Prevention Newsletter
Greetings!
And just like that, here we are into another year. I hope you enjoyed time well spent with the loved ones in your lives over the holidays, reflecting on everything you’ve accomplished over the past year and the new beginnings in store for this one.
Speaking of new beginnings, have we got a lot in store for you! Take a gander through this newsletter to find out what’s been brewing at the Office of Homeless Youth (OHY). Check out our team pic below from the OHY Grantee Forum in October 2024.
 Team picture from our Grantee Forum in October 2024. First row from left to right: Kelvin, Honey the dog, Emily, Brianna’s baby and Brianna herself. Second row from left to right: Nicole, Gina T, Annie, iLeana, Karen and Chelsea. Third row from left to right: Riannon, Erin, Gaia, Kim, Matt, Isaac and Christopher. Missing: Johnathan.
Prevention Philosophy
It wouldn’t be a prevention newsletter without a spicy tidbit of prevention philosophy, so let’s dig in. We’ve spent past newsletters exploring housing as the bedrock of prevention and Family and Natural Supports as the wraparound framework for how services ought to be delivered. Just as critical a component of prevention, however, is early identification - an early intervention strategy aimed at moving further upstream.
Diversion and eviction prevention, for example, are two place-based models of early intervention intended to keep youth embedded in their natural ecosystem of supports, but how do we even get there in the first place?1,2
Early identification is the nexus of this work. Without uncovering who is at-risk of homelessness we’re unable to mobilize resources and place-based supports, such as diversion, eviction prevention and other early intervention strategies, to prevent homelessness from occurring or recurring.
School-community partnerships are a familiar form of early identification, but our efforts to move further upstream can extend far beyond schools alone. Thinking about early identification in a more global sense, we can envision a system of touchpoints and referral pipelines that prevent young people, wherever they’re at in the community, from ever needing to access the homelessness crisis response system.
Aside from educational institutions, these touch points should be embedded in systems of care, such as the child welfare, behavioral health, legal and carceral systems, in addition to hospitals and healthcare agencies, community organizations and anywhere else young people might come into contact with caring adults who play a supportive role in their lives are key.
Universal screeners are one proven way, when possible, of universally and systemically identifying risk early on (e.g. The Upstream Project and The Geelong Project)3, but immediate service level improvements can be made by providers in establishing partnerships with systems, agencies and other organizations as mentioned above. Through partnerships and ongoing relationship development, providers can move further upstream to connect with young people regardless of which systems they’re involved in or programs they’re accessing.
Waiting for young people to come to us often translates to waiting for a crisis to happen. Conversely, early identification serves to catch young people before more limited and costly interventions become necessary.
System of Care Site Visits
Within our portfolio of targeted prevention projects are the System of Care (SOC) grants, which are intended to reduce exits into homelessness among young people imminently discharging from publicly funded systems of care. These systems, broadly, include child welfare, juvenile justice, inpatient behavioral health and programs administered by OHY.
To better understand the current implementation of these grants, ensure legislative alignment and build relationships, OHY staff conducted a round of site visits with our SOC grantees. The image below shows where these grantees are located across the state.
 SOC grantees by county. Serenity House, Clallam; Coastal Community Action Program, Grays Harbor; Ryan’s House for Youth, Island; YouthCare, King; The Youth Connection, Mason; REACH Center and Comprehensive Live Resources, Pierce, Northwest Youth Services, Whatcom; Volunteers of America, Spokane; and Blue Mountain Action Council, Walla Walla.
Throughout this process, a couple of key takeaways emerged that parallel our conversation above regarding the importance of early identification: moving further upstream into systems and enshrining outreach and engagement as a cornerstone of program operations. Waiting for instability to turn into a crisis creates a missed opportunity to prevent homelessness from ever occurring in the first place.
Read our report brief detailing the SOC grant program, site visit process and, more importantly, the challenges, success and recommendations that we unearthed. These lessons, specifically moving upstream and both establishing and maintaining partnerships, can be extrapolated beyond just publicly funded systems of care as they are generally relevant to any prevention framework.
Statewide Prevention Strategy
Continuing our youth homelessness prevention webinar series, we had the pleasure of airing our third episode alongside systems and provider partners. This episode, focused on secondary prevention, highlighted four recommendations from the state strategy on youth homelessness prevention that aim to prevent deeper systems involvement and out of home placement among youth and their families.
A recording of the webinar along with the slides are available on our website.
Next up in the series will be our final episode looking at universal and primary prevention efforts across the state as they relate to recommendations from the prevention plan.
In line with our journey of successively highlighting recommendations along the prevention continuum, we are in the process of raising up the legislatively mandated Prevention Workgroup and the three, prevention stage-based subcommittees that will shepherd implementation of the prevention plan.
The Prevention Workgroup is an open space to broadly update the community on efforts underway to implement key recommendations and ensure alignment across the subcommittees, in addition to legislative tracking and report outs, all while providing a platform for folks to network with others who they wouldn’t normally have access to. Further, we’ll soon launch the Tertiary Prevention Subcommittee that will more discretely operationalize recommendations that fall along that stage of the prevention continuum, breaking them down into actionable steps. The tertiary stage of the continuum is concerned with preventing exits from systems of care into homelessness and swiftly resolving homelessness among those already experiencing it.
If you would like to join either of these groups or have questions about them, please reach out to Isaac Fall at isaac.fall@commerce.wa.gov.
Hiring Updates
As OHY continues to grow, we have the pleasure of sharing about all the amazing and talented people that have been joining our team. Recapping our Fall 2024 newsletter, Kim Justice, OHY’s first Executive Director, departed for an opportunity with Partners for Our Children, within the University of Washington School of Social Work, as their Policy Director. We quickly launched the hiring process to fill her position and have found her replacement.
Please join me in welcoming Cacey Hanauer-Sutton as OHY’s new Executive Director. Cacey previously served as the Director of Client Support and Empowerment at the Tacoma Housing Authority, most notably leading the development and implementation of the storied Arlington Drive, the largest housing campus for young people experiencing homelessness in Washington state.
In addition to Cacey, we’ve also brought onboard Cole Ketcherside, an OHY alumnus who most recently served as the Partnership, Prevention and Services Administrator at the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF). Cole will lead the newest arm of OHY as our Quality Assurance Director, working to build out a team that will focus on alignment with best practices across our entire portfolio of projects, ensuring that all OHY grantees feel supported and equipped to provide effective, equitable, and accessible services to young people.
Last and certainly not least is the newest addition to our policy and prevention team, Rosemary Peterson. Rosemary is filling our Education & Employment Manager position as my counterpart focused on education and economic opportunity. Rosemary brings her experience as a McKinney-Vento Graduation Success Liaison and, prior to that, as a Student Support Advocate within the Marysville School District. Please join me in giving Cole and Rosemary a warm welcome to our ever-growing OHY team!
REFERENCES
1Stephen Gaetz, Bill O’Grady, Sean Kidd & Kaitlin Schwan. (2016). Without a Home: The National Youth Homelessness Survey. Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press.
2Stephen Gaetz & Erin Dej. (2017). A New Direction: A Framework for Homelessness Prevention. Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press.
3Gaetz, S., Schwan, K., Redman, M., French, D., & Dej, E. (2018). The Roadmap for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness. A. Buchnea (Ed.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press.
Questions?
Contact Isaac Fall, prevention manager, at isaac.fall@commerce.wa.gov
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