About the Ecology of Family Healing
This project was created to make the hidden realities of family homelessness visible, and to offer clear, research-guided pathways for healing, stability, and dignity.
Families navigating housing instability often must respond to systems that were never designed with their wellbeing in mind. This project brings together trauma science and ecological systems theory to show how instability is created and sustained, and how it can be interrupted.​
Family homelessness does not emerge from individual choices. It arises when housing, childcare, healthcare, education, and economic systems fail to provide safety and opportunity. When these systems misfire, families experience chronic stress, exhaustion, and fractured support across every layer of their environment. Parents and caregivers demonstrate extraordinary strength in the face of these conditions but are often misunderstood or blamed for behaviors rooted in trauma.
This site reframes the issue through a lens that recognizes both the structural causes of homelessness and the human resilience that persists despite them.
This project began as a graduate capstone in psychology, but it is ultimately an act of care and accountability to my community. I believe families deserve systems that do not replicate the very trauma they are trying to escape, that frontline providers deserve infrastructures that nourish their labor instead of constraining it, and that communities deserve narratives that recognize resilience rather than turning survival into a deficiency.
Though grounded in research, this site is written for the people who move through these systems every day: case managers, educators, organizers, policy workers, and anyone trying to understand family homelessness without defaulting to stigma or oversimplified explanations.
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The Ecology of Family Healing is a justice-oriented project rooted in dignity, equity, cultural humility, and the understanding that healing is never solely personal. It is relational, collective, and shaped by the systems around us. Families carry the weight of structural harm, but those same structures can be reimagined. When systems are designed around compassion, continuity, and long-term support rather than scarcity and surveillance, they create the conditions in which families can breathe, connect, and thrive.
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This site does not offer individualized clinical, legal, or crisis intervention. It offers a framework and a set of tools to help communities build systems grounded in relational safety, accountability, and belonging. These are the foundations of healing-centered environments, and they are possible when we choose to build them together.