Challenges and Pilots in Youth Homelessness

A national network of funders supporting strategic, innovative, and effective solutions to homelessness

Challenges and Pilots in Youth Homelessness

Youth homelessness has a range of challenges and pilots that are catalyzing communities to collaborate across systems, as well as with young people experiencing homelessness. Learn more about each of these initiatives and what communities have been involved.

Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP)

HUD, its federal partners, and youth with lived experience of homelessness designed the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) to drastically reduce the number of youth experiencing homelessness, including unaccompanied, pregnant and parenting youth. Over three years, 44 communities have received funding and support to develop, implement, evaluate, and continuously improve a coordinated community response to prevent and end youth homelessness.

100-Day Challenges

100-Day Challenges are an onramp to the A Way Home America movement to prevent and end homelessness among youth and young adults in the United States. Rapid Results Institute has partnered with the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development and HomeBase to launch 100-Day Challenges with communities across the country. So far, 35 communities, mapped below, have accepted the 100-Day Challenge to prevent and end youth homelessness.

Grand Challenge

Over a two-year period, the A Way Home America Grand Challenge will help ten (10) communities in the United States end homelessness for LGBTQ+ youth and youth of color, setting the path to ending homelessness for all youth. The Grand Challenge is a problem-solving initiative grounded in several critical approaches: youth collaboration, LGBTQ+ and racial equity, and quality improvement. The Grand Challenge builds on strategies which have already resulted in significant reductions in veteran and chronic homelessness throughout the United States.

Other Youth Homelessness Initiatives

The AWHA Youth Homelessness Initiatives interactive map aims to provide a comprehensive view of the innovative work being done to #EndYouthHomelessness across the country using a coordinated community approach. This map specifically highlights organizations, initiatives, and coalitions either advancing a coordinated community response to youth and young adult homelessness, bringing multiple agencies, programs, or systems together to solve the problem, or which are advancing new and innovative solutions. For more the complete list in your community, check out the interactive map.

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We joined Funders Together because we believe in the power of philanthropy to play a major role in ending homelessness, and we know we have much to learn from funders across the country.

-Christine Marge, Director of Housing and Financial Stability at United Way of Greater Los Angeles

I am thankful for the local partnerships here in the Pacific Northwest that we’ve been able to create and nurture thanks to the work of Funders Together. Having so many of the right players at the table makes our conversations – and all of our efforts – all the richer and more effective.

-David Wertheimer, Deputy Director at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

-President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union Address

Funders Together has given me a platform to engage the other funders in my community. Our local funding community has improved greatly to support housing first models and align of resources towards ending homelessness.

-Leslie Strnisha, Vice President at Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland

Our family foundation convenes local funders and key community stakeholders around strategies to end homelessness in Houston. Funders Together members have been invaluable mentors to us in this effort, traveling to our community to share their expertise and examples of best practices from around the nation.

-Nancy Frees Fountain, Managing Director at The Frees Foundation