Coordinated Community Responses to Ending Youth Homelessness (Convening 2)

This month's meeting explored two pressing questions and began to outline a coordinated research project that could help us shaping our housing resources to improve outcomes for youth.  For more information on Coordinated Responses to Ending Youth Homelessness, click here.  

Q: What is your community’s current or planned relationship between youth coordinated entry systems (CES) and other coordinated entry systems (ie. family, single adults, etc.)

A: Hollywood, CA has their coordinator for the single adult system attend coordinated care meetings for their youth CES, and a youth rep will attend the coordinated care meetings for their single adult CES meetings. They have found this helpful in that youth are able to access longer term adult housing resources that are generally allocated through the adult system.  Additionally, scoring from the Next Step Tool (TAY VI-SPDAT) is being accepted by the adult system so youth don’t have to be reassessed to access those services.  New Rapid Rehousing dollars (23 spots) are being subcontracted to TAY providers as well.

A: Sacramento, CA is using the adult VI-SPDAT on youth currently and planning to go back and assess those youth using the Next Step Tool (NST) to see the comparison. There was interest in understanding how youth scores were different across these tools.  Sacramento said they are willing to share the results with the CELC.  Hollywood thinks they may have some youth that were scored on both assessments as well and will pull that data.

A: Connecticut is currently figuring out how to have the NST integrated into HMIS and produce a combined priority list that also includes other assessments (ie. VI-SPDAT for adults).  They wonder what some of the data challenges they will need to consider as they are building their system.  Hollywood (actually the CoC- LAHSA) has integrated the NST into their HMIS system and their pilot has been working to make sure that the system is generating accurate scores (comparing the paper score to the HMIS generated score).  They are able to generate a client priority list through HMIS but have added some fields to their template that must be entered manually.  They are willing to share their priority list template that is a work in progress and are also interested in what others are developing as well.

A: DC shifted from using the VI-SPDAT to the Next Step Tool for youth.  They noted their youth system and their family system are disjointed, particularly for youth-headed families.  King County is currently discussing whether to use the NST or the family VI-SPDAT for youth-headed families – no decision yet, but providers are leaning toward the Next Step Tool.  Connecticut is leaning toward the family VI-SPDAT for them to easily access specific services and thought it  would be ideal to have a TAY & Family assessment combined.

A: St. Louis, MO is just starting assessment for families and has not began assessing youth yet.

Q: Is anyone assessing vulnerability of youth under the age of 18?

A: Hollywood can, (age 16-24) but to date they have only assessed a couple 17 year olds.  DC is but they have not had to prioritize (or turnaway) based on the assessment scores.  Colorado Springs is but they are just collecting the data at this point.  St. Louis, MO is just using the VI-SPDAT but anticipates using the NST moving forward – they have used it to priorities youth in the adult system because they have a law that allows 16 & 17 year olds to be eligible for adult services.  Sacramento, CA and King County, WA are not assessing youth under age of 18.

A: King County, WA noted they were worried about assessment being required for shelter/crisis beds. HUD is looking to clarify this – shelters should be part of coordinated entry efforts but that doesn’t require prioritization to access shelter.

A: King County, WA is in the very early stage is piloting a diversion project targeting youth new to shelters or drop-in centers – they are VERY early in the iteration process now.  

We also reviewed the big questions related to assessment that communities are facing (identified in the January meeting) and identified 4 questions that we could begin to answer through data:

• Correlation between vulnerability score, housing and outcomes to inform the housing types that will best meet the needs of YYA (shaping housing resources)
• Are we effectively identifying need & vulnerability?
• Can the vulnerability score inform the matching process
• Are their domains that can be used to identify vulnerability and also guide service provision?

Communities were intrigued to explore how they could aggregate data locally to strengthen their approach to ending youth homelessness, and also aggregate this data to inform practices and priorities nationally. There was interest from all communities to look further into designing a collaborative research project and we identified next steps in creating an evaluation plan.