Youth homelessness in the U.S. has been steadily increasing for the past decade, but we can reverse that trend — and end it. To do that, we need to use what we know about young people’s paths into and out of homelessness. That’s why, as we mark Youth Homelessness Awareness Month, Covenant House and Chapin Hall are launching a transformative partnership — Insight to Impact (i2i) — to radically change the trajectory of youth experiencing homelessness by combining frontline access with research infrastructure to prevent youth homelessness at scale.
Chapin Hall’s landmark Voices of Youth Count research showed that 4.2 million children, teens, and young adults — 1 in 10 youth ages 18 to 25 and 1 in 30 adolescents 13 to 17 — face a period of homelessness each year in the U.S. At Covenant House, many residents share that their first experience of homelessness came even before their 13th birthday. This is above and beyond young people experiencing homelessness with their families.
Young people don’t choose homelessness. It happens through a mix of family conflict, poverty, unstable housing, lack of affordable housing and systems transitions like aging out of foster care. The risk isn’t evenly distributed: Black and Indigenous youth and LGBTQ+ youth are dramatically overrepresented, and rural rates look a lot like urban ones, which means this isn’t just an urban issue.
Teens and young adults experience homelessness differently than older adults.
They don’t control the conditions in their homes, families or communities. Too often, they are choosing between personal safety and homelessness. The implications of housing instability for youth are long-lasting, as they are more likely to face repeated housing instability, both as a teen and into adulthood. But they also have hopes, dreams and ambitions that motivate them to achieve much more than their current circumstances.
Youth homelessness is preventable — if we are armed with a strategy built on the right information. The alternative is intolerable: If we do nothing, the number of homeless children, teens and young adults will more than triple across the U.S. by 2035. Together, we can change this.
Courtesy of Bill Bedrossian
Bill Bedrossian
Covenant House brings unparalleled access to tens of thousands of young people across 34 sites federation-wide. Chapin Hall brings four decades of leadership in youth homelessness research and policy. Together, we will partner directly with youth and alumni to answer the questions that matter most: What conditions lead to youth homelessness? Which interventions work best? And how do we shorten the time young people spend without stable housing?
[Related: Never too young to be an advocate]
Past studies have shown that youth homelessness disrupts school and work, worsens mental and physical health and exposes young people to elevated risks of victimization and exploitation. Covenant House research reveals that about one in five Covenant House youth in the U.S. are survivors of trafficking. The longer an episode lasts, the more those risks stack up. The studies also document that system involvement without adequate housing support pushes youth into repeated, longer episodes.
In other words, if we don’t act early, we’re allowing brief cases of youth homelessness to harden into patterns that are more difficult and costlier to unwind, and we’re cementing the very disparities we seek to eliminate. We are also creating consequences and costs for the broader community.
Covenant House’s 50-plus years of experience in direct care for youth facing homelessness bears out the Chapin Hall studies’ findings and has led Covenant House to build a new strategy that deepens its direct service intervention and expands it to include an intentional and systematic prevention pathway and a restoration pathway.
But to truly and effectively prevent and minimize the impact of youth homelessness,
we need to know more, so that we can do more.
Courtesy of Bryan Samuels
Bryan Samuels
To achieve this, we created i2i to build on each organization’s strengths. One of the biggest values of the partnership is turning frontline practice into a continuous engine for prevention and scaling what works at a pace and scope neither organization can achieve on its own.
[Related: Adoption still matters for older youth]
Covenant House is on the ground across dozens of communities, trusted by youth and operates 24/7 at the points where decisions get made: on the street, at the front door, in shelter, in the days before a system exit. Chapin Hall brings research infrastructure: rigorous evaluation, data integration, policy translation/analysis and a track record of turning evidence into playbooks that public and nonprofit systems can use successfully. We will intentionally bring our findings to the public and the field through youth-led briefs, policy briefs and other publications that can help shape policy for youth experiencing homelessness. A key priority of this work is identifying the protective factors that support young people experiencing homelessness and mapping clear pathways to holistic support.
The partnership, with the youth at its center and the support of everyone who believes no young person should experience homelessness, will drive the research, innovation and practice necessary to build prevention and exit ramps that can not only halt the yearslong growth of the youth homelessness crisis, but also reverse it.
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Bill Bedrossian is the president and CEO of Covenant House International. Bryan Samuels is the executive director of Chapin Hall.
