CA Homeless Youth Project Blog

Welcoming LGBTQ Homeless Youth Into Supportive Programs

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the National Alliance to End Homelessness’s conference on ending homelessness in Washington DC. I left this conference with so many innovative strategies that we at the HYP feel it is necessary to communicate them. This will be the first in a series featuring themes we heard at the conference about serving homeless youth. The workshop,“Welcoming, Inclusive, and Affirming Practices for LGBTQ Youth”; lead by Ozella Barnes from Teen Living Programs (Chicago, IL) and Aimee Armata from Larkin Street (San Francisco, CA), was aimed toward helping service providers create a welcoming and inclusive environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth.

Lessons Learned:

LGBTQ youth have unique needs that service providers should be aware of and sensitive to. When welcoming LGBTQ youth it is important to first make sure that staff is well equipped and culturally competent. Barnes recommended that organizations formulate guiding philosophies that everyone can agree with.  One of the guiding philosophies at Teen Living Programs is the minimum requirement for staff to be clinically trained. Barnes discussed how important it is for staff members to be clinically trained to ensure that there is competency in serving the high needs that youth have. To promote a unified philosophy, Aimee Armata recommended that organizations develop a mission statement that everyone can take to heart and can stand behind. Larkin Street’s mission statement (below)is a good example of this philosophy.

The mission of Larkin Street Youth Services is to create a continuum of services that inspires youth to move beyond the street. We will nurture potential, promote dignity, and support bold steps by all.

Guiding philosophies are important because they allow the entire organization to be on the same page as far as how they interact with youth and each other. Both Barnes and Armata stressed the importance of communication to ensure that there is accountability and an atmosphere of acceptance and success. Barnes described, “The right hand always needs to know what the left hand is doing.”

Barnes and Armata spoke about specific guiding philosophies that foster an atmosphere for welcoming LGBTQ youth. Ms. Barnes spoke about her organization’s continual promotion of non-violence. She emphasized that non-violence should be used in everything from language to body movements. This ensures a safe environment for youth and staff. In the same instance, Barnes discussed how services should always use inclusive language and enforce policies of non-harassment. This is important because it discourages a discriminatory environment.

When working with LGBTQ youth, Armata emphasized the importance of knowing the specific LGBTQ competent services in your area. She provided the workshop with two websites where providers can learn more about serving this population: http://www.glma.org/ and  http://www.wpath.org/.

To help youth develop an accepting environment, they recommended retreats to bring solidarity and a sense of community to the young people that they serve. Both providers strongly recommended that youth should be placed in the shelter facility where they feel most comfortable, which is usually in accordance with their gender identity.

Armata left on a strong note with the statement in her presentation, “cultural humility starts with YOU.” She believes that it is important for service providers to acknowledge their own perception of gender and orientation and how it will affect the language, behavior, and advocacy one can do with their organization. She encouraged providers to use gender neutral language and address youth by their name and pronoun of choice; while at the same time encouraging him or her to dress however they feel most comfortable regardless of their biological sex.

The practices that these women developed were supported by years of experience and an intense passion towards the youth they served. Being in a room and actually seeing with my own eyes the number of people who are invested in fostering inclusive spaces for LGBTQ youth brought a smile to my face.

For more information regarding LGBTQ homeless youth read our issue brief: Struggling to Survive: LGBTQ Homeless Youth in the Streets of California.

Jimmy

Come Together, Right Now. Over Youth.

In our 2008 report, Voices from the Street: A Survey of Homeless Youth by Their Peers, the number one recommendation we heard from youth was to undo the criminalization of homelessness, which they saw as exacerbating their housing instability. So it struck me when today, our Twitter timeline was filled with tweets that linked to the recent article by USA Today,  “Cities’ homeless crackdown: Could it be compassion fatigue?” The article highlights the recent trend in implementing legislation that strengthens anti-camping, anti-feeding, and anti-panhandling laws. This trend is happening in cities across the United States and is currently “pitting city officials against homeless advocates”.

City Officials feel that these bans help ensure dignity and promote access to other types of services for the homeless. For example, feeding programs that occur indoors can act as starting points for people experiencing homelessness to begin to explore other services that can help them.

However, advocates for the homeless argue that these types of bans are counterproductive and in fact, perpetuate homelessness, dramatically affecting the well being of youth living on the streets. In one of our videos, the young man says “What do you want me to do? You’re [Police Officers] telling me, ‘don’t sleep in the park, don’t sleep in the street.’ What do you want me to do? You can’t just magically not be homeless.” (:30) These laws penalize homeless youth on the streets and often foster a hostile relationship between youth and police officers. The implementation of these bans leads to tickets and fines, giving homeless youth criminal records and making it harder for them to get jobs.

