Serving Youth in an Economic Downturn

Inside Part I: Youth Homelessness in Today’s Tough Economy Youth Homelessness in Today’s Tough Economy Can’t Be Complacent In His Words: A Youth Speaks Out about His Homeless Experience The Habits of Highly Successful Outreach Programs Three Rules for Working With Unaccompanied Youth Part II: Overrepresented Groups Among Homeless Youth Coming in From the Shadows: Overrepresented Groups Among Homeless Youth Serving Overrepresented Groups of Homeless Youth Down for the Count: Getting the Numbers on Youth Homelessness How Many Homeless Youth Are There in My Community? Resources for Identifying and Working With the Spectrum of Homeless Youth

Serving Overrepresented Groups of Homeless Youth

Youth-serving professionals and researchers who work with runaway and homeless youth agree that knowing something about the culture and reality of young people is helpful to getting youth off the streets, into programs that can help them and into stable housing.

But runaway and homeless youth are a notoriously difficult population to track, and research to date has painted an incomplete picture of who they are.

Data from FYSB’s Runaway and Homeless Youth Management Information System, or RHYMIS, which tracks young people who seek help from basic centers and transitional living programs, as well as studies on homelessness among specific groups of youth, provide some information about which young people are most likely to need help. African American, Native American, pregnant and parenting, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are among the young people most frequently overrepresented in shelters and transitional living programs aimed at adolescents, says LaKesha Pope, a youth policy and program analyst at Washington-based National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Because of the growing body of research that says these groups are overrepresented, community- and faith-based programs that work with runaway and homeless youth are increasingly expected—by funders, communities, and local government leaders, among others—to demonstrate their ability to meet the needs of these groups in a culturally competent manner.

Local Variations

But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every youth-serving organization. The make-up of the runaway and homeless youth population—and their willingness to seek services—varies greatly from region to region and city to city. For instance, while African American youth make up about one-third of clients of all FYSB-funded basic centers and transitional living programs (they count for a little more than a tenth of the U.S. adolescent population), Pope says, “In places like Detroit, the transitional living program entries are almost closer to 98 percent.”

“Is it cultural? Are black kids more comfortable accessing services? It’s not necessarily that Detroit doesn’t have any white homeless youth. It may be that they feel less comfortable accessing the shelters.”

The opposite is true in places like Seattle, she says, where most youth in shelters are white.

Referrals from Other Youth-Serving Systems Boosting RHY Numbers >>