Welcoming 2025 & Recapping Our Successes as a Community 

As we step into 2025, we are so thankful for your support and generosity in the past year. In the new year, Housing Up is underscoring that community, including our families, staff members, community partners, and supporters, is at the center of our mission. While challenging times may be ahead of us, we know that with the help of a community of supporters like you, we can continue to provide safe and affordable housing for the families we serve.

With your dedication to the families we serve, we made incredible strides in 2023 and 2024. In these past two years, our families have been able to not only survive but thrive despite the difficult circumstances. While the road ahead will not be easy, with your help, we will continue to advocate for vulnerable families in 2025. If you haven’t already, check out our 2023/2024 annual report to learn about all we accomplished together as a community. Here is a list of some of our favorite highlights:

• 900 families served across all of our housing programs
• 91% of families maintained their stable housing in 2023
• 60% of rapid re-housing families gained or maintained employment in 2023
• 81% of families participated in our resident services programming in 2023
• 638 hours were dedicated to youth enrichment & tutoring in 2024

Our Latest Blog Posts: Addressing Critical Topics in Homelessness

We started off the new year exploring beyond a surface-level understanding of homelessness. Our blog post, “The Cycle of Trauma and Homelessness,” investigates the deeply intertwined relationship between trauma and homelessness. The blog post touches on different types of trauma, like childhood trauma and racial trauma, that impact long-term psychological and physical health. Research reveals that people experiencing homelessness often have a history of trauma, particularly early childhood trauma, which has been identified as a risk factor for becoming homeless. To get a better understanding of how trauma impacts families at Housing Up, we interviewed Resident Services Coordinator Tony Smith. Tony highlighted how trauma awareness is critical to harm reduction and building trust with the families we serve.

Our second blog post, “US Homelessness Reached a Record High in 2024,” continues the conversation surrounding the factors that lead to homelessness on a national scale. At the end of 2024, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that homelessness rose by 18% from 2023 to 2024. Families and children experienced the most significant spikes compared to the other groups surveyed, with family homelessness rising 39% and child homelessness increasing 33%. While this steep rise in homelessness cannot be attributed to any single cause, skyrocketing rent prices and the lack of affordable housing have been identified as some of the primary contributors to this increase.

To learn more about these topics, read our full blog posts here:  “The Cycle of Trauma and Homelessness” and “US Homelessness Reached a Record High in 2024”.

Support Our Mission on the Ground!

We cannot thank you enough for all of your support this past year. Your passion for helping Housing Up’s families reach their goals has made a big impact. Our top priority in 2025 is to foster and grow our amazing community of individual supporters, businesses, organizations, and faith-based groups. Housing Up offers a range of volunteer and engagement opportunities for supporters and organizations that are interested in enacting change in person. If you or your organization are interested in working with our team on the ground, please contact Housing Up’s Community Engagement Manager, Shahidah Abdul-Lateef, at sabdul-lateef@housingup.org.