Homelessness touches the lives of thousands of children in Minnesota. The Wilder Research Center’s 2012 one-night homeless survey found that homeless children with their parents now make up about one-third of the homeless population. Half of these children are under age 6. 

Young children are especially hard hit by homelessness. We know children who are homeless or who have experienced the trauma of homelessness are at greater risk for poor social, emotional, and cognitive developmental outcomes, likely to be unprepared for kindergarten and at risk for school failure. 

Efforts to serve homeless families are complicated by the difficulty of Identifying, locating and engaging homeless parents with young children. In this workshop participants will consider barriers to seeing homeless children in their community, strategies to increase and/or improve outreach to homeless families and strategies to maintain connection with families experiencing homelessness.