About Us
This website is a service of the Social Work Department, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The website was created in response to two aspects of service provision for families and children who are homeless:
- Much of the expertise in working with homeless families and children resides in workers in local shelters and in homeless families themselves who have figured out, usually by trial and error, approaches or techniques that are effective. Very rarely are these approaches and this expertise shared outside of the agency or community. This website hopes to be a means for sharing this valuable information.
- Given that most shelters for the homeless are local non-profit organizations, often with barely enough funding, many of the workers that serve homeless families and children lack professional education and training. This website is a step toward providing information that can be used to get better at what we do.
The project director is Dr. Jim Winship, Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Since the early 1990s, he has worked with homeless families at a shelter in Southeastern Wisconsin. He was the Project Director for a three-year HUD-funded training grant through the Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, "Serving, Supporting, and Strengthening Homeless Families" and has done other training with service providers. He is the co-author of Generalist Social Work Practice: Context, Story, and Partnerships (Brooks-Cole, 1998). As a consultant for the National Center on Homeless Education, he created the section on their website on community awareness. He chairs the Poverty Response Team of Rock County (Wisconsin), works on housing issues statewide in Wisconsin, and is a board member of the National Welfare Monitoring and Advocacy Partnership
Contributions by practitioners who work with homeless and low-income families have made this website possible. Special thanks to Karen Fisher of Madison, Wisconsin; Harold Mitchell of Richmond, Virginia; and Doug Spangler of Richmond, California. Social work students Andrea Hall and Heather Johnston located appropriate research articles and websites.
About Us 
Helping Clients Plan for the Future
Advocacy and Service Provision
Parenting while Homeless
Starting Points in Working with People who are Homeless
Perspectives
on Shelter Life from Residents and Staff
Sharing Expertise and Question
Future Plans for the Website
Related Links
Site Index
Contact Us
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Website Created by Tapan
Shah for Jim Winship and Social Work Department, UW-Whitewater. For comments:
Contact homewords@uww.edu All material
Copyright © 2000 by Tapan Shah and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
All rights reserved
Last Updated January 24, 2001
