Statement of the National Network for Youth on the Youth Component of the Federal Strategic Plan to End Homelessness

February 10, 2010

The National Network for Youth, founded in 1975, is a national nonprofit membership and advocacy organization that provides education, networking, training, materials and policy work with federal, state, and local lawmakers. The mission of the National Network for Youth (NN4Y) is to champion the needs of runaway, homeless, and other disconnected youth through advocacy, innovation and member services. Additional information may be found at www.nn4youth.org.

The National Network for Youth associates itself with the position of national homeless advocacy organizations that the federal strategic plan to prevent end homelessness (FSP) must detail the national strategy to prevent and end homelessness for all Americans who are or will be experiencing a lack of permanent housing or a threatened inability to maintain it. We were pleased to join a group communication to the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) in December 2009 articulating a set of principles and a proposed structure for the FSP. We remain faithful to this joint request and urge ICH to vigorously seize its FSP mandate and place the nation on a final and lasting journey to permanent housing, health care, livable incomes, education, and civil rights for all Americans, including Americans at risk of homelessness.

The National Network for Youth is pleased that ICH has established a process for assuring that the FSP acknowledges and respond to the unique needs of unaccompanied homeless youth with homeless youth-specific prevention and elimination strategies additional to universal approaches beneficial to all homeless Americans. Such an approach to homelessness is consistent with our own. 

In 2007, the National Network for Youth launched a long-term campaign to prevent and end runaway and homeless situations among youth. A Place to Call Home: The National Network for Youth’s Permanency Plan for Unaccompanied Youth seeks to build the conditions, structures, and supports to ensure permanency for unaccompanied youth, where permanency is understood to include a lasting connection to loving families, caring adults, and supportive peers; a safe place to live; and the youth’s possession of skills and resources necessary for a life of physical and mental wellness, continuous asset-building, dignity, and joy. The Place to Call Home Campaign involves activities in four work areas:  public policy advancement and system change; practice improvement and professional development; public awareness and stakeholder education; and research and knowledge development.  The Place to Call Home Campaign offers a blueprint for preventing and ending youth homelessness.  We urge ICH to follow our design when developing the youth-specific components of the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.  We intend to measure the FSP against our own plan to judge the federal plan’s integrity and soundness.

The public policy elements of our Place to Call Home Campaign are embodied in the Place to Call Home Act (HR 3409 of the 110^th Congress), comprehensive legislation introduced in 2007, to prevent, respond to, and end runaway and homeless situations among youth. This act offered ultimate solutions to the causal factors of unaccompanied situations among youth and included provisions in the homeless assistance, housing, child welfare, juvenile justice, public health, education, workforce investment, teen parenting, and immigration areas.

We very briefly summarize key provisions of the Place to Call Home Act and Place to Call Home Campaign, with the hope that the FSP youth workgroup will incorporate them into the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.

Prevention of Youth Homelessness

• Increase public investments in evidence-based and promising child abuse prevention and treatment, family preservation, family support, parental substance abuse treatment, and parental mental illness treatment interventions in order to strengthen family ability to care for and support their youth and keep them from separating from the family.
• Adopt policies and practices to assure youth access to foster care and adoption assistance in order to assure that adolescents and young adults may receive protection by the state when families are unable to care for their children.
• Assure that child welfare, juvenile justice, and behavioral health authorities ensure appropriate permanent housing and supportive services for youth exiting their custodial systems.
• Expand age of eligibility and increase public investments in foster care independence and youth reentry programs to assure youth housing and support services for youth exiting custody.

Interventions for Homeless Youth

• Increase capacity (including through increased appropriations to the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act) of the national network of runaway and homeless youth providers to assist runaway, homeless, and street youth in returning safely to families or to transitioning successfully to independent adulthood.
• Ensure access to HUD homeless assistance by changing the HUD definition of homelessness to include all homeless living arrangements experienced by youth and by removing disincentives to use of HUD homeless assistance funds for emergency shelter, transitional housing, and supportive services.
• Ensure access to secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities by removing barriers to enrollment and attendance and providing targeted supports to prevent dropout and promote educational completion.
•  Ensure access to workforce development and employment opportunities by removing barriers to enrollment in workforce programs and facilitating homeless youth access to subsidized, transitional, and permanent jobs.
• Ensure access to health care services by removing barriers to enrollment in public health insurance programs and facilitating access to health care safety net projects.
• Attend to the housing and services needs of distinct homeless youth subpopulations, including pregnant and parenting youth, LGBTQ youth, immigrant youth, and trafficked youth, through cultural competence training of providers, specialized housing, and removal of impediments to publicly-funded housing and supportive service programs.
• Eliminate runaway youth contact with the juvenile justice system by eliminating exceptions to federal deinstitutionalization requirements and promoting and financing alternatives to detention.
• Assure youth access to publicly-funded permanent housing assistance through “fair share” provisions in housing assistance programs for all Americans and through specialized youth permanent housing initiatives.

National Capacity-Building

• Increase awareness of the magnitude of homelessness in America, including youth homelessness – and the nation’s determination to end homelessness – through a White House Conference, Congressional hearings, public service announcements, and other educational formats.
• Assure that homeless youth are included in nationwide estimates of the incidence and prevalence of homelessness in America, either through inclusionary data collection or through specialized youth estimates.
• Confirm and publicize evidence of the benefit of providing opportunities and supports to homeless youth compared to the cost of inaction.
• Support a national system and 21^st century methods for assisting youth and families in crisis in identifying available resources and services.
• Organize and deliver a system of organization and professional development support for homeless youth-serving organizations and youth workers.

For further information on the National Network for Youth’s position on the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness, please contact Vicki Wagner, President and CEO at 206.382.4949 or vwagner@nn4youth.org or Bob Reeg, Public Policy Director, at 202.265.7271 or breeg@nn4youth.org.