Ruth Anne White

Ruth White is co-founder and executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and former director of Housing and Homelessness for CWLA.  Ruth works closely with professionals and people personally impacted by social programs to improve public policy to ease access to economic resources and to reduce government intervention into peoples’ lives. Since beginning her work to expand housing and self-sufficiency resources for families and youth involved with child welfare and early childhood education programming, Ruth has successfully advocated for over $400 million in funding for new permanent housing subsidies.  In 2020, Ruth partnered with the Connecticut Head Start Association to create the “Head Start on Housing Initiative” to recruit landlords to accept vouchers from Head Start families.  The Initiative also established a partnership between the State Department of Housing and the Office of Early Childhood to earmark 65 “on demand” vouchers for families and Early Childhood Housing Outreach team members in each Head Start Center.  In 2018, Ruth partnered with current and former foster youth from ACTION Ohio to design and deliver the youth-written Fostering Stable Housing Opportunity (FSHO) proposal directly to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Congress.  The HUD Leadership Team adopted the on-demand, synchronized, and revolutionary distribution mechanism for housing choice vouchers as the basis for the Foster Youth to Independence Initiative in 2019. FSHO passed into law and is funded at $30 million annually. Ruth is a certified Assisted Housing Manger and holds a master’s degree in social administration from Case Western Reserve University and a bachelor’s degree in social work from The Ohio State University.  She is currently a doctoral candidate and professor at the Catholic University of America.