Lisamar Candelaria, a mother of seven, was living in hotels with six of her children before being accepted into the Head Start on Housing program.
Candelaria was working a minimum wage job and said she was tasked with paying about $2,000 monthly in housing fees.
With their new home, acquired through the Head Start on Housing program, each of Candelaria’s children now enjoy their own bedrooms.
“It's a very beautiful, five bedroom home,” Candelaria said. “My kids are happy. I'm happy. I've never lived a stress-free life. I've always worked. I've never had any help. So I'm very lucky to have this type of help.”
The Head Start on Housing program helps families like Candelaria’s. It enables unhoused families with children in the federal government’s Head Start early childhood education program to get an expedited Section 8 voucher, which in turn assists them in securing a permanent home.
Since it began in 2022, the Head Start on Housing program has found homes for nearly 150 unhoused Connecticut families. Head Start provides early childhood education and care for income-qualifying families.
The program, which provides housing vouchers on an expedited schedule, is now expanding. Section 8 housing vouchers allow families with lower incomes to afford safe housing, according to Seila-Mosquera Bruno, Connecticut's housing commissioner.
“Usually you go into a waitlist for a Section 8 voucher, but you need it in real-time, in the time that you need it the most, so you don't go to a shelter,” Mosquera-Bruno said.
Come January, Head Start on Housing will have an additional 50 returning housing vouchers to give to families with children in the Head Start program who are also experiencing homelessness. Returning vouchers are housing vouchers that were given back to the state by families who no longer require housing aid.
“It's such a great program we want to continue. We will continue,” Mosquera-Bruno said. “Through our homelessness prevention programs, we help every year about 25,000 families and individuals and I know we need more.”
The program is a collaboration among several state departments along with the Connecticut Head Start Association and the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare.
In its two years, the program housed 144 families, including 317 children. The housing choice vouchers are provided by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mosquera-Bruno said.
