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 for 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 to find or maintain one's housing is a search for a base 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
Six Core Training Areas require attention for this multi-role work:
- Essential Skills - Assessment, Case Management, Professional Boundaries, Support for Specific Client Populations, Community Contacts, Follow-Up
- Income Supports
- Landlord/Tenant Issues
- Mental Health & Addictions
- Immigration & Refugee Issues
- Stress Management
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 a program of East York East Toronto Family Resources (EYET).
As a multi-service organization, EYET provides family resource programs, community services, parent/child drop-ins, childcare programs and an integrated continuum of housing programs including:
- East York Housing Help Centre: assists people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness to find and keep housing.
- Resources Exist for Networking and Training (RENT): builds the capacity of the housing help sector by facilitating the housing workers’ network in which coordinated resource development is a priority.
- landlordconnect.ca: is a RENT resource that provides housing help/landlord liaison service and an online vacancy list of affordable, private market units for housing workers to access for their clients.
- At HOME: EYET also participates on the Board of this community corporation, working to build affordable housing for single-women led families in East York.
RENT is funded by federal funds administered through the City of Toronto.
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.
Housing help work was being done in a variety of contexts, in a variety of ways. How to do housing help was not a written expertise. 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) – 11 Workshop Series
- Current Workshops
- Networking Sessions between housing, income support, legal services, health, family services, and settlement sectors
- Videos 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 emerging online newspaper
- Bi-weekly eBulletin
- Practical Resources - needed in everyday housing work and recommended by housing workers
- Postings of Other Trainings, Advocacy Campaigns and Job Postings of interest to housing workers
- Searchable Database of members by work context, client population, language, and location
- Online Vacancy Listing & Landlord Liaison centre – www.landlordconnect.ca
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. It is an online centre of information and vacancy listing, facilitating the identification of private landlords offering affordable housing, and 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.
Housing help services are a critical link between people precariously housed and affordable housing units available in private rentals, social housing, supportive housing, and other housing types. 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 who will rent to their clients such as newspaper advertisements, contacting neighbourhood landlords, answering landlord inquiries, and developing relationships and informal referral agreements 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 to link those efforts and augment those efforts. 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.
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.
Associating each unit filled through landlordconnect.ca with a housing help service provides a significant and effective resource for preventing eviction should the tenancy become vulnerable. This is a requirement of landlordconnect.ca with its members. In this way, landlordconnect.ca actively builds relationships that reduce homelessness.
Housing Help Association of Ontario (HHAO)
The Housing Help Association of Ontario is being incubated within RENT, until strong enough to stand alone as an organization. Its history is a fascinating one!
Many of the current community-based housing help services originated in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Funding was provided through the Ontario Ministry of Housing under programs such as 'Access to Permanent Housing' and later, 'Community Partners'. During these years, the provincial government consulted with and supported a provincial association known as the Housing Access Network of Ontario (HANO). HANO sponsored annual conferences, facilitated communication between members, and consulted with the Ministry on housing access program and policy development.
Between 1995 and 2000, however, provincial funding for housing and homelessness initiatives was downloaded to the municipalities, and the province ceased its direct funding of the coordinated HANO and regular provincial trainings for housing help programs. Each municipality began to make decisions about how to use the housing and homelessness dollars they received: in many municipalities, community-based housing help centres lost their funding and were forced to close, while in other places, housing help worker positions were created in a variety of contexts (shelters, drop-ins, outreach programs, multi-service agencies) and housing help centres had to compete to maintain status-quo budgets. The number of clients seeking housing help during that time, however, was far from status quo. Homeless and near-homeless individuals and families were increasing dramatically across the province as other provincial policies, such as the removal of rent controls, a 20% cut to social assistance rates, and a frozen minimum wage, were implemented.
Housing help services were often isolated from one another within their own municipalities. 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 2003, Lutherwood Housing Action Centre in Waterloo Region, with a local student placement grant, compiled a list of housing help services across the province that was used to begin organizing semi-annual meetings for agencies that could donate staff time, travel and accommodation to attend. For many housing help services the time and travel costs prohibited their involvement at these meetings. (The meetings have occurred in Kitchener, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Peterborough, Midland and Toronto.)
At the same time, RENT went online with more dynamic tools for communication, and the numbers of members from across the province began to increase. By 2004, RENT had made contact with the provincial meetings. As an established housing workers’ network committed to coordinated resource development, and with a variety of communication tools, RENT resources were leveraged to strengthen the provincial work. Donating staff time, online tools and resources, RENT helped improve communications about housing help work across the province, its history and the semi-annual meetings. RENT established two separate online discussion boards, one for housing help centres across Ontario to discuss anything that arises in their local work, and one for the semi-annual conference planning committee (which has now evolved into the Executive and Planning Committees shared board). These tools not only facilitated improved coordination and communication, they provided a tremendous savings on long distance telephone bills! RENT was also able to uncover more people who had been involved with HANO, and even the HANO bank account which those who were responsible for it were thrilled to be able to close and give the $600 remaining toward some of the costs of the October 2006 meeting in Hamilton, where the network began to form an Association!
In 2008, HANO Executive members are managers from the following organizations: Georgian Triangle Housing Resource Centre; Peterborough Housing Resource Centre; The Help Centre (Northumberland County); Sudbury Canadian Red Cross – Housing Help Program; Hamilton Housing Help Centre; COSTI-North York Housing Help; East York East Toronto Family Resources – East York Housing Help Centre & RENT.
Formalizing and enhancing the Housing Help Association of Ontario will retrieve and fortify a capacity that has been severely damaged over the past decade; namely, the ability of the housing help sector to strengthen community-based homelessness prevention work across the province. Through its incubation within RENT, HANO hopes to provide support for vital community-based housing help services to again have the opportunity to operate in a more coherent and integrated way; sharing knowledge, skills, program and policy development information with one another and the general public. And, that will mean the difference between having a home, or not, for thousands of Ontarians.