Stakeholder Meeting: Center for the Pacific Asian Family Shelters

Center for the Pacific Asian Family Shelters’ goal is to secure permanent housing for survivors of abuse and neglect. The team behind CPAF Shelters aims for permanency, ensuring permanent family based living situations. Their role is to identify and secure resources such as housing, paper work, advocacy for families, and basic necessities like food and water. CPAF helps families fight for housing and the elements they consider for their arguments include socioeconomic backgrounds, current living situations, the likelihood of enrolling them into a rapid rehousing program, and the approval for possible openings. Additional factors that come into play include:

- income 

- family size

- immigration status

Nonetheless, Section 8 housing plays a big part when ensuring stable living environments for families. CPAF’s shelter housing coordinator, Joyti Chand, stated, “Section 8 housing is a shot in the dark, but when advocating for my clients, my role is to decrease the barrier on the basis of human rights.” Joyti’s role is to secure food and emotional safety for her clients, making sure that the first response is not shelters but rather permanent housing, and working on paperwork/documentation which is a tedious, difficult obstacle. . One of Joyti’s latest success stories include how she was able to subsidize lifetime housing for a deaf family with two young children. The family moved into a unit with three bedrooms alongside accommodation for their disability. Despite the successes, CPAF Shelters still faces many challenges in how there are very few affordable low income housing units. With these conditions very few families fit the requirements, and the piling struggles that the Covid-19 pandemic has put us through, securing housing has never been so rare 

One way teens and youth activists can help is by becoming familiar with the child welfare system encompassing substance abuse, documentation status, emotional state of being and much more. Many curveballs are also thrown at case workers which is why it is crucial for us to help build substantial barriers for clients. CPAF Shelters has helped many families and plans to continue helping many more in the future.