This Child Trends two-brief series highlights information on access to care for homeless children and families. The first brief, Facilitating Access to Early Care and Education for Children Experiencing Homelessness, covers barriers to accessing early care and education among families experiencing homelessness and how states and communities can increase early care and education enrollment of children experiencing homelessness. The second brief, Leveraging Data to Identify Children Experiencing Homelessness, points to the challenges that states and communities encounter when using data to identify children experiencing homelessness who need early care and education.

This continuously updated set of resources, which include guidance, tool kits, and reports, provides information for supportive housing and homeless housing providers, in light of CDC guidelines for social distancing and quarantine against community spread of COVID-19. This compendium also offers fact sheets on how homeless individuals and families can navigate and access services.

This research-to-practice brief assesses the impact of evaluation technical assistance (ETA) provided to grantees under two federal initiatives: Youth At-Risk of Homelessness (YARH), funded by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3), a multi-agency funded initiative. The brief covers details about the grant programs and the provision of ETA evaluation offered; success, utilization, and benefits of ETA; how program requirements and evaluation needs were balanced; and how to make ETA successful for this and similar programs targeting disconnected youth.

This blogpost by the Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) highlights the challenges facing homeless pregnant mothers, babies, and toddlers. To address these challenges, the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) Family and Youth Services Bureau and the Office of Head Start support collaboration between Runaway and Homeless Youth and Early Head Start grantees serving both youth in transitional living programs and maternity group homes, as well as children enrolled in Head Start programs. National Training and Technical Assistance Centers will play a crucial role in this collaboration, sharing resources and training materials on early childhood development for young parents and families experiencing homelessness. By encouraging this collaborative relationship, ACF’s two-generation approach strives to meet the needs of parents and their children.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation issue brief examines how two agencies, Alameda County, California and the Colorado Department of Human Services use continuous quality improvement (CQI) in implementing their programs that address youth at risk of homelessness. CQI is a process-oriented evaluation that supports the enhancement of programs and practices through ongoing collection analysis of real-time data to identify and test changes in program implementation. Key components of this brief look at the CQI process design features at these two agencies, how the CQI process affected the operation of the agency’s interventions to prevent homelessness among youth and young adults who have been involved in the child welfare system, and what advice the two agencies have for other entities that may use CQI in their program reviews.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness developed this categorized list of resources, which includes criteria and benchmarks for communities to use in implementing strategies to address homelessness. The resources are organized according to overarching goals, specific objectives, and sub-objectives. The four overarching goals include: Ensure Homelessness is a Rare Experience, Ensure Homelessness is a Brief Experience, Ensure Homelessness is a One-Time Experience, and Sustain an End to Homelessness.

This Annie E. Casey Foundation blogpost profiles A Place 4 Me, a community-based organization in Cleveland that improves outcomes for housing of youth transitioning out of foster care. The blogpost discusses the organization’s goals for ending youth homelessness and how it integrates support systems and services by offering young peer navigators who have transitioned out of foster care.