Advocacy Spotlight: Supportive Housing Providers Association (SHPA)

The mission of the Supportive Housing Providers Association (SHPA) is to strengthen the supportive housing sector so that people have access to affordable housing and can survive and thrive in their community with services individually tailored to their needs. “Supportive Housing” refers to the combination of affordable housing with services for individuals and families who have been homeless and/or have special needs. ​

---

SHPA was founded in 1995 as a collection of three Chicago-based organizations interested in supportive housing. It expanded to become a state-wide association shortly after being established. SHPA became member-based in the year 2000 and now has a membership of over 100 organizations. SHPA is the leading advocacy group for supportive housing and services in Illinois.   
 
SHPA’s members include providers of housing and supportive services, housing developers, and community members interested in creating more affordable housing and ending homelessness. SHPA provides its members with education and connections to technical assistance and training, while working with residents of supportive housing to empower them with peer-to-peer support and advocacy opportunities. SHPA also has a strong advocacy arm and engages members in advocacy to strengthen the sector. We have highlighted a couple of SHPA’s more recent accomplishments—among so many—below. 
 
SOAR Services 
Among the many supports SHPA provides, over the last year and a half, it has become the state’s team lead for SOAR (SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery). Many people who rely on income from SSI/SSDI benefits need assistance with the application process, which is often tedious and can be prolonged if they don’t have the proper documents or don’t properly complete their applications. A longer application process delays when applicants receive the benefits they are entitled to. To address this, SHPA now has a full-time staff member who assists SOAR practitioners with applications. As a result, delays are less likely, and applications are more likely to be approved on the first try. This is a huge benefit both for supportive housing providers, and for the residents of the supportive housing!  
 
Workshops for Empowerment, Healing, and Advocacy 
SHPA developed the 2-day “Telling My Truth” workshop in 2021 to coach people who have experienced homelessness on how to talk about their experiences in empowering ways. SHPA worked with peers to design the workshop. 
 
Talking about one’s experience of hardship is often painful, but “empowerment can’t happen without healing, and people can usually talk about their hardships when they’ve healed from them,” says Susan Day of SHPA. So, these workshops strive to show people how they can heal enough from their experiences to make thinking and talking about them easier. After taking these workshops, people can tell their stories confidently, using them to advocate for more affordable housing, among other things. To prepare peers to speak effectively with legislators, the workshop also covers how to speak one’s truth in elevator speeches that are compelling and get the point across in a short amount of time.  
    
The workshop is called “Telling My Truth” because the peers who helped develop the workshop didn’t want what they shared to be called “stories” because “a story” often implies that what is being said is fictional. The narratives that people in Telling My Truth put together are very much real. Even if a person’s recollection of an event they’ve experienced is clouded with their opinions and emotional reactions, that perspective is still that person’s “truth.”  
 
Leadership Training 
In 2023, SHPA received funds from the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness to develop a new workshop. Since most of the peers that developed the original Telling My Truth workshop were on boards of directors, leading advocacy committees, and developed experience in talking with legislators, they were gathered to discuss the skills they wished they had had before their current successes and what skills they’d still like to learn. This information was used to develop a new Leadership Workshop that’s designed to guide people with lived experience from “telling their truths” to the next step of using their experience to make change. Since this workshop is derived from peers’ unique experiences, they are the ones who facilitate these workshops.  
  
“One Voice is Heard, Many Voices Are Listened To” - Allison Gaiter (SHPA Peer)  
SHPA partners with Joining Forces and similar organizations because they “can’t afford to duplicate, but we can come together.” SHPA has seen a lot of wins for things they’ve lobbied for, and the knowledge to achieve those wins came from collaborations with other agencies. By learning from partner organizations and agencies, SHPA keeps up to date on what is needed for affordable housing or homeless services throughout the state, and then supports those partners through its lobbying.  
  
Person Interviewed: Susan Day (SHPA’s Illinois Coordinator for the Central & Southern Region / Program Manager for the Peer Leadership Development Program)