Our History

Partnering for Change was founded in 2011 by Tanya Tull, who at the time had been working in the field of family homelessness for 30 years. After developing two of the first family shelters in Los Angeles, she founded Beyond Shelter in 1988 with an innovation in the field at the time—the “housing first” approach to ending family homelessness. Beyond Shelter served primarily vulnerable and harder-to-serve homeless families referred by emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, re-entry programs, and residential drug treatment programs. Successful from inception, Beyond Shelter then promoted the new methodology across the country for the next twenty-five years, including with national advocacy organizations based in Washington, DC.  Funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services from 1991-1996, Beyond Shelter conducted two of the first federal demonstration projects on family homelessness with this approach. 

Beyond Shelter’s programs in Los Angeles County also became a “laboratory” for social change in challenging the then-emerging Continuum of Care (CoC). Promoted by HUD during the first years of the Clinton Administration, the CoC was premised on the believe that homeless people, including families with children, should move directly from emergency shelter to transitional housing where they could stay for up to two years to learn the skills required “to live independently.” It was within this context that Beyond Shelter began scaling up the “housing first” approach to ending family homelessness.

At the time, there were two emerging schools of thought, the first based on homelessness being perceived primarily as a result of personal dysfunctions and the second based on external factors: rising rents pushing people on fixed incomes out of the rental market, redevelopment of downtown cores that removed traditional SROs and residential hotels in many cities, and other economic forces. Unfortunately, rather than focus on families who might have benefited from a period of transitional support during a housing crisis, more dysfunctional families were often terminated from transitional housing programs for being “non-compliant” with program requirements. Beyond Shelter conducted its first out-of-state training in Columbus, Ohio, in 1992. In collaboration with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the first national workshop was conducted in Los Angeles, CA, in 1993. In a few short years, family shelters and transitional housing programs from throughout the country began to adapt key housing first components into their transitional housing operations. Twenty years later, HUD’s Rapid Rehousing program is an almost exact replication of Beyond Shelter’s Housing First Program—modified by the addition of time-limited rent subsidies for participants.

In 2010, realizing that the housing affordability crisis was intensifying, Tanya began to explore the feasibility of housing interventions at an earlier stage—prior to a homeless crisis. Partnering for Change was incorporated the next year as an intentional “scaling up” of idea generation, program experimentation, and knowledge dissemination for systems transformation. With a growing evidence-base on the impact of housing instability on child, youth, and family health and well-being, Partnering for Change focused initially on a universal prevention approach: to promote early identification of, and timely and appropriate responses to, indicators of housing distress among vulnerable families served by mainstream systems: schools, child and family services organizations, and healthcare services delivery systems.

As rental housing costs continued to increase across the country, however, it  became apparent that mainstream and community-based services systems were unable to keep up with the need and that direct services staff lacked both the training and resources to address housing problems successfully. Housing issues had become the “elephant in the room” and existing policies and practices were often no longer applicable.

In 2015, Partnering for Change began working in the newly-designated Los Angeles Promise Zone, researching and documenting the prevalence and types of housing instability experienced by low-income renters in one of the the most challenging rental markets in the country. Through a collective impact framework, the organization also began envisioning and testing some possible new housing interventions. We hope this website presenting the results of our efforts thus far will motivate others to join in the broader effort.