Housing & Houselessness
Leadership Network
Professional Development for Collaborative Houselessness
Service Providers & Housing Leaders across Los Angeles
Looking to expand your leadership capacity?
Complete an interest form today!
Housing & Houselessness Leadership Network
The Housing & Houselessness Leadership Network (HHLN) provides houselessness service providers and housing professionals with the leadership skills and a cross-sectoral network to advance their capacity to ignite action and impact within their organizations and across the region. Become an agent of change on housing and houselessness in Los Angeles County!
Participants expand their capacity from 1) peer learning, 2) experienced leadership, DEIB, and human centered-design facilitators, and 3) the broader Coro and regional community through Coro’s unique blend of experiential and immersive programming.
Interested Candidates – Click Here to Connect with Coro Staff to Learn More.
Over 60 hours of professional development programming from February to May meeting about twice per month. You can also expect about 5 to 10 hours spent outside of sessions on minimal Focus Day team group work and individual assignments.
The Programs are broken into three components:
- Opening Retreat – Multi-day, off-site weekend retreat laying key skills-building and cohort-building foundations.
- Leadership Forums – Facilitated professional, management, and leadership development skill-building sessions featuring Coro’s time-tested and unique curriculum.
- Focus Days – Cohort-curated and -led explorations of a challenge facing houselessness and housing to stretch your professional and leadership development in a real-time setting. The teams select the topics to bring learning into the room with their cohort.
- Provides you with the leadership skills and a cross-sectoral network to advance your capacity to ignite action and impact within your organizations and across the region to better provide houselessness solutions and services.
- Enables you to enhance your knowledge of the houselessness challenges and solutions (and the systems in which those challenges and solutions lie) by learning from your peers within the cohort and across the housing and homelessness space.
The curriculum includes a wide range of professional skills-building:
- Adaptive Leadership
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging (DEIB) and Anti-Racism
- Effective Communication and Advocacy
- Effective Inquiry and Critical Thinking
- Giving and Receiving Feedback
- Human Centered Design
- Interpersonal Leadership Styles™
- Managing Diverse Teams
- Negotiations
- Project Management Tools
- Public Narrative Frameworks
- Self-Awareness and Self-Management Tools
- Stakeholder Analysis and Coalition Building
The Focus Days serve as vehicles for you to exercise leadership and management skills-building in a real-time setting, enhancing your knowledge of a houselessness and housing challenge, while also practicing your professional development in an experiential way.
As a leadership and professional development institute, Coro’s program goals, including HHLN, aim to expand the leadership and professional capacity of our program participants in order for them to have the networks, skills, and knowledge to drive impact in their work and communities.
HHLN Is Not | HHLN Is |
An echo chamber for your perspectives to be reinforced | A place to experience and appreciate diversity of experiences and viewpoints and engage in productive conflict and discourse |
A “quick fix” bootcamp where you will be told the answers and solutions | A place to identify personal professional strengths and areas for growth and practice skills building |
A think tank in which Coro or you will be “solving” the region’s housing and houselessness crisis | A space to build a collaborative network of peers eager to work together – both during the program and afterward – to better understand how to address this crisis and expand your toolkit of frameworks to enhance your capacity to do so |
The program creates opportunities for you to bring your professional work into the program.
- Personal Leadership Commitment – you will name a specific area of growth you plan to practice over the course of the program.
- Peer Consultancy – the peer consultancy case enables you to bring into the program a real-world professional challenge you are seeking to address and to seek peer coaching from your cohort.
- Exploring Tough Interpretations – an adaptive leadership module that builds on Coro’s effective inquiry, giving and receiving feedback, and effective communication tools to illuminate your resistance to change.
- Focus Days – as a cohort-led component of the program, the Focus Days provide participants with an opportunity to expand their knowledge of the challenges the region faces related to the issues of housing and houselessness, while also engaging in through-partnership with other cohort participants and external stakeholders on how to move forward.
Coro values diverse perspectives, identities, experiences, and world views represented in programming and cohorts; as such, HHLN cohorts reflect the make-up of the region, representing a wide array of backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and identities.
Ideal HHLN candidates are those who:
- work in, live in, and/or serve communities in Los Angeles County,
- have five (5) years or more of professional experience working across and within the issues of housing and homelessness,
- hold an interest in innovating solutions to Los Angeles County’s houselessness and housing challenges,
- view houselessness and housing as a cross-sectoral field and are willing to communicate and collaborate with other stakeholders in and outside of the field,
- have the support they need from their organizations to fully commit to participating.
Multi-Perspective: You should be ready to engage productively with different perspectives and ready to engage in personal reflection, open to changing your opinion or position.
Vulnerability and Psychological Safety: As a necessary component of multi-perspective learning, Coro views vulnerability as a critical leadership attribute essential for unleashing learning, building authentic and meaningful connection, and for holding spaces that are psychologically safe as a precursor to adaptive, innovative collaboration. You should be ready to contribute to building a psychological safe cohort environment.
Intentional Ambiguity: A signature characteristic of Coro programming is generating intentional ambiguity, which works to highlight your defaults, ignite your learning, and support you to lead and manage through uncertainty.
Learn by Doing: Coro views leadership as a practice; you should be ready to learn by doing with sessions as opportunities to lay the foundation; you will gain the most by taking the skills, tools, and frameworks and practicing/adapting them in your professional roles.
Thanks to generous support from Cedars-Sinai, and JPMorgan Chase & Co., Coro Southern California is able to offer HHLN to participants for a significantly reduced program fee of only $250 (subsidized and discounted from $7,500).
The generous financial support of HHLN’s sponsors and the program fee covers:
- Over 60 hours of expert facilitated learning, materials, and instruction
- Overnight double-occupancy accommodations for the Opening Leadership Retreat (note: you can reserve a single-occupancy room for the Opening Leadership Retreat for an additional room fee of $550)
- All meals during the Opening Leadership Retreat
- Interpersonal Leadership Styles™ assessment and materials
- Lunch during full-day, in-person sessions
- Closing Ceremony reception
- Access to Coro HHLN GSuite platforms
- Upon successful completion, a Coro HHLN certificate of completion and access to the Coro community and special alumni-only events, programming, and platforms
You may incur additional incidental expenses due to your participation, such as transportation and parking costs and additional meals outside of those provided by Coro.
Participant Stipend: Thanks to the generous support of HHLN’s financial sponsors, Coro is able to offer a limited number of need-based participant stipends to help offset expenses related to their participation, such as parking and transportation, day-care, or limited PTO. Applicants seeking participant stipends must complete at the time of application the relevant questions on the HHLN application.
Employer and Sponsor Assistance: Most of past participants have secured financial support from their employers to cover the program fee. We encourage you to speak with your employer or to engage your network about potential support. We have prepared this useful Program Benefits Guide to support with employer conversations about professional development support.
Coro’s unique approach to leadership and professional development training delivers both immediate and long-lasting capacity-building benefits by expanding your skills, networks, and knowledge.
- 100% of past participants agreed that their participation in HHLN expanded their professional networks.
- 97% of past participants reported improved ability to identify their areas of growth due to their participation in HHLN.
- 91% of past participants reported that due to their HHLN participation they have a better understanding of their personal strengths and weaknesses that influence their effectiveness.
- Almost 90% of past participants said their HHLN participation increased their leadership skills.
Explore the Program Benefits Guide
“I valued being given a space to engage myself as a diverse leader….I felt pushed to explore myself, and I value the deep relationships I fostered. I feel like I walked out with a family and a coalition that can innovate and change the future of homelessness. In no unclear words, Los Angeles needed this leadership space to have difficult conversations and the innovations that can possibly come out of our personal commitments to purpose and change. We can change this challenge by breaking down the walls and seeing the people and transformative leaders in front of us.”
– Monique Alvarado, Organizational Advancement & Marketing Project Manager, Los Angeles Mission
Coro’s programs deliver deep impact (see more in the “Program Impact & Testimonials” tab above and in the Program Benefits Guide) at a highly subsidized professional development rate. The housing and houselessness work environment and the challenges your team members face in it are complex. Investing in your team by expanding their skills, network, and knowledge further builds your capacity to deliver on your organization’s mission.
Supporting team members, either financially and/or with the time and space to participate fully in HHLN, yields strong organizational benefits by:
- Increasing the skills of employees in critical positions that can be incorporated departmentally and instilled in their direct reports.
- Demonstrating your commitment to the employee, increasing their feeling of engagement, which often leads to higher productivity, loyalty, and retention; and
- Motivating all employees by signaling that leadership and a commitment to their work is rewarded by the organization.
Connect with Coro to discuss an organizational partnership and nominate a member of your team for HHLN.
“In a time when professional development is critical to demonstrate organizational commitment to staff, Downtown Women’s Center (DWC) is ever reliant on the amazing training opportunities made possible through Coro programs.
We have first-hand seen an advancement in our mission because of the deeper network, civic engagement, and personal and professional skills building that come with joining the Coro community. Staff who have completed Coro programs demonstrate greater adaptive leadership skills at DWC, a timelessly important quality, but one that converging health and social pandemics demands of our current workforce today more than ever.” – Amy Turk, Chief Executive Officer, Downtown Women’s Center
- Abundant Housing LA
- Century Housing
- City of Long Beach, Department of Health and Human Services
- City of Los Angeles, City Planning Department
- City of Los Angeles, Office of Council President Paul Krekorian (CD 2)
- City of Pasadena, Accessibility and Disability Commission
- Communities for a Better Environment
- Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
- County of Los Angeles, Office of the Chief Executive
- Covenant House California
- Downtown Women’s Center
- Ethos Real Estate
- Hollywood Food Coalition
- Los Angeles County Development Authority
- Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA)
- Los Angeles Mission
- My Friend’s Place
- Ontario International Airport Authority
- Orange County Department of Education
- San Gabriel Valley Regional Housing Trust
- SSG/HOPICS
- The Center in Hollywood
- Thomas Safran & Associates
- WET Design
- Whalar
Thank you to our Supporters
Application
Now accepting applications for the 2024 HHLN cohort. Submit online here. Applications are due Sunday, December 10, 2023 at 11:59pm PST.Interest Form
Click here to complete an Interest Form and learn more about HHLN.Nominate
Know someone who would be great for HHLN? Nominate them here.Program Benefits
Download this guide to review the benefits of HHLN participation. This is a great resource for those requesting employer financial support and time off for participation.Meet the Cohort
2024 cohort details coming soon. See below for information about our recently graduated cohort.- Past Cohorts
Class of 2023 Program Calendar
Click here to view the HHLN 2024 Program Calendar (including the program’s attendance policy).Questions? Contact:
Callie Spaide
Senior Manager, Recruitment and Alumni Relations
callie@corola.org
(213) 267-6497