Bridging Supports Across Agencies to Help Families Achieve Housing Stability and Economic Security

Insights from Ascend Fellow Cheryl Ternes, Former Director of Human Services, Arapahoe County, Colorado

The moment that changed how Cheryl Ternes thought about her work didn’t happen in a county office or a strategic planning session. It happened in a homeless shelter.

Visiting a local shelter that served individuals and families, Ternes — then Director of Human Services for Arapahoe County, Colorado — came upon a family with very young children. The shelter gave them a place to be, but little more. The children had nothing constructive to do, and the adults around them weren’t always the examples she would have wished for them. There were no comprehensive supports, no guidance, no path forward.

“I said to myself: we can do so much better for these families,” Ternes recalls. “There are so many resources out there that we should be connecting them to.”

That conviction — that the problem wasn’t a lack of resources, but a lack of connection — would shape the rest of her career and produce one of the field’s most instructive models for serving families experiencing homelessness.

Families Don’t Live in Silos. Systems Shouldn’t Either.

An Ascend Fellow with more than four decades in human services, including 23 years as deputy director in Jefferson County, Colorado, before nearly two decades leading Arapahoe County Human Services, Ternes saw the same pattern again and again: families navigating housing instability while juggling multiple other challenges. Housing, food, employment, health, child care, and education were tangled together in their daily lives — but the systems built to help them were organized program by program, each with its own rules, its own front door, and its own definition of success.

“A family might get to a shelter and have their immediate housing needs met,” she explains, “but then they weren’t connected to the services to access safe and stable housing, the education and training needed to maintain a good paying job, or child care, so they could hold down that job.”

The fix sounds simple — and Ternes is the first to say so. “It sounds so simple and makes so much sense. But when you have large departments that are diverse and busy and have their own focus, sometimes all of the needs of the family are not addressed.” A public benefits team measured on getting benefits out the door quickly and accurately, for example, isn’t naturally positioned to ask what else a family needs. So Ternes worked to change what staff were trained to see — and to ask.

GOALS: A Replicable Model for Whole-Family Stability

That thinking became concrete in GOALS — Generational Opportunities to Achieve Long-Term Success, a two-generation initiative Ternes helped develop in partnership with Family Tree, the Center for Policy Research, and a network of community providers.

GOALS serves families experiencing or at risk of homelessness, housing roughly 15 families at a time for stays of four to nine months on a residential campus. While parents work to overcome employment barriers and build skills to support their families, children receive high-quality early childhood education and academic support — and the whole family gets help strengthening its well-being and stability. Critically, support doesn’t end at move-out: families receive follow-up services for up to a year after participation.

At the center of the model is something Ternes considers non-negotiable: a single case manager who sees the whole family. “They need one central case manager who can assess their needs, help them make connections, and make a plan — and be their cheerleader,” she says. “Often families don’t know what’s available, and they don’t have someone providing that support and guidance.”

Just as important, GOALS was built to prove itself. A formal two-phase evaluation showed improvement across every component the program measured — for both adults and children. Many participating families moved out of poverty entirely. Those results became a tool in themselves: evidence Ternes could put in front of other agencies, alongside surveys asking families directly whether their needs were being met.

What It Takes to Make Collaboration Stick

For leaders hoping to replicate this kind of systems change, Ternes is clear-eyed about what’s required — and where the challenges lie.

Train everyone, then train again. Ternes brought department leaders and community leaders together for training on the two-generation approach, then provided continuous opportunities to keep the framework alive. “It has to be continuous education,” she says. “You establish the connections — and then people change jobs.” When COVID disrupted relationships across agencies, her team had to deliberately rebuild them, with regular meetings and structured ways to bring partners together.

Put it in the strategic plan. Ternes embedded whole-family connections into Arapahoe County’s strategic plan, ensuring staff at every level understood the full range of services across the department — and that community members knew how to access them.

Look beyond your own walls. The connections that matter most often sit outside human services: mental health providers, early childhood education programs, secondary and postsecondary education partners. Building those bridges is part of the job.

Let families be the evidence. From program evaluations to family surveys, Ternes consistently brought the experiences of families themselves into conversations across child welfare, public benefits, and beyond.

Housing as the Foundation for Affordability, Mobility, and Security

Ternes’s work speaks directly to the outcomes at the heart of Forward With Families. Safe, stable housing, she argues, isn’t one need among many — it’s the foundation that makes economic mobility possible. “If families aren’t able to maintain safe and stable housing, they will end up homeless again,” she says. “We wanted to end that cycle. Lifting families out of poverty requires safe and stable housing.”

Asked what gives her hope, she points to the families themselves. “GOALS gives me hope — it was proven to be successful. We saw families become successful. We saw that many of them were no longer considered to be in poverty.”

But she doesn’t minimize the headwinds. Changes to federal food supports and TANF, she warns, are making it harder than ever for dedicated local leaders to deliver what families need. That, she suggests, makes coordination not just good practice but a necessity: communities can no longer afford the inefficiency of fragmented systems.

Her parting lesson for today’s leaders is the one her whole career embodies:

“Don’t work in a silo. Look across programs, agencies, and services. Be intentional about those connections — and serve families holistically.”