HPRI Flourishing & Empowerment Summit: Panel Discussion II - Perspectives on Flourishing

Los Angeles’ homelessness response systems face persistent challenges related to fragmented service coordination, workforce burnout, and tenuous pathways for long-term stability. Clients and frontline staff often operate in high-stress environments without sufficient material and moral support. These systemic conditions hinder both service efficiency and the ability to foster transformative outcomes for individuals at high risk of experiencing persistent homelessness.
Flourishing and Empowerment frameworks, strategies, and approaches facilitate emotional intelligence, resilience, skill development, new pathways, and the transformative power of knowledge and teamwork. These person-centered approaches are demonstrated to enhance outcomes in housing security, employment retention, and physical and mental health.

Human flourishing is the sustained experience of well-being marked by positive mental health, strong social connections, purpose-driven activity, and the capacity to meet basic needs and pursue personal goals within supportive environments.
Human empowerment is the process by which individuals gain the psychological, social, and structural resources necessary to exert control over their lives, make informed decisions, and affect meaningful change in their communities.

This summit brings together researchers, public sector leaders, service providers, property managers, clinicians, funders, and people with lived experience of homelessness. Our aim is to reshape the permanent supportive housing ecosystem around the principles of flourishing: collaboration, accountability, trust, mindfulness, and innovation.