A National Approach to Meeting the Needs of LGBTQ Homeless Youth
This two-page fact sheet provides an overview of the prevalence and experience of LGBTQ youth, causal factors, and risks to LGBTQ youth while homeless. It also highlights a reform agenda to end homelessness for LGBTQ youth and makes best practices recommendations for youth-serving professionals, case workers, and advocates, for administrators and supervisors, and for residential services.
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Fact Checker: Youth Homelessness
Youth homelessness is disturbingly common. Although the prevalence of youth homelessness is difficult to measure, researchers estimate that about 5 to 7.7 percent of youth experience homelessness each year.
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FY2010 RHYA Appropriations
This issue brief provides a recommendation for funding the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act (RHYA) programs and explains why such funding levels are necessary to adequately address the problem of youth homelessness.
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Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act: FAQs
This report by the National Foster Care Coalition is entitled "Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act: Frequently Asked Questions on the Provisions Designed to Impact Youth and Young Adults." It reviews numerous common questions, including those around the extension of foster care to age 21, which was included in the Act.
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Homeless Youth Letter to Obama Administration
The National Alliance to End Homelessness joined nearly 200 other organizations in sending a letter to the Obama Administration requesting its support in ending youth homelessness. The letter makes numerous recommendations about how to achieve that goal.
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Homeless Youth Research Bibliography
This document is a review of research focused on unaccompanied homeless youth.
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Housing for Homeless Youth
When runaways and homeless youth cannot be reunited with their families, the creation of housing models that also address the service needs of youth is one solution to ending youth homelessness. The goal of this brief is to outline a spectrum of youth housing models that connect affordable housing, self-sufficiency services, and positive youth development approaches. This brief examines youth housing combined with positive youth development services and highlights four housing models and programs that demonstrate promise in housing for older adolescents and young adults.
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Incidence and Vulnerability of LGBTQ Homeless Youth
This report highlights the incidence of homelessness among LGBTQ youth and the vulnerability of LGBTQ youth to becoming homeless. As compared to their heterosexual peers, LGBTQ youth face a greater risk of exploitation. This brief explores pathways into homelessness for LGBTQ youth and ways to end homelessness for this group. It also includes a chart on the systems components for addressing homelessness among all youth, including LGBTQ youth.
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Juvenile Justice: Legislative History and Current Legislative Issues
Juvenile justice in the United States has predominantly been the province of the states and their localities. The first juvenile court in America was founded in 1899 in Cook County, Illinois, and, by 1925, all but two states had established juvenile court systems. The mission of these early juvenile courts was to rehabilitate young delinquents instead of just punishing them for their crimes; in practice, this led to marked procedural and substantive differences between the adult and juvenile court
systems in the states, including a focus on the offenders and not the offenses, and rehabilitation instead of punishment.
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Missing and Exploited Children: Background, Policies, and Issues
Beginning in the late 1970s, highly-publicized cases of children abducted,
sexually abused, and often murdered prompted policymakers and child advocates to declare a missing children problem. At that time, about one and a half million children were reported missing annually. A more recent count, in 1999, estimated that approximately 1.3 million children went missing from their caretakers that year due to a family or non-family abduction, running away or being forced to leave home, becoming lost or injured, or for benign reasons, such as a miscommunication about schedules. About half of all missing children ran away or were forced to leave home, and nearly all missing children were returned to their homes. The number of children who are sexually exploited — defined broadly to include a continuum of abuse, from child pornography to commercial sexual exploitation — is unknown. Verified incidents of child sexual exploitation that were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) from 1998 to 2006 exceeded 180,000.
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National Recommended Best Practices for Serving LGBT Homeless Youth
This policy brief by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Lambda Legal, the National Network for Youth, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights provides a brief overview of homelessness among LBGT youth. It makes recommendations about improving practice, improving organizational culture, and improving residential services.
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New Funding for Homeless Youth Services and Housing
This brief includes information on new funding benefiting homeless youth in ARRA, HPRP actions steps for local organizations serving homeless youth, ideas and model programs on re-housing and prevention for homeless youth, establishing a framework for youth homelessness prevention and re-housing, and other federal appropriations benefiting homeless youth.
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Vulnerable Youth: Background and Policies
The majority of young people in the United States grow up healthy and safe in their communities. Most of those of school age live with parents who provide for their well-being, and they attend schools that prepare them for advanced education or vocational training, and ultimately, self-sufficiency. Many youth also receive assistance from their families during the transition to adulthood. During this period, young adults cycle between attending school, living independently, and staying with their families. On average, parents give their children an estimated $38,000, or about $2,200 a year, while they are between the ages of 18 and 34 to supplement wages, pay for college tuition, and assist with down payments on a house, among other types of financial help. Even with this assistance, the current move from adolescence to adulthood has become longer and increasingly complex.
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Fundemental Issues to Prevent and End Youth Homelessness
This issue brief reviews the key issues surrounding youth homelessness, including causes and characteristics of homeless youth. It also contains an introductory explanation of the youth housing continuum, a development model for stable and supportive housing for young adults and policy implications regarding youth homelessness. The brief also features the Ten Essentials Your Community Needs to Prevent and End Youth Homelessness, designed by the National Partnership to End Youth Homelessness.
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Ten Essentials to Ending Youth Homelessness
This toolkit provides a brief overview of the ten essentials strategies for ending youth homelessness in your community.
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Runaway and Homeless Youth: Demographics, Programs, and Emerging Issues
There is no single definition of the term “runaway youth” or “homeless youth.” However, both groups of youth share the risk of not having adequate shelter and other provisions, and may engage in harmful behaviors while away from a permanent home. The precise number of homeless and runaway youth is unknown due to their residential mobility and overlap among the populations. Determining the number of these youth is further complicated by the lack of a standardized methodology for counting the population and inconsistent definitions of what it means to be homeless or a runaway. Estimates of the homeless youth population range from 52,000 to over one million. Estimates of runaway youth — including “thrownaway” youth — are between 1 million and 1.7 million.
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