Everyone needs a place to call home, but not everyone’s vision of what home looks like is the same.
As program director of Housing Families First, Cindy Moussavou works with a team of housing counselors to address family homelessness on an individual basis. “We’re not telling people that there’s one vision of what you should have because we want people to dream for themselves,” she explains. “Instead, we ask families experiencing homelessness what their vision is and then work with them to see how we can get them there.”
Hilliard House Shelter provides short-term, temporary shelter for up to 40
children and adults who are on their way to a permanent home but need a safe
and supportive stopover to regain control of their lives and plan their path to
housing stability. Building Neighbors is a rapid re-housing program that helps
families move into permanent housing as quickly as possible, then provides supportive services to help them sustain it.
The third leg of the Housing Families First stool is a program Moussavou created called Bringing Families Home. The program partners with Richmond Public Schools’ Center for Families in Transition to provide more than 300 students and their families facing homelessness each year with housing counseling and the financial assistance needed to move into permanent homes. “I used to work in shelters, and it became clear that if these families had been given housing counseling and a little financial assistance, their homelessness could have been prevented,” she says.
She is understandably proud of creating the program, which is seen as a
national model for bridging the divide between the educational system and
the homeless services community. “By reaching these families through the
students, we’re addressing the housing and education connection,” she says.
“Children are able to attend school more regularly when they have a stable
home.”
Ask Moussavou how she chose her career and she’ll say it chose her.
“I’m driven by the idea that we’re all meant to be neighbors, so I bought a house three miles from here because I wanted to live and work where I serve,” she says. “Because home is where the heart is and your heart drives the rest of you. If a family doesn’t have a home, how does that affect them? Every family deserves a home.”
