Housing Specialist

**Housing Specialist**

Are you passionate about home and housing? Do you keep abreast of housing trends locally, provincially and nationally? Do you enjoy being with people as they imagine, plan and take steps towards living their full best lives?

Durham Association for Family Resources and Support is seeking the right fit for a Housing Specialist. The role will assist people along with their families in their individual plan to secure housing. The approach involves tapping into a combination of existing and typical community options, personal assets, ideas, and creativity. Additionally, the Housing Specialist will bring their passion for “home” and housing, and dynamic interpersonal skills to this role.

Guided by the principles of DFR and the Imagining Home Family Group, the Housing Specialist will work collaboratively with each family and support them as they become ready to move forward with creating a home of one’s own with their family member. The Specialist delves into what captures “home” for each person and helps to build sustainable, reliable and relevant plans of home and support. Sustainable plans are rooted in relationship. The Specialist will assist the team and families to evolve in understanding and support t bring about this role in situations where this is desired.

The Housing Specialist will also take a lead role in developing and facilitating monthly group meetings with interested families, ensuring rich and relevant material for each gathering.

In addition to direct work with families and facilitated group meetings, a key to this role will be leveraging community capacity and leadership. Under the direction of families, Imagining Home’s guiding principles and the team lead, the Housing Specialist will keep a “finger on the pulse” of current and emerging housing issues, seeking out allies, collaborators, innovative opportunities and solutions, that address housing issues that affect families. Research, grant writing, evaluation and ongoing reporting in professional and public formats will be important elements within the scope this role.

A further core focus will be to use various methods to share our learning with interested partners and stakeholders in order to advance more individualized, sustainable home and housing models.

**About Durham Association for Family Resources and Support (DFR)**

Durham Association for Family Resources and Support is a Durham-based, family support and resource organization that partners with families to imagine, plan, and implement good lives in community, one person at a time, for and with their family member with disability. We consider the person in the context of their family (born or chosen) where their relationships most often ensure that this is where the voice of the person might best be heard, supported and augmented.

Durham Family Resources is largely but not solely funded by the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (MCCSS). We also work at times with the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Housing, Regional governments, and federal government departments. Our work is shaped by our relationship with a range of over 300 families and our mutual understanding of their potential and capacity, and of what supports, resources, and information they might welcome in order to pursue a positive Vision of a good life for their family member within their neighbourhood and community.

**Responsibilities**
- Provide individualized support to each family to guide them through the decisions and resources to secure housing that will best suit them
- Facilitate monthly group meetings and manage expectations from a diverse population
- Provide information and options for housing including details regarding type, location and social aspects of home choices
- Work collaboratively with DFR facilitators to assist families to be in a position to move forward on their established housing plans
- Collaborate with families involved in the housing groups, helping to build capacity and leadership that will ensure a strong and sustainable group into the future
- Work in conjunction with the long-term planning and facilitation supports available to each person
- Assist in developing a Home & Housing and Roommate Resource Kits of information suitable for future families to begin the same kind of creative process on their own
- Maintain a pulse and communicate pertinent housing developments, initiatives, incentives and policies to staff and families
- Plan and engage in conversations with realtors, bankers, and other resources to secure housing solutions
- Connect and collaborate with community members, organizations and local government to further housing initiatives
- Develop and maintain a “Brain Trust” of community members skilled and willing to provide assistance to family plans
- Design and keep current an affordable housing interactive resource
- Keep up to date on tools and resources that will continue to support our work in housing
- Collect, organize