Purpose & Goals

The Youth Action, A Way Home, Alameda County’s Coordinated Community Plan to prevent and end youth homelessness, identified that youth and young adults need flexible, youth-driven assistance and support and more time and options while navigating housing insecurities and homelessness. Supports in the homeless response system are often not as understanding of and familiar with the unique needs of transition age youth. Young people need support by peer navigators who understand and whom they can trust in order to access and effectively utilize supportive services necessary to obtain and maintain housing. In addition, the traditional 2-year timeframe of Transitional Housing (TH) and Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) programs do not typically provide enough time for a young person to be ready to maintain their own permanent housing, especially given the local housing market.

Alameda County Housing & Homelessness Youth Services are designed to meet young people where they are in their housing journey and support them in increasing their income and building the necessary skills and supports to obtain and maintain permanent housing, as well as to address youth homelessness in Alameda County with the maximum amount of flexibility and time to provide them with supported housing and services to prepare them to successfully maintain permanent housing independently.. By providing individualized, youth-specific supports to improve wellbeing and help to build a stable foundation from which young people can focus on reaching their housing, education, employment, wellness, and other personal goals. Together, Youth Services is intended to increase our systems capacity to provide youth-specific services for transition-age youth who do not have many other options that feel safe, approachable, and accessible to them. It is critical for young people experiencing homelessness to have access to safe and stable housing they are satisfied with in conjunction with needed services to transition out of survival mode and towards healthy and sustainable independence.

Philosophy & Principles

Alameda County Housing & Homelessness Youth Services utilizes a person-centered, Housing First approach across all programs in which resources and services are tailored to the unique needs of each young person. Young people work in collaboration with their peer navigator or case manger to reach their individual goals and work towards obtaining and maintaining permanent housing. All programs are also grounded in the practices of trauma-informed care, Positive Youth Development, and harm reduction. Additionally, all programs are expected to adhere to the following principles derived from the Housing First for Youth model^[1]:

• A right to housing with no preconditions. Programs cannot require participants to be sober, abstinent, employed, in school, in treatment for any condition, or enrolled on services as a condition of being enrolled in a program or housed. Further, services and the offer of support are tied to the young people, whether or not they are currently housed (e.g., the program may not exit a young person because they got evicted). Young people enrolled in a program are not required to accept services or other offers of support.
• Youth choice, youth voice, and self-determination. Young people are experts in their own experiences, needs, and lives. Young people in the program have full control over their lives, including when they may make choices that service providers would not choose for them. The service provider’s job is to meet each young person where they are, work with them to reduce harm when possible, and support them in learning through the process of making choices and experiencing the positive and negative consequences of those choices. Note that this implementation of youth choice does not mean that anyone can and should do whatever they want whenever they want. Rather, providers should help set boundaries and help young people understand the boundaries of choice when considering consequences they do and do not want to face. Further, each young person’s ideas, opinions, and knowledge should be respected and be a leading contributor to program implementation and policy.
• Positive Youth Development & wellness orientation. Programming and supports are oriented around young people’s assets, strengths, dreams, and hopes. Programming supports young people in building self-esteem, a positive sense of self, buy-in for working toward and achieving their own goals, and access to supports and opportunities that will allow them to pursue their personal interests and dreams. Further, the program embeds trauma-informed practices that recognize intersectionality, increase safety, decrease harm, and prevent re-traumatization.
• Individualized & youth-driven supports. Programs are expected to understand and respect that, once housed, each young person will want, need, and choose to participate in a unique type and level of support or services. The program promotes active engagement from peer navigators or case managers without coercing young people to accept that engagement or other services offered.
• Social inclusion & community integration. The housing offered to youth through Youth Services programs should never stigmatize or isolate youth, nor should it force them to participate in a community they are not choosing for themselves (e.g., in a site-based setting). Service providers should consider how to offer individualized opportunities for social, cultural, and spiritual engagement, and staff should be equipped to explore if, when, and with which boundaries participants may want to connect or reconnect with natural supports and biological and/or chosen family in their lives.