Tanya Tull
A nationally recognized expert on family homelessness, Tull began working in the nonprofit sector in 1980, when she founded Para Los Niños (For the Children), in response to an article in the L.A. Times about children living in Skid Row hotels. She served as the agency’s Executive Director through 1985 and President through 1996. In 1983, Tull co-founded L.A. Family Housing – a nonprofit agency that develops and operates emergency shelters and permanent housing. Tull founded two additional nonprofit agencies in 1988 – A Community of Friends and Beyond Shelter – as an evolution of her earlier work in the field. A Community of Friends develops permanent, supportive housing for chronically homeless populations and has been operated by others since 1990. At Beyond Shelter, Tull developed the housing first approach to ending family homelessness—and promoted the new model across the country for the next 25 years.
From 1990 through 2011, under Tanya Tull’s leadership, Beyond Shelter’s Institute for Research, Training, and Technical Assistance conducted over 200 workshops and presentations in over 75 communities, 30 states, and Puerto Rico – including national two-day workshops held in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, often co-sponsored by the National Alliance to End Homelessness and other leading national advocacy groups. Promoting key components for two distinct and separate initiatives, Housing First for Families and Service-Enriched Housing, her work provided flexible and adaptable strategies that have resonated on a national scale.
In 2011, as an intentional evolution of her work at Beyond Shelter, Tanya founded Partnering for Change to promote early identification of, and more timely and appropriate interventions to, indicators of housing instability by mainstream systems (including schools, community-based services organizations, and healthcare systems). Using the Los Angeles Promise Zone as a place-based test site, efforts were made through “place-based” collective impact strategies to engage schools, family resource centers, child development centers, and other community-based programs either based in, or providing services to, the area. Comprised of some of the most dense neighborhoods in the US, indicators of housing instability were rampant. From this effort, recommendations for new cross-sector policies and practices within an adaptable framework for mainstream and community-based services systems nationwide evolve.
A graduate of Scripps College, Claremont, CA, and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, Tanya was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences from Whittier College in 1992. She served as a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs (2005 — 2020) and was elected as a Senior Fellow at Ashoka in 2009. Recognition includes the Gleitsman National Citizen Activist Award, Kennedy School of Government – Center for Public Leadership, Harvard (1996), and the MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) Community Service Award (2002). Tanya served for many years on special advisory committees for the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition and worked closely with both the National Homelessness Law Center and the National Center on Housing and Child Welfare.