Staying Current: Find, Check and Use the Information Your Work Depends On

Rich Los Angeles context. Skills that work wherever you practice.

Built for homeless-services staff in any US city or county, with Los Angeles as the worked example.

Rules change, roles move, screenshots fly around the group chat, and AI tools answer with total confidence. This self-paced field guide and toolkit teaches frontline and supervisory staff in shelter and interim housing, outreach, case management, housing navigation, drop-in, coordinated entry, prevention and peer roles to stay accurately informed: tell a rule from guidance and rumor, read the rule itself, weigh research honestly, check a claim before repeating it, and keep what you know dated and correctable. Published by Homeless Services Learning Lab Foundation (California). Edition 1.0, October 2026.

What you'll be able to do

• Sort what you hear into rule, guidance, policy, practice or unverified claim, and ask who it binds, since when, and who decides.
• Find and read the text that applies: a federal regulation in the eCFR, a state law (California and another state's code site), a HUD notice and a CoC policy.
• Decide what a study supports, using plain numbers and both groups' results, and how to treat preprints and questionable journals.
• Verify a claim, a screenshot or an AI answer against the original, and keep participant information out of AI tools.
• Keep a small update routine, date your claims ("as of …"), write a team update people can trust, and correct yourself cleanly.

Included in the download

• 68-page field guide with five lessons. Each lesson has a layer-by-layer view (federal, state, LA County, other places, and "check yours"), a worked decision, practice scenarios with model answers, a self-check with feedback, and numbered sources.
• Four printable one-page job aids and a Check Yours worksheet (PDF and Word).
• Nine editable Word tools with a printable PDF companion (claim card, rule-reading worksheet, evidence appraisal card, claim verification and AI check, conflicting sources note, personal update routine, team update note, correction note, thirty-day practice plan).
• A Source and Recheck Tracker in Excel that flags when a source or claim is due for a recheck, with a fictional worked example.
• Start Here and the license for the tier you choose.

License tiers

• Individual (1 user): $49
• Program / Site Team (15 named users): $199
• Agency / Multi-site (50 named users): $499

Before you buy

• Sources: built on 100 legal, policy and research claims, each traced to its source. Laws and regulations were read in full official text; research was checked against the published record (Crossref, PubMed or the publisher). They include the federal Administrative Procedure Act, the eCFR and Federal Register's own reader aids, HUD's CoC and ESG rules on written standards and coordinated entry (24 CFR 578.7, 576.400), HUD Notice CPD-17-01, California's constitution, Public Records Act and Brown Act, Washington's and Texas's constitutions and codes, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, HUD's HMIS privacy standards, NIST's generative-AI profile and Mata v. Avianca, plus research on Housing First, communicating risk, preprints, predatory journals, misinformation, lateral reading and AI citation errors. Sources were checked October 27, 2026; LA governance facts are dated and still moving.
• Other places: examples from Washington State and Seattle/King County, the Texas Balance of State CoC, Chicago and Massachusetts.
• What it isn't: legal advice, a research-methods course, software training or an endorsement of any AI product. No agency endorsement is implied. The scenarios are fictional.
• Related HSLL guides: Rules, Rights and Fair Exits and Notes and Data.
• Accessibility: the PDFs aren't certified PDF/UA accessible. The worksheet and tools are also supplied in Word.

Downloadable digital resource.