Ontario Trillium Foundation funds, which starting in 2007, began to grow the Association further. Part of those funds allowed HHAO to create www.findhousinghelp.ca, through which there is more detailed information about housing help in the Province, and the goals and activities of the HHAO.