May 16-18, 2007 
Newton, Massachusetts

The 2nd Young Children Without Homes National Conference took place May 16-18, and was extremely successful.

If you attended the Conference, we would love to hear
your thoughts. Your feedback will help us plan our future Conferences. Choose between an electronic evaluation
(e-mailable) or a hard copy evaluation (mailable/faxable).

The Participants:
The 2nd Young Children Without Homes National Conference brought together 570 participants from 30 states and Canada to focus our efforts on improving the lives of young homeless children. The conference participants were from a variety of backgrounds from early childhood teachers, family shelter providers, public school homeless liaisons, social workers, family advocates, Early Intervention, Head Start, state agency personnel, housing advocates and others. The networking during the conference along with the conference workshops and general sessions instilled an urgency to do better for homeless children and families that resulted in hundreds of "Call to Action" postcards written to elected officials across the country to ask for their support.

The Featured Speakers:
The featured speakers were truly inspiring! They included:

Keynote Speaker, Marian Wright Edelman
of the Children's Defense Fund

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of the Touchpoints
Center at Boston Children's Hospital

Dr. Jack Shonkoff of The Center
on the Developing Child at Harvard
University among others.  

The Workshops:
There were 60 workshops with a wide variety of topics including the effects of homelessness and trauma on young children, how to build community awareness of the growing numbers of families who find themselves homeless in the United States, how to recognize developmental delays in homeless young children, utilizing  parents' voices in advocating to end homelessness, addressing the health needs of homeless families and the use of storytelling to support social-emotional development in young homeless children.

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Gulf Coast Efforts

At this year's Conference, we were moved by the powerful continuing saga of the health and developmental impacts on the children who were evacuated as a result of the Gulf Coast hurricanes and who are now homeless. The Gulf Coast Panelists are the faces of the many, many heroes who have worked tirelessly since the late summer of 2005 to assist families in their efforts to find stability and housing as well as provide consistent, high quality early education programs for the "Katrina babies".