From May 13th through the 15th, Foundations for Youth Success members gathered in Boston, MA for the first in-person convening. This convening included site visits to YouthHarbors and Roca a presentation from Stephen Gaetz and a peer exchange with The Simmons Foundation.
The highlights - what did people say?
"I loved this meeting. The site visits/discussions were great. The location was great and the food was amazing!"
"I really appreciated Stephen Gaetz and the 30,000 foot view. It is interesting to see how another country came up with a shared set of values and goals and then constructed a plan."
"This convening had the right balance of formal and informal time to learn and network and really get to know each other. For the first FYS convening, this was really important."
"I'll be bringing this information back to [our local funders]!"
"More of these, please!"
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Welcome at the MIT Endicott House in Dedham, MA, where the decor wants to make eye contact and the food is delicious!
Youth homelessness systems mapping and data walk
Suggested read: Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Site Visit 1: YouthHarbors
Operating in local high schools, YouthHarbors works with unaccompanied, homeless young people who are not accessing services through the homelessness or child welfare systems.
For more information, contact Danielle Ferrier, Executive Director, at [email protected].
Site Vist 2: Roca
Roca’s mission is to disrupt the cycle of incarceration and poverty by helping young people transform their lives. One of the major issues they see in working with gang-involved youth is housing instability.
For more information, contact Molly Baldwin, Executive Director, at [email protected].
Debrief: What can funders do?
Key takeaways:
- Strong leadership is important. Both programs have intense, passionate leaders. Can programs survive without?
- Pay for outcomes, not models
- Good models are intensive and expensive and flexible (in terms of serving the evolving needs of their clients)
- Staff interactions with young people transcend "the model" so how can we better support the training of individuals and prevent burn out?
- Capture data everywhere!!
- Be risky -- push on existing boundaries and test success along the way. Don't be afraid of short-term failures because that's how your community gets closer to the answer.
Some questions still circling in the group:
- What happens to young people once they are through the program (e.g. graduate high school)?
- Scale? What will it take to scale these models?
- How can we work with the schools from the beginning to prevent the need for a crisis response? Does that mean programs should be in the schools?
- What are the incentives for programs focused on prevention to even join the systems change table? What is our role as funders in bringing them to the table?
- Is there a "best" housing model? Or are there a variety of options that might work for different young people in different situations?
- Advocacy - promote the cost savings!
Suggestion for FYS:
- Take elements/themes of successful programs and start listing them in one place. Even if these are not considered "best practices" yet, there's still value in identifying the trends.
- Think about the outcomes we want to fund
- We need to be willing to take risks. What does it look like to encourage risk-taking around youth homelessness funding?
- Have conversations with federal partners about how we can help them play in the margins, test "risky" programs, etc.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Presentation and Discussion: Stephen Gaetz, Professor and Director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
We will have a recording of Stephen's presentation shortly. Check back on this page soon!
Notes from Stephen's presentation
Stephen discussed an assessment tool developed through The Geelong Project in Australia to identify young people with high risk factors early on. This tool is used in schools across the country. Canada is now adapting this tool via The Upstream Project. Resources on both initiatives are included below:
The Geelong Project Prospectus
The Geelong Project Executive Summary
The Geelong Project Full Report
The Geelong Project Outcomes Measurement Plan
Peer Exchange: The Simmons Foundation
The Simmons Foundation shared some of the things going on in real time in Houston, TX and got feedback from the group. A few key questions came out of this discussion:
What is the role of the funding in supporting effective collaborations locally? Should they support the development of governing structure for the collaborative and/or support the building relationships?
How do we, as funders, build the capacity for collaboration in the community? Do we know how to effectively collaborate? Are we modeling effective collaboration for our grantees?
How can we, as funders, improve the outward facing messaging to the community that we are going through a planning process around youth homelessness and that we welcome their input? Are we even effectively communicating that youth homelessness is an issue in our community? How can we get more buy-in from the early stages of our process so that we are ready to move when it comes time for implementation?
Notes from Meeting
See a summary of the meeting's evaluations.
Did we miss anything? Add your comments below.