Homeless Youth Summit - Part Two

If you remember, back on Monday -- before Virginia Tech and my trip to Salem -- I was relaying my comments at a Homeless Youth Summit here in Portland on the 13th. Let’s pick up where we left off …

Having answered the first of two questions (see last Monday’s entry), I moved on to the second: What is one action the current system can undertake to contribute to ending youth homelessness? The question specifically asks about the current system in Portland, but my answer, I believe, is applicable to any homeless youth agency or system; I wasn’t specifically singling out Portland services. There were two things that I wanted my answer to carefully avoid, however. First, I wanted to make sure that I was pointing out an action that was either not currently being taken, or not currently being taken with the level of intention that it deserves; and, second, I wanted to steer clear of an Occam’s Fazer-type answer (see yesterday’s entry). Unfortunately, when a question is designed to elicit the one thing that a system can do, we open the door for Occam’s Fazer. So, in order to close that door just a little, I responded that the one thing the system could do is to implement my three point plan. Today I’ll share point one.

Before the panel started answering the questions, the audience was provided with an overview of the system. It was made clear in that overview that the system was not focused on “weekend warriors” or kids just hanging out. The intent of the system is to serve “homeless” youth, and a specific definition was provided. I don’t have the definition in front of me as I write this, so I may be a bit off in my numbers, but part of the definition specified that a young person could not have spent more than 1 night at “home” in the past 30 days. In my national experience, I’ve noticed a similar focus in other agencies.

The first point of my three point plan defined this focus as a mistake. Anyone who has been working with this population for any length of time knows that a young person who is experiencing trauma or separation from family can get acculturated in an extremely short period of time. Less than two weeks of dabbling in the culture of the streets can take a runaway youth, or even a “weekend warrior” (a youth still living at home, but spending much of their time hanging out on the streets) from a youth with a viable option to reunite with family and either destroy that option, or make it much more difficult. If a young person has only spent 1 night at home in the past two days, we should be paying attention to them.

A large part of the burden for this attention falls on street outreach programs. In my opinion, far too often outreach programs are missing this critical element of the services they provide. They often do an excellent job of engaging with the “hardcore” street-dependent youth, and do an admirable job of streetwork providing services geared toward both harm reduction and encouragement to transition off of the streets. What they often don’t do well enough (in my opinion) is act a “first responders”. Who is in a better position to notice the new faces on the streets? Why should we wait until they are entrenched in a street family before they become eligible for our attention? So, the first part of my three point plan is early intervention with youth new to the streets. If we did a better job at that, maybe we could cut down a bit on the numbers of young people we need to serve later.

Tomorrow, point two.