Data to End Youth and Young Adult Homelessness

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Data is a critical component of the Anchor Community Initiative. Our Data & Evaluation Director, Liz, explains what data communities are collecting and how it will help communities end youth and young adult homelessness and achieve equitable outcomes.

Ending youth and young adult homelessness requires accurate data that tells communities how many young people are experiencing homelessness in real-time, who these young people are, and what their needs are. To achieve this, Anchor Communities have established By-Name Lists and monitor monthly data points that reflect the number of unaccompanied youth and young adults entering and exiting their homeless system.

The Anchor Community Initiative draws inspiration from the Built for Zero model by Community Solutions, which has been effective in ending veteran and chronic homelessness in communities around the nation. To follow this model, communities need to look beyond the performance of projects and programs, and towards the performance of the entire homeless system. This means that each month, communities collect three types of data points:

  • Actively homeless: This encompasses ALL unaccompanied youth and young adults experiencing homelessness each month. It includes young people who are unsheltered, sheltered and couch-surfing.
  • Outflow: This is the number of young people who exit the system each month. It includes young people who have been housed, young people who providers have not been able to reach in 90 days, and people who have aged out.
  • Inflow: This is the number of young people who enter the system each month, either because they are new to the system or returning to homelessness.

Young people who experience homelessness are individuals with unique identities. Furthermore, young people of color and LGBTQ+ young people experience homelessness at higher rates than their white, cisgender, heterosexual peers. To reflect our commitment to racial and LGBTQ+ equity, we want our data to show young people’s unique identities and shine a light on disparities. We’re pushing our data work further, and we’ve updated our data infrastructure so communities can now submit race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and age data. Anchor Communities have access to data dashboards showing these data points and other analytics thanks to software provided by the Tableau Foundation.

Demographic data allows Anchor Communities to further interrogate system performance and set goals around equitable outcomes for young people of color and LGBTQ+ young people. For example, in the data dashboard below we see that in this community, at least 11% of the young people experiencing homelessness in December 2019 are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer. However, the sexual orientation of over 60% of young people experiencing homelessness in this community is “unknown.” Being able to see this “unknown” percentage prompts communities and our coaching team to delve deeper into what might be happening on the ground, why these data are missing, and what improvement projects could be implemented to improve data quality.

In order to provide supportive and responsive services and housing for young people, communities must first understand what the needs are. Data provides a foundation for communities to plan and advocate for resources to support young people.

This updated data infrastructure is the first (of many) steps that we will take to achieve more equitable outcomes. The new dashboard allows us to measure improvements and reductions in youth and young adult homelessness as communities are working to make system level changes. Thank you to everyone in the Anchor Communities who works hard to submit monthly data points!

Why We Need a Centralized Diversion Fund

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Update: The House and Senate have both included $500,000 towards the Centralized Diversion Fund in their budgets! Please join us in thanking our elected officials for this investment. Email and tweet your legislators here: https://p2a.co/HVFll02

We know that youth and young adult homelessness has many faces. It can look like the high school student who left grandma’s house to couch-surf after grandma couldn’t afford to feed them anymore. Or like the 18-year-old who no longer feels safe staying with their parents after coming out, and just doesn’t have enough money saved up to make a deposit on an apartment. Or even like the 22-year-old parent about to lose their job and rent money because they can’t afford yet another car repair.

If homelessness can look so many ways, our solutions to homelessness need to be just as varied. It just won’t cut it to give a young person a list of resources and hope that their situation fits into the constraints of the system. That’s why A Way Home Washington is establishing the Centralized Diversion Fund. Communities around the state will have access to the fund to help young people obtain the support they need to stay housed, starting with our four Anchor Communities: Pierce County, Spokane, Walla Walla and Yakima. Supporters in these communities agree that we need flexibility and creative solutions to address each young person’s unique needs.

“The Centralized Diversion Fund would be an incredibly powerful platform for increasing collaboration across all organizations and systems that impact young people’s lives,” said Matthew Davis, Homeless Program Specialist for the City of Spokane and lead of our Spokane Anchor Community team. “It would allow us to more efficiently resolve young people’s homelessness by being more immediately responsive to their specific barriers to housing.”

