Fighting Youth Homelessness

The city of DC and local organization continue their efforts to fight Youth Homelessness.

WASHINGTON— As DC continues to have the highest rate of homelessness in the nation, efforts are being made to target youth homelessness, with the goal of breaking the cycle of homelessness at an earlier age. District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser and the city of DC have set the goal of ending homeless by year 2022. There are currently 271 young people experiencing homelessness and one year away from the proposed deadline and there is still a long way to go.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, data surrounding youth homelessness, which is defined as those between the ages 18 and 24, did not start to be recorded until quite recently in 2015. Since then, in 2017 Mayor Muriel Bowser launched the Solid Foundations DC: Comprehensive Plan to End Youth Homelessness that propose to end youth homelessness by 2022.

The plan outlines key steps to ending youth homelessness that include understanding and defining youth homelessness, identifying causes, and creating key strategies to combating the issue. Among these strategies, the city of DC has partnered with local shelters and organizations to provided youth centered programs and services.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI), an organization that works to promote racial equity and economic opportunity in the District of Columbia through research and publication, has identified economic instability as a key factor in causing homelessness in youth ages and other subgroups of homelessness a like in the DC area.

“People become homeless for all kinds of reasons, primarily in the District because of economic reasons and primarily it’s an affordable housing problem,” said Kate Coventry the senior Policy Analyst on Homelessness at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, in an interview. “People can’t afford rent. Rent is going up. Wages are not going up. it’s hard to get out of because housing is very expensive and when people remain homeless for a long time, whatever conditions they may have get worse, substance abuse, mental health, and it’s just really difficult to deal with those things if you’re not in housing”

Not only is insufficient income and a lack of affordable housing a cause of homelessness but it is also what makes it so difficult to break out of the cycle, Coventry explained. This puts those who experience youth homelessness at an added disadvantage due to their age.

Antwan Gillis, the assistant director of the Welcome Center Services Division of Friendship Place in an interview echoed the difficulties that the youth homeless community face when trying to exit homelessness.

“Of course, it’s … more difficult when you’re a transitional age youth,” said Gillis. “Some [homeless young people] are still under guardianship of parents or caretakers who may be experiencing homelessness or just due to a bad relationship at the house, it makes it more difficult for them to get benefits and things of their own when they have somebody else responsible for them.”

Friendship Place, a housing shelter that includes a drop-in center, medical clinic, and helps with job placements, is part of the city of DC contracted program created to build programs and services directed towards young homeless individuals. The shelter has two programs centered around providing services towards youth experiencing homeless along with helping all ages and veterans. The first, Youth Connect, caters to those ages 18 to 24 in a mobile street outreach program that allows for the organization to directly reach those effected and bridge them the resources they need.

“The biggest focus is taking a person-centered approach and letting folks get in the driver’s seat of their own lives and helping them to achieve the goals that they need and that they want to reach in order to help rebuild their lives,” Gillis said.

Their second youth program, Before 30, targets those ages 25 to 29 who although are not in the age bracket of what is defined as youth homelessness, need targeted help that differ from the senior homeless community. Before 30 provides life skill building courses, mentoring opportunities, and assistance in finding stable housing that help these individuals transition as they are aging out of the government aid minors benefit from.

“People between [25 to 30] can easily not receive services at all due to some of the systematic things that happen when you turn 25,” he said. “Our program is just a way to try to prevent some of those young people in that age range from falling between the cracks,” said Gillis.

Not only do young people require different services but there is need to provide a safe space as they are in a vulnerable stage explained Janeth Peña the Executive Director and CEO at DC Doors in an interview. DC Doors is a shelter that provides services like supportive housing programs for adults and transitional housing support, education, and job training to youth ages 18 to 24.

“They realize that the youth system is much friendlier than the adult system,” Peña said. “So, if for some reason, one of our young persons is unable to touch the youth system, for whatever reason, when they go to the adult side, they’re able to see the difference between the adult side and the youth side, when it comes to like resources, when it comes to case management, when it comes to just having a friendly environment.”

