CT4A Spotlight: Housing as a Human Right

Rebecca Singer, DNP, RN, is an assistant clinical professor of population health at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Nursing. She has nearly two decades of experience in global health and community partnerships. Her work has taken her around the world to conflict zones, post-conflict zones and other unstable regions where she has collaborated to provide essential health care services to individuals, families, and communities in crisis. She has focused on providing trauma-informed care to survivors of violence, including sexual and intimate partner violence, and on coordinating emergency response services for refugees and internally displaced persons. Since the beginning of COVID-19, Rebecca has collaborated with the City of Chicago Department of Public Health to co-lead an outbreak response program that focuses on providing services to people most vulnerable to poor outcomes, including residents of shelters for those experiencing homelessness, long-term care facilities, residential treatment centers, subsidized housing, senior living apartments, and correctional institutions, or those most susceptible to becoming ill. Rebecca has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Stephen Brown is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked in both adult and pediatric emergency rooms at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UI Health). He leads the Better Health Through Housing Program, UI Health’s housing program for the chronically homeless. It is the longest running healthcare-to-housing program (since 2015) and has housed more homeless persons than any other single hospital in the country. He also runs ComPAct, a team-based care program that works to better coordinate the care for healthcare super-utilizers. As a Senior Director, he helps to address systemic social justice, working upstream with the courts, law enforcement, State behavioral health agencies and community-based services to divert persons with mental illness, substance use and homelessness away from the Emergency Department and the criminal justice system into behavioral health care and housing.

Christine Haley is the chief of the Illinois Office to Prevent and End Homelessness. In this capacity, Christine works with 16 state agencies to implement a strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness for Illinois residents. She chairs the Illinois Interagency Task Force on Homelessness and co-chairs the Community Advisory Council on Homelessness. Before joining the state, Christine was the Director of Housing for Cook County Health, one of the nation’s largest public safety-net health systems. Together with Housing Forward, she was the clinical administrator of a 19-bed medical respite center in Oak Park, IL. She is the founding executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

Fredrick Fret, a proud Nuyorican from the Bronx, has decades of experience working in Community Engagement, Faith Based Youth Leadership, Entrepreneurial Development and Business Management. For the past year, he has worked with New Life Centers of Chicagoland as the Assistant Director of the New Vecino Program. Focused specifically on Resettlement Operations and Logistics, Shelter Management and Community Integration Educational Programming. 

Marc Raifman is a Chicago-based Social Security disability benefits and SSI attorney in the Law Offices of Jeffrey A. Rabin & Associates. As a member of both the Chicago Continuum of Care (CoC) and the Chicago Homelessness and Health Response Group for Equity (CHHRGE), he is a advocate for improved homeless services in Chicago. He previously practiced as a public benefits and legal aid attorney in the Greater Chicago area, and he supervised the Maywood Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP), a clinic based out of Loyola University Chicago School of Law in partnership with Loyola Medicine and the Stritch School of Medicine. Prior to that, he practiced within the “Health Forward” MLP between Legal Aid Chicago and Cook County Health.

Check out a link to some of Marc’s advocacy.