Stage 4: Designing and Planning to Implement Solutions

The Next Phase of an LCSC’s Work Will Include:

  • Agreeing on a common definition of youth homelessness.
  • Gaining a better understanding of the current system and its gaps.
  • Develop a plan to create change, including key steps over the next year.

Different communities may need more or less time to accomplish this, but two meetings of two to three hours each may be sufficient.

Meeting 1: System Navigation Meeting

This meeting aims to help participants come to a common and deeper understanding of youth homelessness in your community, including why the current responses have not been sufficient to solve the problem. Consider including the following questions and activities to help achieve this goal:

Introductions and Ice Breakers

The type and length of introductions and ice breaker activities will depend on how well participants already know each other and the time available.

Presentation: Learning from Data

Share an overview of current services available in your community and information about their usage. Have a local partner spend 10-15 minutes sharing relevant data to help partners better understand current services, who is being served, etc. Make sure to give context to explain possible limitations of available data. 

  • Ask participants what gaps they see in the service array.
  • Ask participants why some youth experiencing homelessness might not access the existing services.

Activity: Youth Homelessness System Navigation Activity 

NN4Y engages the LCSCs we work with in an interactive simulation of a young person trying to navigate youth homelessness systems and services to help stakeholders better understand how their current system functions.  This activity involves having the group go through the steps a young person might take if they are experiencing homelessness and trying to access help. 

A key to the success of this activity is to work closely with the YAB in advance of the meeting to choose scenario examples that will uncover the specific failings of your local youth homelessness response. After the activity is completed, spend ample time (e.g., 30 minutes) talking through with participants what flaws or gaps in the system they saw and how those might be addressed. 

Preparation: 

You may need to prepare a card detailing the eligibility/details of each service so that the person in that role for each round knows whether or not they can serve the young person, e.g., the card for rapid rehousing may say they only serve youth who are legal adults or emancipated so they can sign leases. In contrast, the child welfare system card may say they only serve youth under 18.

How to play: 

  • In each round, one participant will play the young person’s role, with details about the young person’s situation changing during each round. 
  • Other participants will be playing the roles of different systems. For example, the “young person” will hold a string and travel around the room to map out how they navigate the crisis response system.  

Different situations that could be used for the young person include:

  • A young person over age 18 who is LGBT was kicked out.
  • A young person under age 18 who is LGBT was kicked out.
  • A young person under the age of 18 ran away from abuse in their home.
  • A young person over age 18 ran away from home or was kicked out.
  • A young person over age 18 was evicted.
  • A young person who is pregnant or parenting.
  • Other situations suggested by participants. 

Agencies or services/locations to include in the simulations:

  • Youth-serving agency (e.g., youth homelessness provider)
  • Child welfare agency
  • Host home 
  • Rapid rehousing
  • Education
  • Juvenile justice
  • Other agencies, services, or locations suggested by participants  

As the simulation is happening, and in between rounds where different scenarios are navigated, the participants can discuss what happens at each step (e.g., the intake process for this service). Facilitators can ask probing questions (e.g., how could we improve this?)

Finalize Your Working Definition of Youth Homelessness

Your group will have previously discussed how you will define homelessness, but take this opportunity to check in and see if there’s still agreement before adopting your LCSC’s “official” definition. Suppose your group has struggled with how narrow or broad a definition to use. In that case, the system navigation activity may help the group agree on a more inclusive definition.

You may also wish to recap your group’s earlier descriptors of your local system and encourage participants to consider if the activities in this and previous meetings have changed their perceptions of the system.

Wrap Up

Reflect briefly on the conversations throughout the meeting and give an overview of the next steps. If time allows, preview that the next meeting will focus on how we can design solutions that will address the gaps identified earlier by building on the experiences and insights of the individuals who have accessed youth homelessness systems (or have not accessed them, despite experiencing homelessness). It will also involve distilling all the group has learned in previous meetings and prioritizing concrete action steps.

Meeting 2: System Change Design and Planning Meeting

This meeting aims to think about solutions to youth homelessness from the perspective of the young people who are experiencing homelessness and have to use and navigate services and systems offered in your community. The meeting will also include deciding on the LCSC’s prioritized actions for the next year to achieve its goals.

Presentation: Review of Learning from Previous Meetings

This meeting is focused on responding to the barriers identified in previous conversations and prioritizing strategies, so it will be essential to review the learning and decisions from earlier discussions, including the shared vision and goals and the system gaps the navigation exercise illustrated.

Discussion: Human-Centered Design

Explain that human-centered design is a way of creating goods or services or solving problems that starts and ends with the perspective of the user or client. Under this approach, “designers” (e.g., those creating a program or service) start by learning from the people they are designing for, then generate and try out many ideas, continuing to refine them until they find what will work best for their users/clients. You may wish to show a 2-minute video from IDEO explaining the concept of human-centered design, available at https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design. 

Activity: Brainstorming Solutions

Now that you have a clear idea of your systems gaps and a method for designing solutions, it is time to develop new strategies for solving the challenges unique to your community.

Allow participants to break into small groups to brainstorm ideas and solutions, then have each group share back their top ideas. Make sure that YAB members are distributed throughout the groups. Each group should have at least one young person with relevant lived experience. This should be a two-step process:

  1. Participants suggest all possible solutions. Encourage the groups to think beyond current system offerings and limitations using the prompt: What would it look like if we were creating a brand new system with all new rules and healthy funding amounts?

  2. YAB members and service providers do a “reality check” to determine how well the solutions might work for young people experiencing homelessness.

Activity: Deciding on Priorities and Actions for the Coming Year

Building on the excitement generated by the brainstorming activity, facilitators should work with the group to reach a consensus on the 2 to 5 solutions the LCSC should focus on implementing over the next year. These can be solutions generated in the brainstorming activity or ideas generated in the previous meetings, as long as LCSC members who have experienced homelessness concur that they are viable strategies.