Join CHCF in Sacramento on Wednesday, March 12, 2025 for a briefing about these supports and their importance for helping people move from homelessness to housing. The briefing will begin with an overview of how homelessness impacts a person’s health by Margot Kushel, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF. She will draw from the landmark California Statewide Survey of People Experiencing Homelessness. Following the presentation, Michelle Schneidermann, MD, director of people-centered care at CHCF, will moderate a discussion about the role Medi-Cal is playing in California’s homelessness response and how that role can be strengthened and improved through critical partnerships across the health, homelessness, and housing sectors.

In this op-ed, Margot Kushel, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF, highlights the frequency people experiencing homelessness are exposed to violence. Across the country, people are viewing the presence of people experiencing homelessness on public transportation as a thread, leading efforts to remove individuals sleeping on public transportation. "Throughout literature, sleep has been a metaphor for death. But, in real life, sleep should mean neither death nor arrest. We need to focus on real solutions — increasing housing affordability and the services that allow people to thrive — instead of demonizing tired, frightened people" Dr. Kushel writes.

The UCSF Benioff Homelessness & Housing Initiative held a webinar to explore the implications of the 2024 election for homelessness on the West Coast and beyond. Margot Kushel, MD, moderates a conversation with Marc Dones, Chione Lucina Muñoz Flegal, MCP, and Marcy Thompson, MSW, to discuss the policy impacts, the challenge of evidence-based service delivery in a potentially austere and charged political environment, and strategies for advancing effective solutions.

Most people experiencing homelessness in California do so in unsheltered settings, such as outdoors or in vehicles. This webinar is about the causes and consequences of unsheltered homelessness. Margot Kushel, MD, moderated a conversation with Marc Dones, Ashley Meehan, MPH, and Carter Hewgley, discussing recommendations and solutions for addressing unsheltered homelessness in a way that preserves health, dignity, and civil rights for those experiencing it.

Are you a researcher who wants to include people with lived experience in your research? Are you an organization that wants to authentically involve community members in your program development or evaluation? The UCSF BHHI recently released a report on the largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s—the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH). The CASPEH was guided by a Lived Expertise Advisory Board—a group of advisors from across the state of California who represent a range of lived and living experiences of homelessness. Join Kara Young Ponder, PhD, Lived Expertise Advisory Board Members Michelle Ochoa, Dez Martinez, and Robynne Rose-Haymer as they discuss the nuts and bolts of how they did research together from designing survey questions to helping train field staff, analyzing data and disseminating findings.