Youth Today News

Janell Braxton spent much of the early 2000s in foster care. She moved between more than eight homes before the age of 21. After she exited foster care, Janell felt she wasn’t set up to take care of herself – she wasn’t taught to build a budget, pay her rent or apply for an apartment – and after a particularly traumatic experience she found herself staying on couches with friends and family.

In the third of a three-part series on how public funds are being used to address youth homelessness in Washington state, Janell and her mother Debra tell their stories.

Janell told journalists Sam Leeds and Elizabeth Whitman, “If my story can help anyone, just even one person, then that’s all that matters to me.”

By 17, Pip was cycling in and out of Kitsap County’s juvenile court. He avoided going home to a “volatile” living situation. He struggled at work.

Then a court-appointed therapist referred him to a program called H-SYNC, Housing Stability for Youth in Courts. H-SYNC has been life-changing, Pip said.

Nearly a quarter of young people who exit the Washington state justice system are homeless a year later. Young people leaving foster care or inpatient behavioral health become homeless at high rates as well. Five years ago, Washington enacted a law aimed at preventing this phenomenon.

In the second of a three-part series, journalists Sam Leeds and Elizabeth Whitman explain how H-SYNC was designed to identify and help youth at risk of homelessness — and how it could serve as a model for other states.

When Daniel Lugo was preparing to transition out of foster care around his 21st birthday, he looked for help figuring out how to cover his rent and other expenses once state payments stopped. Eventually, he reached a dead end.

Later, as a legislative aide in Washington's House of Representatives, that experience inspired him to propose a "no-wrong-door access point" for young people in similar situations, like exiting foster care, the juvenile justice system, or in-patient behavior health treatment.

In the first of a three-part series, journalists Sam Leeds and Elizabeth Whitman trace Lugo's idea through the legislative process and into reality.

When schools closed and the states locked down against COVID-19 in March 2020, employees at organizations serving homeless youth felt a wave of panic. How would they aid students trying to attend remote school from inside a car? Or reach kids quarantining in crowded homes where money for food and rent already was stretched thin?

As COVID-19 upended their usual protocols, some nonprofits saw the tally of homeless youth they served plummet. But for other organizations across the country, the pandemic spurred innovations in how they find and serve a population whose needs were amplified and, in some ways, made more acute because of COVID-19.

A number of service providers adopted online and telephone-based options for young people to apply for housing, attend support groups and connect with case managers, mental health counselors and doctors. Other groups went in the opposite direction, delivering food and other supplies directly to youth and their families wherever they were sheltered, including in cars and motel rooms. Several organizations around the country also began experimenting with giving cash directly to young people, allowing them to determine how best to meet their own needs.

For this episode of the Youth Today News podcast, we focus on two providers in one city that responded to the pandemic in very different ways, saw the benefits of doing something new and were forever changed by it.