FY 2017 Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program Community Selection Announcement
To help end youth homelessness, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is awarding $43 million to 11 local communities, including five rural communities through its Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP). This project supports a wide range of housing programs including rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, and host homes.
HUD developed YHDP with youth in mind, relying upon the recommendations provided directly from young people who had experienced homelessness. To ensure that the program meets the needs of young people, HUD incorporated many of the same young people who provided recommendations on the program’s design in the application review process. Their assessment helped HUD ensure that applicants understood the needs and preferences of the young people they will serve. HUD also worked closely with its federal partners to help develop the program and review applications, including the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Education (DOE), and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH).
The 11 communities selected will collaborate with a broad array of partners including a Youth Action Board (YAB) and the local or state Public Child Welfare Agency (PCWA). These communities will develop a coordinated community plan to prevent and end youth homelessness to submit to HUD within 4 months. They will also participate in a program evaluation to inform the federal effort to prevent and end youth homelessness going forward and will serve as leaders in the nation on the work to end homelessness among young people.
YHDP recipients will use funding for rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, and transitional housing, and to fund innovative programs, such as host homes. Recipients can begin requesting funding for specific projects as soon as they are ready. YHDP will also support youth-focused performance measurement and coordinated entry systems. Over the next several months, selected communities will work with their youth action boards, child welfare agencies, and other community partners to create a comprehensive community plan to end youth homelessness.
HUD is awarding grants to the following communities where local applicants expressed their own vision for ending youth homelessness:
San Diego, California: $7.94 million
The Regional Task Force on the Homeless and their members have demonstrated success in system changes addressing homelessness through subpopulation-specific initiatives and implementation of both a Comprehensive and a Youth Coordinated Entry System (CES).
The award will move the Task Force forward in creating appropriate system capacity, full implementation of a youth coordinated entry system to identify and quickly link all homeless youth to tailored and scaled housing and services, and emphasizing prevention and diversion, to prevent and end youth homelessness.
Louisville, Kentucky: $3.45 million
This Continuum of Care (CoC) has a strong history of coordinating stakeholders to create systemic change in the homeless service system resulting in cutting the chronically homeless population in half. We have worked to reach functional zero for our homeless veteran population. We have been working to make systemic change in addressing homelessness among youth since 2016 through the Homeless Youth Committee of the Louisville CoC.
Boston, Massachusetts: $4.92 million
System success will mean moving Boston from a city where multiple programs individually serve Youth and Young Adults (YYA) at-risk of and experiencing homelessness, to a city with a coordinated, resourced, and data-informed system with common vision and goals.
NW Minnesota (Rural): $1.41 million
Given the significant system changes involved and the specific challenges associated with the rural nature of our region and desire to assure the participation and respect the sovereignty of three Tribes, our CoC is proud that we have achieved utilization of a single prioritization list and participation of nearly all homeless dedicated beds.
Nebraska (Rural): $3.28 million
The mission of the Connected Youth Initiative (CYI) youth development model is to bring young people together with service providers, funders and decision-makers to create supportive communities committed to improving outcomes for youth ages 14-24 with foster care, juvenile justice or homelessness experiences. It is designed to build strong collaborations and infrastructure necessary for community ownership of youth well-being and the realization of improved youth outcomes.
Northern New Mexico (Rural): $3.37 million
Although New Mexico is not a wealthy state, many local communities and pueblos have demonstrated a philosophical, political, and financial commitment to confronting social inequities, particularly as they affect underserved populations and children. Youth Services and Family Services and its collaborators are proposing to extend this commitment, via methodologies established and modeled to a web of communities in our 14-county region, and we’re poised to join a national effort of likeminded individuals, groups, and municipalities to end youth homelessness.
Columbus, Ohio: $6.07 million
The Youth Action Board (YAB) and Youth Committee vision is for all youth to have a safe place to call home. Successful achievement of this vision in our community means all youth will have immediate and easy access to the support they need to prevent homelessness or, if needed, will have immediate and easy access to crisis housing and services to ensure that homeless episodes are rare, brief, and one-time.
Nashville, Tennessee: $3.54 million
The creation of the Key Action Plan has represented a clear shift in our community, where the problem of youth homelessness is more broadly recognized and embraced beyond a small number of Youth and Young Adult (YYA) providers. With the direct support of over 20 diverse stakeholders – including a wide range of community-based organizations, systems, and Young Adult (YA) – engaged in the Key planning process, Nashville’s CoC has increasingly tested new strategies and methodologies as we work to expand our continuum of housing options for YYA in Nashville and build momentum toward ending youth homelessness.
Vermont (Rural): $2 million
The Youth Homelessness Prevention Plan Committee (YHPPC) has engaged youth and youth providers in planning; conducted a youth baseline needs assessment; and incorporated youth perspectives into the CoC’s Coordinated Entry policies and procedures.
The Youth Homeless Prevention Plan Committee (YHPPC) will collaborate with the Vermont Balance of State CoC to define system-level success based on the framework of preventing homelessness, and for those youth that do become homeless, ensuring homelessness is rare, brief and one-time. The Youth Action Board and YHPPC will collaboratively define system-level targets, as well as quarterly and annual benchmarks to ensure stable housing, social and emotional well-being and permanent connections.
Washington (Rural): $4.63 million
Washington State has one of the strongest commitments to addressing youth homelessness in the nation. Strategic efforts underway include: preventing youth from exiting public systems of care (such as child welfare and juvenile justice) into homelessness, developing a crisis response system for families and youth in conflict, and closing educational equity gaps for homeless students.
This award funding will be used as an opportunity to help build youth programming infrastructure in the rural counties. The CoC also plans to create a less burdensome, quicker, and more flexible experience for youth facing homelessness as measured by participant interviews and develop new data sharing and service delivery partnerships with youth providers, funders, local and state government organizations, legislators and other stakeholders.
Snohomish, Washington: $2.39 million
Snohomish County Human Services Department (HSD) will build on successful innovative practices that have transformed the Everett/Snohomish County Continuum of Care homeless response system, to further transform the homeless youth response under the Youth Homeless Demonstration Program.
Resources
The following resources provide more information about YHDP and the FY 2017 awards.