Session: Responding to Youth Homelessness: Integrated Knowledge Development to Inform Policy and Services (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

The causes and correlates of youth homelessness are multifaceted, calling for increased research into service needs to inform policy and program responses for this diverse and vulnerable population. Researchers and policymakers note the challenge of developing services tailored to the range of characteristics of homeless youth. Multiple problems – including trauma, health, and behavioral health issues – contribute to homelessness. While homeless youth are at greatest risk among the vulnerable homeless population, they remain underserved. There is a need to build knowledge of youth homelessness, addressing service needs for responsive policies and programs.

While the social work knowledge and skill base equips the profession to ensure healthy development for all youth, our ability to respond to the intersection of problems is key to achieving several of social work’s grand challenges. The Grand Challenge to End Homelessness is inter-related with the challenge to Ensure Healthy Development for All Youth. The proposed symposium presenters are partnered within a National Homelessness Social Work Initiative that includes and transcends current categories (youth development, health, family violence, social isolation, economic inequality, etc.) to strengthen knowledge development, curricular content, and innovation exchanges supporting homeless service leaders and creating student leadership paths.

A youth homelessness research agenda is key to ensuring a knowledge base that addresses both grand challenges. For example, the Affordable Care Act creates opportunities to meet demands for youth-oriented homelessness programs. Social workers can serve as local design leaders in new community-based care systems that include behavioral health, community health workers, family-centered teams, and peer supports – yet they require evidence to inform their approaches. The proposed symposium brings together five studies addressing these two interconnected challenges.

Social workers’ abilities to respond to intersections of grand challenges lead to new conceptual frameworks synthesizing data and facilitating research on holistic interventions addressing complex issues. A person-in-environment perspective prepares social work researchers to achieve this level of integration – resulting in multifaceted policy, program, and practice solutions to ultimately end youth homelessness.

The proposed symposium highlights multi-layered issues of homeless youth, emphasizing policy/service implications and novel approaches. The studies range from service distinctions based on risk and resilience characteristics, to food insecurity severity, to invisible populations in colleges, to provider perspectives and policy/service implications of youth mobility, and alternative program research. Results point to the need for youth-focused services and articulate clear next steps in research. As a whole, the proposed symposium facilitates participants’ exchange of ideas across grand challenges.

Paper 1 explores trauma history, mental distress, and resilience, delineating service sub-groups based on risk and resilience factors.

Paper 2 describes severity of food insecurity among homeless youth and calls for food access along with housing and other social service needs.

Paper 3 highlights invisible populations of youth experiencing homelessness and food insecurity on college campuses, proposing better understanding and supports for this group.

Paper 4 addresses provider perspectives on youth mobility, identifying the need for policy advocacy, collaboration, and alternative programming.

Paper 5 investigates photovoice as an innovative methodology to engage and empower homeless youth.