Systems in Sync: What Seven States Learned About Supporting Families Experiencing Homelessness

More than 500,000 infants and toddlers in the U.S. experienced homelessness during the 2023–24 school year. For these children and their parents, the lack of a stable home affects nearly everything: prenatal and postpartum care, mental health, early development, and a family’s ability to stay together. The systems that could help, including maternal health, mental health, housing, child welfare, and data, often work separately, and families have to find their way through each one on their own.

In March 2026, the BUILD Initiative’s Prenatal-to-Three Capacity-Building Hub launched Systems in Sync, a six-month learning community built around one question: what would it look like for these systems to work together more intentionally? Teams from Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin spent six months looking for answers, using a Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole Systems lens.

Starting With the Family, Not the System
Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, set the tone at the first session:

Families don’t live their lives in silos; neither should our policies.

Each session that followed took on a different part of a family’s experience. In the session on maternal health, Erin Patterson, senior director of strategic initiatives and partnerships at SchoolHouse Connection, urged teams to look closely at what their state’s data show about the maternal health needs of people experiencing homelessness. She also pointed to federal and state grant programs that can help meet those needs. And she stressed the need to “design opportunities to hear directly from parents experiencing homelessness.”

The next session did exactly that. Daryl Savell of Savell Consulting Company shared his experience of homelessness as a single father. He reminded participants:

Just because a family’s reached safety physically does not mean their nervous systems immediately recognize safety emotionally. Systems often misinterpret children’s behaviors as defiance and disrespect rather than dysregulation and unmet developmental needs.

What Housing Stability Takes
In the session on housing stability, Duffield and Patterson walked through the barriers families face in finding and keeping housing, along with state and local policy ideas to address them. Eric Smith of North Carolina then shared the state’s ASCEND model. It’s a six-week, community-centered curriculum that helps families access, maintain, and manage housing, covering topics from money management to long-term stability planning. His advice for lasting change was simple:

Partnerships make the difference, and the strength of the partnerships are key.

State teams then mapped the organizations and systems they would need to build a housing stability ecosystem in their own states, and identified promising practices already underway.

The final sessions focused on child welfare and sustainability. They looked at how teams could keep the work going after the learning community ended.

Learning From One Another
The expert presentations mattered, but participants learned just as much from one another. One Delaware team member said:

The sessions make us think deeper. We have met outside of our Systems in Sync time together to further our discussions and lay out our goals and framing for incremental changes that can lead us to bigger endeavors.

In Wisconsin, the team began planning its own community of practice. It is considering using the recorded Systems in Sync presentations and discussion format to help partners work out how they can better work together.

Sync Up and Sync Out
In August, the learning community closed with a session called Sync Up and Sync Out. Each state team reflected on what it had learned, the progress it made, the barriers still ahead, and its commitments for moving cross-system collaboration forward.

The Hub is now following up with each state to identify next steps and opportunities for continued support.

What Comes Next
The real measure of Systems in Sync won’t be the sessions themselves. It will show up in what happens next: a new partnership, data shared in a new way, agencies that communicate more intentionally, a barrier that partners solve together. Most of all, it will show up in a family that finds a more coordinated and supportive system because of the work these teams started.

This work is connected: then, now, and moving forward. The conversations we started months ago are connected to the actions you are taking today, and those actions will shape what becomes possible for children and families tomorrow.