In February, Casey Trupin from Raikes Foundation and Daisy Vazquez from Porticus, both members of Funders Together, attended the first-ever Prevention of Youth Homelessness International Conference and describe key takeaways for U.S. philanthropy in this blog post.

By Daisy Vazquez, Porticus; Casey Trupin, Raikes Foundation; and Michael Durham, Funders Together to End Homelessness

Co-hosted by A Way Home Canada (the model for A Way Home America) and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, the first-ever Prevention of Youth Homelessness International Conference reflected the culmination of Canada’s Making the Shift campaign, a comprehensive initiative that aims to divert the field’s focus from crisis response to prevention. The majority of the nearly 600 attendees who gathered in Toronto in February represented Canadian programs, advocacy, and research, and were joined by representatives from across the globe, including promising work in Wales and Australia, for example. US colleagues contributed as well with remarks from former U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) director Jeff Olivet and presentations by Point Source Youth and Covenant House. 

• Check out the conference program here

One main takeaway was simply that this event even happened. This conference signifies that the emergent focus on youth homelessness prevention is a global movement and that other countries can demonstrate genuine progress. Dr. Steve Gaetz, Scientific Director for the Making the Shift campaign, said that he was expecting that this conference would serve the purpose of persuading attendees that prevention is necessary. Instead, he found that few needed convincing. They were ready to share what they’d learned and build a cohesive international movement.

Major Themes from International Partners

Despite varying definitions of prevention, the focus of programs described throughout the conference pertained to interventions in particular sites, namely schools, families, and state care.

For example, The Geelong Project in Australia (known as Upstream in North America and the UK), has demonstrated profound success by deploying a universal screening tool in schools and matching children who are at risk of losing their housing with appropriate support services. 

We were especially intrigued with the Family and Natural Supports (FNS) initiatives presented in a range of sessions. Recognizing that a majority of young people who have been homeless cite family conflict and/or abuse as the reason they left home, FNS includes a range of services that promote healing and restoration within families, such as therapy and mediation, but also financial support for parents/guardians. Success does not exclusively entail staying with families when abuse and conflict cannot be resolved but embraces a broader understanding of kinship to ensure young people remain connected in loving homes, including chosen family.

While several sessions pertained to interventions in particular institutions, like carceral settings or child welfare facilities, there appeared to be universal recognition that the overall intention of prevention is to stop children and youth from interacting with any of these systems at all. The further you go upstream, the more that prevention interventions in different sectors merge with one another. Economic stability and community integration prevent not just homelessness but also school dropouts, incarceration, etc.

Comparisons to the U.S. Movement

No doubt our Canadian colleagues are far ahead in their nationwide efforts to shift from crisis response alone. The proliferation of programs like Upstream and FNS, in addition to the vast body of research on the subject, attests to this. Reflecting on the U.S. movement, we noted how our thinking is so enculturated into crisis response that we struggle to imagine working outside of our current systems. Some partners suggested a “prevention” intervention in shelters, which would, by definition, only reach young people who are already precariously housed. Comprehensive prevention would obviate shelters altogether.

Casey Trupin of the Raikes Foundation presents at the Prevention of Youth Homelessness International Conference

It is worth noting that the Upstream Project does exist in the United States, but it remains just a handful of time-limited pilots, each of which struggles for sustainable funding and keeping non-homelessness-system partners at the table. And any screening tool that identifies risk factors relies on the availability of appropriate services, namely housing, to succeed. All the same, initiatives like Upstream are not rocket science. They just seem ambitious because they hardly exist here in the States.

That said, the U.S. leads the way in using flexible financial assistance to prevent homelessness. While the Toronto conference did include some financial assistance interventions, the American movement for cash and universal basic income is a model for others.

Opportunities for U.S. Philanthropy

Prevention of homelessness, especially for young people but not exclusively, represents rare common ground between the stereotypical left and right in U.S. politics. For example, as Amanda Andere, CEO of Funders Together once said, when we’re talking about abolitionist policies, we’re mostly talking about prevention. Abolitionist strategy attends to the root causes of harm such that punitive responses are revealed to be obsolete. But this speaks to conservative values as well. It is a far more efficient use of resources to prevent homelessness in the first place and keep young people from interacting with public systems than to wait until they’ve experienced profound trauma. Moreover, while the work of ending youth homelessness often implies a focus on unaccompanied young people (who are disconnected from their families of origin), prevention necessarily requires engagement with parents and families, biological or otherwise. Prevention promotes kinship and familial connection, what some might call family values.

While other nations may lead the way specific to youth, prevention of homelessness across populations is gaining traction stateside, as evidenced by California Policy Lab’s Homelessness Prevention Conference that took place the same week. It behooves us to connect this emerging focus with our youth-specific movement.

We can do this by leveraging philanthropy’s influence to ensure prevention gets the spotlight in our sector’s various homelessness conferences. We can incentivize our national youth homelessness partners to focus more on prevention through our grantmaking. And since the Making the Shift campaign in Canada is sunsetting, with no plans for another international prevention conference, perhaps we can use our convening power to host the next one. We must keep up the momentum.

Recommendations for Philanthropy

• As homelessness response systems in the U.S. increasingly include homelessness prevention, ensure that prevention interventions are tailored to meet the needs of specific populations such as youth and young adults.
• Effective prevention of youth/young adult homelessness requires collaboration between different sectors (e.g., education, youth workforce programs, family services, housing). Philanthropy can incentivize this by supporting cross-sector collaborations and funding innovative cross-sector pilots that are focused on youth homelessness prevention.
• Broaden the application of successful models (e.g., Upstream Project and Family and Natural Supports) to other related systems that touch youth and young adults. For example, identify other youth systems (such as juvenile-legal, youth workforce programs, community colleges) that could implement key elements of these models to identify and support youth at risk of homelessness.

Additional Resources

• Funders Together webinar on Upstream Project (April 2024) (member login required)
• Funders Together Blog: Upstream Enough? Reflections on the Canada-US Funders Forum on Prevention of Youth Homelessness (November 2022) 
• Resources from Canada’s Making the Shift Campaign
• Resources from the International Conference
• A New Direction: A Framework for Homelessness Prevention | Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
• Building a Homelessness Prevention System: A Toolkit for Launching, Operating, and Managing an Evidence-Based Program | Results for America