Assessing for & Appropriately Responding to the Housing Needs of Domestic & Sexual Violence Survivors: A Decision Tree as an Alternative to a Scoresheet

This article describes the common struggle with how to equitably and fairly implement coordinated entry (CE) through use of a screening tool that assigns points to individuals or families based on their ‘vulnerabilities.’ As an alternative, the authors assert that the most promising solution for assessing housing needs of survivors lies in having brief but focused conversations with survivors that cover the topics most relevant to choosing strategies likely to lead to safe and stable housing. Offering an alternative, the authors conceptualize a decision tree accompanied with a model of brief and focused conversations to better determine housing needs for survivors of domestic and sexual violence.