Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program in the US

Deadline: 28-Jun-22

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is soliciting applications for the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) to develop and execute a coordinated community approach to preventing and ending youth homelessness.

The goal of the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) is to support selected communities in the development and implementation of a coordinated community approach to preventing and ending youth homelessness and sharing that experience with and mobilizing communities around the country toward the same end. The population to be served by this demonstration program is youth experiencing homelessness, including unaccompanied and pregnant or parenting youth.

Objectives

The demonstration has seven primary objectives:

Build national momentum. Motivate state and local homelessness stakeholders and youth services providers, including Runaway and Homeless Youth providers across the country to prevent and end youth homelessness by forming new partnerships, addressing system barriers, conducting needs assessments, testing promising strategies, and evaluating their outcomes;
Promote equity in the delivery and outcomes of homeless assistance. Executive Order 13985 calls on agencies to advance equity through identifying and addressing barriers to equal opportunity that communities may face due to government policies and programs. Similarly, HUD expects YHDP recipients to promote equity throughout the community’s youth homeless response system for youth who are disproportionally more likely to experience homelessness, such as Black, Indigenous, Hispanic (non-white), and LGBTQ youth.
Highlight the importance of youth leadership. Demonstrate effective models of strong leadership and agency by youth with lived experience in the community. Create replicable best practices of youth leadership for other communities.
Evaluate the coordinated community approach. Evaluate coordinated community approaches to preventing and ending youth homelessness, including local and state partnerships across sectors and other planning operations;
Expand capacity. Expand community capacity to serve youth experiencing homelessness (particularly by using a Housing First approach), pilot new models of assistance, and determine what array of interventions is necessary to serve the target population in their community;
Evaluate performance measures. Evaluate the use of performance measurement strategies designed to better measure youth outcomes and the connection between youth program outcomes and youth performance measures on overall system performance for the Continuum of Care (CoC); and
Establish a framework for Federal program and TA collaboration. Determine the most effective way for Federal resources to interact within a state or local system to support a coordinated community approach to preventing and ending youth homelessness.