Presenting this project at a Senate work session hosted by Sen. Kuderer

To establish the Centralized Diversion Fund, we need support from across different sectors. Our generous private funders have committed $500,000 to the project, which will set up the infrastructure and supply an initial pool of funds. To ensure its sustained success and scalability, we are asking the state legislature to include another $500,000 for the Centralized Diversion Fund in the 2020 state budget. Our communities and young people have no time to spare to rely on this needed support.

“Young people experiencing homelessness in our community do not have many options for the supportive housing that many really need to reach their potential,” said Joshua Jackson, Executive Director of Rod’s House and the lead of our Yakima Anchor Community team. “Right now, young people often have to wait until they have been repeatedly traumatized, exploited, abused, etc., often for years, before they can get the housing support they need. The Centralized Diversion Fund will help ensure it NEVER happens in the first place.”

On February 21, supporters from around the state will gather at our state capitol to urge elected officials to include these funds in the 2020 state budget. Every email and tweet counts – contact your elected officials and tell them that communities and young people around the state deserve a fully funded Centralized Diversion Fund!

Congratulations, Pierce and Walla Walla!

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For the past ten months, our four Anchor Communities have had a singular focus: answering yes to all questions on the Youth and Young Adult By-Name List scorecard and reaching quality, real-time data. In February, two of our Anchor Communities reached exciting milestones: Walla Walla became the first Anchor Community to say yes to all 41 required questions in the scorecard, and Pierce became the third community in the nation to reach quality, real-time data for youth and young adults! This means that at any given time, Pierce County knows how many unaccompanied youth and young adults are experiencing homelessness.

To get where they are today, Pierce and Walla Walla made major systemic changes.  Pierce engaged their local child welfare, juvenile justice and education systems, and they worked closely with young people to learn how to make services more accessible.  The community streamlined the process of identifying young people experiencing homelessness and adding them to the By-Name List by embedding members of their ACT team, a youth and young adult outreach team operated by the REACH Center, across all systems. They also co-created focus groups and surveys with young people, allowing them to confirm what aspects of services are working for young people and to implement changes where needed.

In Walla Walla, the community was able to fund their first ever outreach program with the help of the $1 million secured for Anchor Communities in the state budget. Blue Mountain Action Council (BMAC) hired two Navigators, enabling the community to reach full outreach coverage. The team also benefitted from the consistent participation of two young adult team members, Charlene and Carla, who held focus groups to gather young people’s input on outreach strategies and the system. Team members also stepped up to fill gaps in capacity, like Coordinator Samantha Jackle filling the role of HMIS data lead, attending trainings and working with the Department of Commerce to learn the skills needed for the task.

We’re so proud of these teams!

Saying yes to all questions on the scorecard puts infrastructure in place to help communities better understand how their systems are serving all young people, especially those who have been historically marginalized. This information is crucial as communities move towards the goal of ending youth and young adult homelessness by 2022.

After completing the scorecard, Anchor Communities keep submitting monthly data on the number of young people who enter, exit and are actively homeless. Data must be balanced for three months to confirm its reliability. Pierce County has reached this milestone, meaning they’ve reached quality data! This means that their data accurately reflects the number of young people experiencing homelessness in real time.

Without a robust data infrastructure, young people can fall through the cracks, particularly if they were not accessing any services. Since data has a significant impact on the future allotment of funding for social services, this lack of clarity has dire consequences. Quality data allows communities to better understand how funding and resources should be allocated, and to identify disparities in outcomes for young people of color and LGBTQ+ young people. It is a critical component of ending homelessness.

Now that Pierce County has reached quality data, they will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their solutions using dashboards designed by our Data & Evaluation Director, Liz, with visualization software from the Tableau Foundation. Data analytics will tell us if a project leads to a reduction in the number of young people who are experiencing homelessness. When data shows that a project has led to a reduction, it is an indicator that the project was effective and that we are moving in the right direction to reach Yes to Yes.

