The purpose of this Toolkit is to provide access to tools, case studies, evaluations, sample documents, and other useful resources for connecting supportive housing tenants to employment. In creating this resource, our goal is to help supportive housing organizations, workforce partners, and employers address key challenges in the planning, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of employment-related services and programs.
This Toolkit was designed to serve as a user-friendly “hub” for employment resources from diverse sources. Many of the resources were developed by CSH over its 17 years of experience documenting partnerships, practices, and innovations within the supportive housing field. Other materials are drawn from a variety of sources, including federal technical assistance centers, the disability community, the Chronic Homelessness Employment Technical Assistance Center (CHETA), workforce consultants, supportive housing agencies, and other nonprofit groups that have gathered protocols and procedures designed to link jobseekers to employment. Given this breadth of material, you will notice that different resources are designed for specific target audiences (e.g., workforce community, disability community), but all can be effectively adapted to the supporting housing field and the tenants they serve.
All of the materials within this Toolkit can be accessed via the Table of Contents. This Toolkit currently contains more than 90 documents. In addition to the full Table of Contents, users may want to review 25 Essential Tools for Case Managers and Employment Specialists, a document designed specifically to help busy, front line employment and housing staff easily access practical tools that are found throughout the Toolkit.
The Guiding Principles for High-Quality Employment Services is a one-page, foundational document outlining the basic philosophy and framework that informs this Toolkit, as well as that of many successful tenant employment programs.
The complete contents of the Toolkit are organized into six sections. Each section can be accessed by the following links:
Building Your Team
The tools and resources in this overview section make the case for why employment is a successful strategy for tenants and supportive housing providers and describes how to plan and train staff for new employment programming.
Tenant Outreach and Engagement
Providing employment services to supportive housing tenants involves far more than job training and job placement. The tools in this section help supportive housing providers create a culture that promotes work among tenants and effectively reaches out to and engages tenants in work or work-related activities.
Partnership with Employers
This section identifies ways to understand an employer’s culture and workplace practices and how to negotiate a good employment fit for both employer and tenant. This section also includes information to help employers understand reasonable accommodation and to benefit from tax incentives when hiring tenants.
Workforce Resources and Community Partners
CSH has designed this section to help supportive housing organizations understand and better connect to workforce, community and local partners as well as build their own network of employment staff and resources. Included are materials to map community resources, forge collaborative partnerships and understand the workforce system.
Tenant Vocational Assessment and Career Planning
The resources in this section outline methods to develop individualized employment plans with tenants and help tenants learn about careers aligned with their interests and experience. Other key issues include addressing treatment integration and accommodating specialized needs in the career planning process.
Finding Jobs and Advancing Careers
This final section of the Toolkit provides tools and resources to develop effective tenant employment and retention strategies. The contents include an array of programmatic examples that provide an in-depth look at proven practice in the field, encompassing job development, in-house employment and training, customized employment, self-employment and career pathways.
In January 2008, the MetLife Foundation awarded the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) a grant to implement the Allies for Employment Initiative, a re-granting and technical assistance program that helped five (5) communities to design strategies for providing improved access to the mainstream workforce system for tenants of supportive housing, that featured new or enhanced collaborations and cross-agency coordination, and that will, ultimately, be more effective in helping tenants secure and retain mainstream jobs in appropriate employment settings, including the competitive marketplace. The information in this section of the Toolkit documents the remarkable progress and planned next steps for each of the collaborative projects that received an Allies for Employment Planning Grant, and also highlights important lessons that organizations and communities across the country can learn from the grantees' partnerships, activities, and plans.
Acknowledgements:
This Toolkit was made possible through the generous support of the MetLife Foundation.
CSH also wishes to acknowledge the contributions of FutureWorks and Workforce Learning Strategies consulting for their work in preparing many of the tools included within this Toolkit.
CSH also gratefully acknowledges the valuable guidance and input from the MetLife Toolkit Advisory Group, as well as all who contributed to earlier documents, tools, and publications upon which many of these tools are based.
Finally, CSH wishes to acknowledge the generosity of all those organizations that provided sample documents for use within this Toolkit.
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