Session: Voices of Youth Count: Results from a National Youth Homelessness Research and Policy Initiative (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Youth homelessness is an urgent, costly and significant social problem with no simple solutions. Moving toward solutions must begin not only with data on the number and characteristics of youth who experience homelessness but also an understanding of the needs and experiences of heterogenous population---including those of over-represented subpopulations (e.g., LGBTQ youth, system-involved youth, and pregnant or parenting youth)---and the capacity of service providers to address their needs. To gain a clearer picture both the scope and nature of youth homelessness in the U.S., Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago undertook Voices of Youth Count (VoYC), a national, multi-component research and policy initiative focused on runaway, homeless and unstably housed youth. The purpose of the initiative is to accelerate progress toward preventing and ending youth homelessness by filling critical knowledge gaps, informing the development of federal, state, and local policy, improving service provision, and building a foundation for future research.

VoYC partnered with 22 counties across the U.S. The counties were selected using a stratified random sampling approach that was designed to ensure geographic diversity as well as variation in urbanicity and homeless youth services infrastructure. Together with its county partners, VoYC has engaged in a variety of research activities including a count of homeless and unstably housed youth, surveys of youth, providers and Continuum of Care (CoCs), and in-depth youth interviews. Other VoYC research components include a national survey of adults, an analysis of existing data, a policy and fiscal analysis, and a systematic evidence review.

This symposium will include four papers. Each paper will present findings from a different VoYC component and discuss their implications for policy and practice. The first paper will focus on the results of a brief youth survey that was administered to youth in each of the 22 counties in conjunction with point-in-time counts to collect information about the demographic characteristics and experiences of this population. The second will present the results of a survey administered to service providers in each of the 22 counties to gather information about the services available to homeless and unstably housed youth and identify gaps in service provision. The third focuses on the results of in-depth interviews conducted with homeless and unstably housed youth in five of the 22 counties to explore their housing trajectories and factors that shaped those trajectories. The final paper presents the results of a national survey that were used to generate national prevalence estimates of homelessness and couch surfing among 13 to 25-year-olds.

The four papers are complementary to one another in that each addresses policy and practice relevant questions that the others cannot. Taken together, they provide a more comprehensive picture of youth homelessness in the U.S. than any individual study could provide.