Our 2020 Legislative Priorities

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Recently, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Nan Roman, shared the three elements she’s observed in communities that have successfully ended homelessness: data, funding, and buy-in from political leadership. Throughout the year, we work hard to make sure communities around the state have all three of these elements. During the legislative session, we are zoned in on securing state funding that goes towards effective solutions and working alongside elected officials who support policies that benefit young people.

Our Advocacy Day in 2019

The 2019 legislative session was full of victories for the movement to end youth and young adult homelessness. The state budget included $8.5 million for the Office of Homeless Youth, which included $4 million for the Anchor Community Initiative. We saw important policy changes, like the end of juvenile detention for status offenses and the requirement that no public system of care discharges young people into homelessness.

In 2020, we return to Olympia to advocate for:

·       The Centralized Diversion Fund (CDF) – Our goal has always been to increase communities’ capacity, so when a young person says “Yes, I need help,” their community can say “Yes, we can help.” The CDF is a flexible fund that organizations around the state can access to help young people stay housed, whether that means helping meet a deposit on an apartment or helping with a car repair to help a young person stay employed and make their rent. To ensure the CDF launches with ample funds to support communities, we will advocate for our legislators to include $500,000 towards the CDF in the state budget.

·       Protecting Commercially Sexually Exploited Children (CSEC) – Young people in the foster care system make up a high percentage of CSEC. We will advocate for the creation of two receiving centers to help CSEC receive treatment and return to their communities, and to keep youth from facing criminal prostitution charges.

·       Family Reunification Services Program – When families receive the support they need before they become involved in systems like child welfare or juvenile justice, we strengthen families and prevent homelessness. We will advocate for increased capacity and expertise in culturally relevant prevention and early intervention services.

·       Behavioral Health Funding – Our 2018 study found that 1,200 young people experienced homelessness within 12 months of exiting inpatient behavioral health treatment that year. We will advocate for funding to ensure that young people exiting treatment have safe housing and follow-up care.

·       Extending Children’s Mental Health Workgroup (CMHWG) – The CMHWG advises the legislature on improving behavioral health services and strategies for children, youth, young adults and their families. The work group has identified barriers and opportunities to ensure these services are accessible, effective, timely, culturally and linguistically relevant and supported by evidence. The group sunsets in 2020; based on its proven efficacy and leadership we will advocate to extend its lifespan.

In addition, we will keep advocating for the necessary budget to successfully implement the policies passed in 2019. We will also support our partners’ legislative priorities, like the Office of Homeless Youth’s request for housing for minors and The Mockingbird Society’s work to help youth and young adults experiencing homelessness access IDs.

We are deeply appreciative of all our supporters who contacted their elected officials in 2019 and urged them to champion the needs of young people. Sign up to our email alerts to stay up to date on all our advocacy actions!

Our 2019 Highlights

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Our Executive Director, Jim Theofelis, has dedicated his life to helping young people, as an advocate, a clinician and a leader in the movement to reform foster care and end youth and young adult homelessness. He reflects on what 2019 meant for A Way Home Washington and the movement to end youth and young adult homelessness.

Throughout the year, the A Way Home Washington staff has been working hard to end youth and young adult homelessness. There are community leaders to meet, data to analyze, communities to coach and press releases to write. As 2019 comes to a close, I took a pause to think about what we’ve accomplished this year. I’m blown away by the dedicated, mission-driven people I am proud to call colleagues and partners. In no particular order, here are my top ten 2019 highlights:

1.       The momentum in the Anchor Communities. A year after we launched the initiative, we hosted update events in each community, and we got to see how much the movement has grown across the state.

From Walla Walla to Yakima, all the community updates were full of energy!

2.       A strong team. Our staff has grown to be nine people strong. I’m humbled to work alongside these bright, passionate and hardworking individuals every day. They keep me sharp!

3.       $8.5 million for the Office of Homeless Youth. We joined the voices of advocates around the state who believe in funding the Office of Homeless Youth. Our advocacy paid off when the state legislature included $8.5 million for OHY in the budget, including $4 million for the Anchor Community Initiative!

4.       The passage of SB 5290. Young people deserve services, not detention. I am in awe of all the courageous young people who advocated to pass this bill, and it was an honor to be in the room when Governor Inslee signed it into law.

We presented an award to The Mockingbird Society for their leadership in advocating for SB 5290

5.       Enhancing our public profile. You may have seen a lot more social media posts, blogs and newsletters from us this year. I’m pleased to see us flexing our communications muscle so that more people can learn about our work. Sign up to our newsletter for monthly updates!

6.       Strong partnerships. The Anchor Community Initiative has rallied communities around a North Star, and efforts like the Host Home Coalition have brought together key players around the state around important issues. I’m proud that we can help bring partners together and lead the charge against youth and young adult homelessness.

7.       Young people’s leadership. I’ve always believed that the perspectives and expertise of young people with lived experience are integral to finding solutions. Young people are part of all our Anchor Community teams because without them, we don’t have a movement.

8.       Funding the Anchor Community Initiative through 2022. Thanks to the generosity of our philanthropic partners, we can sustain the infrastructure of the Anchor Community Initiative through 2022. That means that whenever we receive additional funding from the legislature or donors, we can pour that money right into service in the communities.

9.       Convening our partners. In October we had our annual Anchor Community Initiative convening and State Table. Seeing our partners from around the state in one room, putting our heads together to end youth and young adult homelessness, was a true joy.

Taking a page out of Nonprofit AF and adding a cute animal picture from the picnic!

10.   Picnicking with our furry friends. Even though it was a busy year, it’s important that we find time to rest and recharge our energies. I enjoyed spending a few moments of camaraderie with my colleagues at our summer picnic, and meeting their families of the human and canine varieties!

This work we’re doing, it’ll have a monumental impact on the lives of young people. Sustainable change, the type of change that will last for seven generations, is not easy to achieve. When I think about what it will take to end  youth and young adult homelessness, I think about all the courageous individuals and organizations who have said “Yes” to the work. Thank you for all that you do!

What a Data-Driven Culture Means to Us

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At A Way Home Washington, our core values include equity, youth partnership, trauma-informed practice and a data-driven culture. Our Data and Evaluation Director, Liz, writes about how data informs our work at A Way Home Washington.

“You don’t count unless you’re counted.” It’s a common refrain in the data community, and for me it gets to the root of why we need data to achieve racial and LGBTQ+ equity. Data gives us the information we need to make informed decisions and to evaluate whether our initiatives are yielding equitable outcomes.

Data is the foundation of the Anchor Community Initiative. It all starts with a question that seems simple: “How many young people are experiencing homelessness in your community?” But we hear from our communities that answering this question is much more complex than it seems. It requires developing new processes to collect and analyze data, updating data infrastructure and building partnerships and protocols across all public systems of care. The first stage of the Anchor Community Initiative is about laying down the groundwork to answer this question in real time.

Liz taking her data expertise to the next level at the 2019 Tableau Conference

But the data work doesn’t stop there. It’s not enough to know how many young people are experiencing homelessness. We also need to know their race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity so we can address any disparities in their experiences. Are young people of color experiencing homelessness at higher rates? Are LGBQ young people returning to homelessness at higher rates? Are trans young people spending a longer time experiencing homelessness? Data will help us answer these questions and shine a light on equity issues within our system.

For this work to be effective, we need to ask critical questions of our data. Otherwise, inequities can hide behind the numbers, or a population may be entirely absent from our data set. This was the case at a national data conference I attended last year, where a Continuum of Care presented their data. I noticed that demographic data such as race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity was not included in their data dashboards. When I asked the presenter about it, she said that they had no LGBTQ+ young people showing up in their data. She concluded that the community “didn’t have any LGBTQ+ young people”.

I cannot stress enough that just because a population, or multiple populations, are not showing up in data does not mean that they don’t exist. In our coaching work with Anchor Communities, we are asking constantly asking: Is the data accurate? Is our system counting everyone? Are we collecting data in a respectful and responsive way? The answer to all of these questions needs to be “yes” because the next stage of our work will be using this data to drive towards an equitable end to youth and young adult homelessness.

I’m extremely proud of the work that Anchor Communities are doing to embed a data-driven culture centered on racial and LGBTQ+ equity. Recently, Yakima made the local decision to collect sexual orientation data at youth and young adult Coordinated Entry access points. This change is an excellent example of how starting with data can lead to community-wide culture shifts. Ultimately, these shifts will create safer and more supportive environments for all young people experiencing homelessness, and especially for young people of color and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

What Trauma-Informed Practice Means to Us

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At A Way Home Washington, our core values include equity, youth partnership, a data-driven culture and trauma-informed practice. Our Coaching and Improvement Manager, Ashley, writes about how trauma informs our work at A Way Home Washington.

“When you get housed, staff is constantly hounding you to get a job and make the rent. When I was on the streets I couldn’t break down and fall apart, I had to stay strong every second. Now I’m in housing and feel safe for the first time in years, and I just need to lock myself in my room and feel my feelings. But no, they kick you out for that.”

This is how one young person described their experience in housing programs to me when I worked at The Mockingbird Society. I got to work closely with young people who exited homelessness into housing programs, and I heard stories of young people who were continually kicked out of shelter and housing. One lost their housing for three days after they returned smelling like weed. Another asked for a night away to attend their dad’s wedding, had their request denied and then got kicked out for going anyway. Yet another was asked to leave for being behind on their “productive hours.”

Trauma is ubiquitous and ongoing for young people experiencing homelessness. Young people of color and LGBTQ+ young folks must also survive racism, homophobia and transphobia while experiencing trauma. Feeling unsafe for long periods of time causes people to stay in a state of hypervigilance, or what young people call ‘survival mode’. They need to constantly watch their backs and focus on surviving the next night, so situations that may not feel threatening to a person who has not experienced trauma may lead to bigger reactions than housing program staff expect.

These are extremely difficult experiences, and young people are not healed the second they get housed. They can’t just switch off from survival mode immediately. Yet our programs and services are constructed as if they could. We want young people working, paying rent and being “productive” as soon as possible once they’re housed. We aren’t prepared to respond to young people’s reactions when they’re still living in survival mode. We expect them to live inside, often in group settings, with no peer conflict and with totally new coping mechanisms.

A system designed to serve young people wouldn’t result in so much cycling through programs. The fact that young people are able to navigate these systems that weren’t designed with their needs in mind is a testament to their resilience. In many cases, young people are relying on their own strength to survive and thrive despite of the system, not because of it.   

The Adolescent Health Working Group provider toolkit on trauma is a helpful resource

We need to transform the system and stop treating young people like their trauma will abruptly end the second they’re housed. On the individual level, we need to work with young people in ways that take their traumatic experiences into account, and we need to recognize their trauma responses for what they are. At a societal level, we need to dismantle toxic systems, policies and practices that create environments primed for trauma.

At A Way Home Washington, we are committed to transforming our statewide system in partnership with young people themselves. We need a system that sees each young person as whole, capable, smart and deserving. We want to address the root causes of homelessness and trauma to create a Yes to Yes system with the capacity to support each young person in the way each young person needs to be supported.

Recently, I attended a Learning Session hosted by Community Solutions. During one of the workshops, the facilitator asked participants to list the barriers to housing people may experience. The answers were familiar: No job. Refuses housing. Mental illness. And then, the facilitator asked us to change the way we think about these barriers. Instead of seeing these characteristics as barriers that keep people from being housed, we should think about the barriers our systems put up to keep people with these characteristics from being housed.

The Anchor Community Initiative is working to actively identify the barriers keeping their local systems from being responsive to young people. Communities then address these barriers through coaching and support from experts. If a barrier is too big for a single community to solve, we work in partnership with the Office of Homeless Youth to advocate for policy and funding changes at the state level. Through this approach, we know that we’ll be able to build trauma-informed Yes to Yes systems.

Centering Youth Voice

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Youth partnership is critical to ending youth and young adult homelessness, and it is one of our core values at A Way Home Washington. Sierra Phillips is one of our youth partnership consultants, and she shares how she has seen this work make an impact on youth and young adult engagement.

Adultism training. Being unafraid to fail. A high level of community participation. Funding for diversion programs. Accountability. These are a few of the things our Anchor Communities, Pierce, Walla Walla, Yakima, and Spokane, were proud of during the recent annual convening. And I am proud of working with an organization that consistently incorporates these values into the work we do.

Sierra presenting at the convening

I’ve been working as a consultant with A Way Home Washington for the past 8 months, and I’ve been helping the Anchor Community Initiative team make sure that youth and young adults are centered in activities like the annual convening. In preparation for the event, I was able to sit down with the team that works on the initiative every day, and with members of the local teams like Carla, an amazing young person from Walla Walla. Through this preparation, I gained the contextual knowledge I needed to make sure my recommendations helped the team come closer to their goal of centering young people in all activities.

The annual convening was a lot of fun. On the day of the event, I got the chance to connect with and meet some rad people, including the young people who are part of each community’s team. I learned what each community was doing and how their goals would impact their future work. And because we were intentional about creating a space where young people’s voices are heard, I believe this event helped each community better understand why youth and young adult engagement is so important in this work.  

I am encouraged to see that youth and young adult engagement is central to A Way Home Washington’s work, and that I continue to be consulted for my expertise on this topic. Over the past months, I’ve been called in to assist with interview panels for staff hiring at A Way Home Washington and work planning sessions for the Anchor Community Initiative.

I hope my future includes more of this work. It is because of A Way Home Washington and other similar agencies that I believe I am more than my story. I don’t have to sit on a stage and be paraded around as “the homeless person.” I am strong, I am capable, and I can do whatever I set my mind too. My future hopes and dreams today are much bigger than they previously were. I feel empowered with the knowledge that I do have a voice that matters in this work and I want other young people to feel that way as well.

The Time Is Right for Sustainable Change

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Our Executive Director, Jim Theofelis, has dedicated his life to helping young people, as an advocate, a clinician and a leader in the movement to reform foster care and end youth and young adult homelessness. Previously, Jim shared why the time is right for solutions in Washington and why solutions must lead to systemic and structural change. Today, Jim shares what sustainable change means to him.

When I think about the reasons why I do this work, I think about the 16-year-old experiencing homelessness today. I also think about how this work will help the 5-year-old who doesn’t know that they may be vulnerable to homelessness one day. To me, sustainability means that our work will help young people today, tomorrow and into the future. The systems we help create to serve young people must continue to exist even as time passes, staff changes and organizations change.

I’m inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Seventh Generation value when I think about building a system that will serve young people today and will continue serving young people for years to come. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is made of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca peoples, whose Constitution influenced the very Constitution we follow today. Their Seventh Generation value states that for any decision we make, we must consider the impact it will have today and for generations into the future.   

We need to adopt this same perspective in our work. We need to think about how our decisions will not just impact the lives of young people and families accessing resources today, but seven generations from now as well. This means that we need to be honest and truly ask ourselves whether today’s systems were created to serve all young people and families equitably, and acknowledge the ways in which the LGBTQ+ community and people of color have historically been underserved and at times even harmed by public systems.  We cannot forget this history when we make decisions today so we can do better by all families.

In the past few years, I’ve seen hopeful signs that as a state we’ve started to adopt this forward thinking. I worked on and applaud the creation of the Office of Homeless Youth Prevention and Protection Programs (OHY) to carry this work forward at the state level. OHY will continue to award grants, hold state level relationships and advocate for preventing and ending youth and young adult homelessness far into the future. Together, we have advocated for Anchor Community Initiative funding in the state budget, leading to $4 million dedicated to services in communities around Washington.

Jim presents a Mockingbird Youth Leadership award to Ryan Tobiasson, Spokane Mockingbird Chapter and Anchor Community team member

And nothing gives me more hope for the future than seeing more and more organizations realizing that we need young people’s leadership and involvement if we want to create a system that works for them. When I founded The Mockingbird Society, compensating young people for their expertise and input was a new and innovative idea. Now, instances of tokenism and pizza instead of real compensation grow more and more rare, and genuine partnership with young people is becoming the expectation. Young people’s wisdom and experience is increasingly shaping community plans and programs meant to last generations.

I’ve heard many young people and their families say that they need access to resources and support before even entering any systems. We need to look upstream at solutions like diversion and school support to truly help all young people and families. Well-funded and accessible diversion programs can make the difference between keeping stable housing and facing homelessness for families who need these resources. And as the first point of contact for many youth, schools that have the resources and capacity to support young people experiencing homelessness or housing instability have the potential to quickly connect families to services and resources. These types of interventions can help us strengthen families and prevent homelessness.

We can’t stop doing this work until we can answer the question “Who do our systems serve?” with “Everyone.” And once we achieve this goal, we need to make sure we’re prepared to carry this work forward at all levels. We need to do it for the 16-year-old experiencing homelessness today, for the 5-year-old whose future our decisions will impact, and for the next seven generations. That’s what sustainable change really looks like.

Meet Our Student Stability Manager!

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Working with schools is critical to ending youth and young adult homelessness. Megan Johnson joins the Anchor Community Initiative as the Student Stability Manager to create and implement a schools strategy. Megan tells us why this issue is so important to her, and why we need to work with schools to achieve our mission.

Throughout my career, I’ve always been interested in empowering people. As an addiction counselor, I wanted to empower my clients to take the steps they needed to live the lives they wanted. When I went back to school for a Master’s in Public Administration, I was driven by my belief that effective policy driven by the voices of those who are impacted can empower entire communities.

My graduate program required a Master’s thesis, and at first I thought my thesis would be about equity in the workplace. I wanted to focus on wages, and how they had not kept up with the cost of living in the region over the past thirty years, leading to homelessness, poverty, and a host of other social problems.  That was my plan  up until the very day we had to discuss our thesis topics in class. I remember I was driving to Seattle University and I was sitting at a stoplight on James Street, listening to a story on NPR about students experiencing homelessness in Washington State.

Megan, her dad and her stepmom on her graduation day

The story started talking about Schoolhouse Washington data, and how around our state approximately 40,000 youth ages 12-18 are experiencing homelessness on any given night.  Maybe I was tired after a long day, or maybe the topic just hit close to home, or most likely both, but I started crying.  To me, that statistic was unacceptable. We cannot allow tens of thousands of children and youth to live without a stable place to call home during their formative years. So, on my way to class, I decided to change my thesis topic and focus on student homelessness instead.

As I worked on my thesis, I saw firsthand how deep inequity runs in our systems. Across different school districts, schools around the state vary wildly in their resources to support students experiencing homelessness and in their capacity to apply for grants. These disparities lead to vastly different outcomes for students of color and students in rural communities – Schoolhouse Washington recently reported that six out of ten students experiencing homelessness are students of color, and that students in rural areas experience homelessness at a higher rate.  These appalling statistics propel me. They drive me to devote my work to this issue because students of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, religions and housing circumstances deserve equitable access to education.

To end youth and young adult homelessness, we need to work in partnership with the school system. Many times, school is the only constant place for students experiencing homelessness. We need buy in from all levels, from superintendents to McKinney Vento liaisons. My work will focus on developing strategies to work with all these important stakeholders at every stage of the Anchor Community Initiative. As we continue to work towards quality, real-time data, it is imperative to work with schools to ensure unaccompanied students experiencing homelessness are included in the By-Name List. Once we have quality data and we begin working on reducing homelessness, we need to partner with schools to implement improvement projects that will reduce student homelessness.

I’m excited to be part of a project with a data-driven approach. Student homelessness exists in every community in our state, and data will help everyone in our state understand that. I am optimistic that our state cares for young people, and that the community will rally to improve outcomes for all students. It is up to every person in Washington state to improve outcomes for all youth and young adults.