Preventing Youth Homelessness: Interrupting Incarceration

Youth involved in the legal system are much more likely to experience housing insecurity. In turn, youth who are homeless are much more likely to be incarcerated. These facts are so well documented that they’re truisms. What’s less established is how we interrupt carceral cycles so that homelessness is never the result for young people in the legal system.  

Continuing a series of webinars on preventing youth homelessness, this edition will examine the promise of Housing Stability for Youth in Courts (aka H-SYNC), a Washington state navigation program supporting young people in the juvenile court system who are at risk of homelessness. We will learn from its designers both to envision replication across the country and to use H-SYNC as an entry point to broader conversation about disrupting carceral systems for youth homelessness prevention. We’ll invite the tension between reformists working to reduce incarceration and abolitionists dismantling oppressive systems altogether. We hope funders leave challenged to fund advocacy and programs that get at the root of injustice.    

View the Fall 2022 editions on the roles of employment, education and healthcare, and the Spring 2023 editions on theories of prevention and the Upstream Project.  

Learning Objectives:

• Name the key characteristics of H-SYNC 
• Understand the link between youth incarceration and homelessness 
• Describe an abolitionist perspective of youth incarceration and homelessness 

Speakers: 

• Michael Durham, he/him, Director of Networks, Funders Together to End Homelessness (moderator)  
• Ridha Kapoor, she/her, Policy and Field Relations Associate, Coalition for Juvenile Justice   
• Shaun Frazier, he/him, Senior Director of Community Housing and Homeless Services, YMCA of Greater Seattle
• Sarah Walker, she/her, Director of CoLab for Community and Behavioral Health Policy, University of Washington
• Whit Guerrero, he/him, Program Officer, Arlene and Michael Rosen Foundation  

Registration

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