This difference in environment, as Peña explains, can be attributed to the fact that many older people in the community have been in the cycle of homelessness for many years, whereas younger people are still new to their situations and learning how and where to find help.

Although age is the signifier for youth homelessness, there is an underlying issue of race that shows some demographics are unequally affected. DC Doors has seen first-hand how the African American community is disproportionally affected by youth homelessness.

“The majority of youth that comes to the drop-in center are African American, I would say about 85%,” said Peña. “Then the remaining 15% is half white, half Latino.”

Among the young people she works with, Peña says, there are several reasons young people fall into homelessness. But some of the most common are mental-health issues, lack of family support, aging out of foster care and, in the case of the Latino community, undocumented status.

Despite the different circumstances that each race experiences more commonly, there is one commonality that all youth homeless people experience.

“One of the things that they all share in common is that someone that’s an adult figure is unable to understand [the young person] where they’re at or where they’re coming from,” Peña said. “If we, as adults exhibited or try to even figure out what the individual needed and how to support that individual, I would believe that we would have less of a homeless crisis in the youth sector.”

Targeting a younger demographic in the cycle of homelessness has become a preventative strategy for combating homelessness as a greater issue Peña further explained. As the overall number of youth homeless people are not the largest number of those experiencing homelessness making a group more easily targeted.

“One of the great things about being able to help someone at a younger age is to be able to break those cycles of poverty so that it doesn’t become cyclical,” Peña said. “So that homelessness is not, my mother was homeless now I’m homeless and now my child will be homeless,” said Peña, “It’s helping someone and really giving them the support at a younger age, as opposed to waiting until they’re much older. It allows you to really curb the homelessness factor and be able to do a lot of great things to have productive citizens in the future.”

The fight to end homelessness is not a one-solution problem, according to experts, including Yorri Berry, director of Youth Partnerships at the National Network for Youth. There must be a balance between outreach work and policy work to help those experiencing homelessness break the cycle as well as prevent future youth from entering the system. Among those interviewed, some other key players working towards fighting youth homelessness are Covenant House, Sasha Bruce, and DC Action.

“Part of the disconnect in advocacy or legislation, is because [youth homelessness] doesn’t look the same as homelessness in those 40, 50, 60-year-olds that have been in the cycles of homelessness for longer,” said Berry in an interview. “For young people it looks different, they are often not in the streets and if they are in the streets, they dress the same as other young people so it’s not as obvious, its less visible and so the response must be very different.”

In the same statistics provided by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, numbers of youth homeless in DC have gone down since the 2015 starting point. Though progress has been made, it has not decreased enough to reach the original goal of ending youth homelessness by 2022 and changes will need to be made to accomplish it.

“I believe that youth homelessness is still not a priority in the way other things are a priority and that is not ok. If something is not a priority or spoken about then you don’t get the funding or attention at the level it should be,” Berry said. “It is starting to become a topic that is on some people’s radars and I am hopeful it will shift, the general population doesn’t have an awareness, they don’t know to join in and try to fix and solve the problem. If we made it a focus, then I believe we would fix it.”

The National Network for Youth is nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and ending youth homelessness in America. They work with communities across the nation to educate and advocate for those young people who are experiencing homelessness.

One facet of the organization includes the National Youth Advisory Council, which is made up of young leaders who had experienced and survived youth homelessness. The council, as explained Berry, was created to allow those with lived experience to be part of the conversation and connect them with law makers and service providers at local, state and in some cases national levels to advocate for their community.

“Often, those who are working on solutions are not the people experiencing it or receiving those solutions which is a problem,” said Berry. “They deserve a spot at the table, to have a voice and to speak on their experiences.”

Listen to Janethe Peña, Executive Director and CEO of DC Doors recall a moment that proved to her the impact the organization has on others: