Pathways to Economic Well-Being: Education Success Series (part 1 of 2)

PART 1. Prioritizing the Education of Students Experiencing Homelessness & Foster Care

Participants are invited to hear from researchers from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and Chapin Hall, along with their field partners to talk about the ecosystems of support needed to prioritize young people impacted by unstable housing and/or foster care. This webinar will present the latest research, real-time examples of what’s happening on the ground, and the chance to explore what funders can do. Panelists will include:

• Earl Edwards, Researcher, UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools
• Matt Morton, Research Fellow, Chapin Hall, University of Chicago
• Kenyon Lee Whitman, Post Doctoral Fellow, UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families
• Erin Simon, Assistant Superintendent, Student Support Services, Long Beach Unified School District; President, Association of California School Administrators

Moderator:  Joseph Bishop, Executive Director, UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools

Highlights

We had a great conversation with UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, Chapin Hall, and Long Beach Unified School District about the ecosystems of support needed to prioritize young people impacted by unstable housing and/or foster care.

Among many other important insights, the panelists shared these key recommendations for funders:

• Listen to and build the capacity of the existing networks of community-based organizations that are already working together to support the needs of students experiencing homelessness and/or the foster care system.
• Invest in models that go ‘up-stream,’ screening for early risk and protective factors that can disrupt pathways into homelessness.
• Fund innovation and evaluation for promising efforts to refine models that could lead to policy change and be implemented across systems.
• Support training among school staff to recognize and respond to the needs of young people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity
• Ask ‘what could be possible if…?’ For example, Dr. Whitman wondered, how might we move towards equity in wealth-building if young people who experienced foster care didn’t have to put a down payment on a home purchase?
• Collaborate with other funders to support systems change efforts that prioritize racial equity and housing justice, and that include people with lived experience in decision-making.

Resources

If you missed the conversation, you can view the recording here. Below are some additional resources that were shared in the chat:

• Chapin Hall / Voices of Youth Count Project Home Page
• Chapin Hall / National Estimates of Youth Homelessness
• SchoolHouse Connection / Partnering with Black Community Based Organizations to Address Student Homelessness
• Crosscut.com / After leaving addiction treatment, young adults often face homelessness
• Black Male Institute / The Disenfranchisement of Black Foster Youth
• University of California / Redefining Student Basic Needs for Higher Education
• The Imprint / Setting an Equity-minded Policy Agenda for People who Experienced Foster Care

Related Discussion

Pathways to Economic Well-Being: Education Success Series, PART 2:
Beyond the School house: A Vision for Transforming Public Education

The second webinar in this series will be a roundtable conversation with national education policy leaders to explore the educational needs of America’s most marginalized youth.