In 2025, 24% of homeless people were part of families with children. When these families face a medical crisis, such as a parent recovering from surgery or a complicated birth, they are often discharged from the hospital to the streets or to shelters not equipped to handle their medical recovery. To address this need, JustDane, a non-profit social justice and social service agency that advocates and provides resources for underserved populations such as the unhoused, created Healing House. Healing House offers 24/7 medical respite shelter to families experiencing homelessness who need a safe place to recuperate after surgery, childbirth, or medical crises.
Recently, a project was launched to expand Healing House services and evaluate outcomes, utilizing a long-standing community partnership between Linda Ketcham, JustDane’s Executive Director, and the Lab for Family Wellbeing & Justice.This University of Wisconsin-Madison research lab focuses on creating evidence-based practice strategies and informing policy development to build knowledge and solutions for families impacted by incarceration and justice system involvement. This project was funded through a grant provided by the Wisconsin Partnership Program (WPP), a grant program committed to enhancing health and health equity.
Combining JustDane’s community expertise with UW-Madison’s research capacity is crucial for evaluating the program’s influence as well as informing efforts to sustain the program long-term. As Associate Professor and Principle Investigator for the Lab for Family Wellbeing & Justice Dr. Pajarita Charles explains, “To our knowledge, there is limited to no evidence on how medical respite services affect unhoused families specifically.”
To do so, Dr. Charles and her team, including Postdoctoral Research Associate, Kerrie Ann Fanning, and Research Assistant, Stella Goldberg, will measure changes in health outcomes, housing stability, and economic well-being of families from the time they begin living at Healing House until three months after they leave. In addition to medical support and healthcare education, families will be offered supportive services to help with finding permanent housing and employment. The study will also include the formation of a Healing House Advisory Committee (HHAC) which will ensure that the voices of parents with lived experiences of housing instability are heard and used to inform the research. The plan is to serve about 90 families, or about 270 individuals, over the next three years.
With plans to launch the project by June, the team is working to further strengthen the already strong connections that JustDane has with local hospitals, including UW Health and UnityPoint Health-Meriter, so that social workers and healthcare providers there know that they have a place to send economically and socially vulnerable families. While the project is still in its early stages, the hope is that it will result in an understanding of changes in outcomes over time associated with Healing House which can result in the program’s expansion and long-term viability. The ultimate goal is to better help families in need. As Dr. Charles described, “we aim to reduce the racial health inequities that disproportionately affect families of color in our local unhoused population.”