In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded funds to 10 Continuums of Care (CoCs) in Round One of the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program (YHDP) to enable them to develop and implement coordinated community approaches to preventing and ending youth homelessness. Through the demonstration, the funded CoCs work with youth homeless service organizations, Youth Advisory Boards (YABs), child welfare agencies, and other community partners to create comprehensive community plans to end youth homelessness. HUD has contracted out a four-year evaluation of the 10 CoCs funded in Round One. The evaluation will capture how the demonstration affects the development and implementation of comprehensive systems-level approaches across diverse contexts to addressing youth homelessness. It will examine the role of these approaches in affecting the size and composition of the population of youth experiencing and at risk of homelessness as well as their effects on youth's service and housing outcomes in three ways: 1) a detailed implementation and process evaluation examining how communities developed and implemented their coordinated community approaches to preventing and ending youth homelessness; 2) A qualitative examination of how targeted youth interacted with the YHPD programs, how they were served and to gather their feedback regarding the program; and, 3) a quantitative assessment that measures any changes in the size of the target population in all ten program sites, relative both to the size of the target population prior to the start of the grant program, and in comparison with a set of comparable communities in which the YHDP was not implemented. We expect to publish the final report by summer 2023.

Note: The status of this project is complete.