City officials and homeless advocates are both right. It is imperative for us to provide services and dignity to homeless people, especially youth. Services can range from educational programs to transitional housing, allowing youth to learn how to become independent and self-sufficient. It is equally important for our society to consider alternatives to the criminalization of homelessness. Fortunately, the US Interagency Council on Homelessness released a report on alternatives to criminalizing homelessness. You can find it here. Once legislators, homeless advocates, and community members come together, then we can move in the direction of finding an end to homelessness.

Jimmy

Cash for Kids week in LA

During the week of March 25-31st three restaurants and one high fashion boutique partnered together by participating in the first annual Los Angeles Youth Network’s (LAYN) Cash for Kids week. The idea of this event was: the cash used to pay fees at the joining businesses were redirected and donated to LAYN. LAYN provides a variety of needs and services to homeless and runaway youth ages 12-21. The funds that were raised went toward LAYN being able to continue to provide services such as: emergency shelter, hot meals, street outreach, case management, daily hygiene and family reunification. Here at CA Homeless Youth Project we strive to make sure that services and resources such as LAYN remain available for youth faced with homelessness. This is a good example of how non-profits can partner with local businesses to increase funding in lean times and better support homeless youth in our state. For more information about LAYN, visit their website at: www.LAYN.org

New shelter for LGBT homeless youth in Chicago

March marked the opening of a new homeless shelter in Chicago, Il. Vida/SIDA opened the doors of El Rescate on March 3rd. El Rescate is a homeless shelter aimed at providing services for LGBT and HIV + youth, ages 18-24. El Rescate was designed to be a transitional housing facility and an independent living program. Please click on the link below to read more.

http://chicago.gopride.com/news/article.cfm/articleid/27736564/special-report-rescuing-chicagos-homeless-lgbt-youth

Kathryn

Ending Youth Homelessness — Themes from the NAEH Conference

I would first like to start off by thanking the Alliance for explicitly including youth in this year’s conference on ending homelessness. For those of us who work day in and out on behalf of this issue, it was great to be with others to share our knowledge, experience, and passion for this work.

There were a few themes over the course of the conference regarding youth homelessness, with the first being the need for more timely and consistent data on this population. Not only was there a workshop on this topic, but also, Nan Roman gave considerable time to the issue in her plenary speech on the first day of the conference. She stated that even though the current data on the size and scope of youth homelessness is severely lacking (and I whole-heartedly agree), moving forward with the data we’ve got is absolutely critical. To that end, she presented data from the NISMART-II in a new way, stating that about 96% of runaways under the age of 18 return home within one week (although many cycle in and out of homelessness). Policy Analyst Samantha Batko was the brains behind this operation, manipulating the data in a way that hasn’t been done before by identifying characteristics about the trajectory of youth homelessness in the hopes to shed new light on where interventions should be targeted. This information indicates that supporting crisis interventions to help facilitate the process of returning home is essential. While in the case of the 400,000 who are unable or unwilling to return home for various reasons such as abuse or parental incarceration, utilizing housing strategies such as transitional living or permanent supportive housing would be most useful. While many of us wonder how the NISMART data holds up today, we hope that there are still valuable lessons to be learned that can be applied and implemented immediately.

The second theme was the need for a variety of different housing strategies for homeless youth and young adults to get them into stable living conditions. There was a particular emphasis on Rapid Re-Housing, a model that has been successful for other segments of the homeless population. More on that in a moment.

The third theme was that the population of homeless youth is heterogeneous. This was repeated time and again by various presenters, almost as if it had been coordinated, although I’m sure it was not. The workshop on creating a blueprint to end youth homelessness focused largely on creating a new typology that recognizes these differences, subtly urging the audience to consider the unique needs of each youth in determining interventions. This typology identified three groups: the temporarily disconnected (this population generally retums home on their own), the unstably connected (for which family reunification may be most helpful), and the chronically disconnected (best served by permanent supportive housing or transitional housing). As Paul Toro pointed out, early typologies (such as street youth, throwaway youth, and systems youth) were crude. They were not mutually exclusive and the definitions often varied depending on who was asked. Eric Rice discussed a new promising practice called Project Strive, and highlighted the ways in which cell phones and other media can be used to reach out to a range of youth, that are more well-connected than many of us previously thought.

I look forward to seeing how these ideas continue to evolve both in policy and in practice.