Grant Details

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. The demonstration has seven primary objectives:

• Prevent and End Youth Homelessness. Provide funding, regulatory flexibility, and technical assistance to help communities develop housing and services for youth experiencing homelessness and make youth homelessness rare and, if it occurs, brief and non-recurring.
• 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. Recipients should 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. Awarded communities will promote equity throughout their youth homeless response system and all YHDP projects will measure and demonstrate equitable delivery and outcomes. This includes identifying barriers that led to any disparities in subpopulations being served and taking steps to eliminate these barriers in the community's youth homeless response system.
• 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 coordinated operational planning;
• 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 Technical Assistance (TA) provider 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.