Alex turns 18.
Alex isn’t one person. The name is a composite, used here to protect privacy, but the situation is
one that plays out for young people moving through immigration and youth-serving systems.
Nothing magical happens at midnight on a young person’s eighteenth birthday. They don’t
suddenly know how to navigate housing, employment, health care, transportation, legal systems,
or adulthood. But from a systems perspective, quite a bit can change. Eligibility can change.
Programs can end. The people who have helped coordinate services may no longer be
responsible for what happens next. The case may be closed correctly. Every box may be checked.
Every required referral may have been made. And the young person can still be standing there
asking:
Where do I go now?
For an undocumented young person, the answer can be especially complicated. Some young
people have pathways available, including programs serving eligible unaccompanied refugee
minors and other specialized populations. But those pathways aren’t available to everyone.
Eligibility requirements, immigration status, geography, documentation, age limits, funding
restrictions, and simply whether a program has space can determine what comes next. That’s
where I think we need to pay closer attention. Because sometimes what we call a transition feels
a lot more like a cliff.
I have spent much of my career working in and around human-service systems, and we are very
good at documenting exits. We know when someone was discharged. We know when we sent the
referral. We know when the case was closed. Those things matter. Programs need accountability,
and documentation matters. But we need to be careful not to confuse a completed process with a
successful outcome.
- A referral doesn’t mean someone actually got through the door.
- A housing resource doesn’t mean someone was housed.
- And closing a case tells us very little about what happened the next morning.
If a young person leaves one system only to begin couch surfing, moving from place to place,
living somewhere unsafe, being exploited, or eventually experiencing homelessness, then we
need to look at what happened between the exit we documented and the outcome that followed.
That is where leadership gets uncomfortable. And it should. Because the question becomes:
- Who owns the handoff?
- Who makes sure the referral actually became a connection?
- Who notices when the housing arrangement that looked solid on Tuesday falls apart on Friday?
- And who does that young person call when they miss an appointment, lose their phone, don’t
have the right document, don’t understand what someone is asking them to do, or simply need an
adult they trust to help them figure out the next move?
Those situations don’t fit neatly into program boundaries. Real life rarely does. If everyone has
technically done their job but no one is responsible for what happens in between, then we have
found a gap in the system. We shouldn’t be afraid to say that. The young people we don’t always
see are another part of this conversation that deserves attention. We already know youth
homelessness can be difficult to count. Young people may be sleeping on someone’s couch,
staying temporarily with friends or relatives, moving between unstable situations, or living in
circumstances that don’t necessarily show up in the traditional ways we measure homelessness.
For undocumented young people, there may be additional reasons to remain outside formal
systems. Fear matters. Trust matters. Mobility matters. Documentation can matter. Whether
someone understands what services are available or feels safe enough to ask for them matters
too. That doesn’t mean every undocumented young person leaving a program will become
homeless. They won’t. It does mean we should be careful not to assume that because we cannot
see someone in our data, they are doing well. Being difficult to count doesn’t make someone less
real. And that brings me to what I think we should be measuring.
Measure the Landing
- What if we stopped looking only at whether someone successfully exited a program and
started paying more attention to where they actually landed? - Thirty days later, is that young person still housed?
- What about 90 days later?
- Six months later?
- Did they stay connected to school or employment? If behavioral health services were part
of the plan, did they actually get connected? Do they know where to go when they need
legal help? Is there at least one person or organization they can call when something
goes wrong?
And here’s a question we probably don’t ask enough:
Does the young person believe they are stable?
That answer matters. A database can tell us a referral was completed. The young person can tell
us whether it worked. Those are two very different pieces of information.
We Don’t Necessarily Need Another Program
When we identify a gap, our instinct in human services is often to create another program. I’m
not convinced that’s always the answer. Sometimes we need to do a better job connecting what
already exists. Start transition planning earlier. Don’t wait until someone’s eighteenth birthday is
around the corner to start asking what adulthood will look like. Build the plan with the young
person rather than handing it to them. Talk about housing, school, employment, transportation,
health, behavioral health, legal assistance, identification, documentation, and community
connections as parts of the same life, not separate referrals living in separate systems. And make
the handoff personal whenever possible. Give the young person a name, not just a phone
number. Schedule the first appointment rather than simply providing the information. Then find
out whether they actually made it. Where funding and program requirements allow, I also think
we should explore a period of transition support after the formal handoff. Maybe that’s 90 days.
Maybe it’s 180. We need to work out the exact model.
The point is continuity. Give the next connection enough time to take hold before everyone
assumes the transition was successful. Communities could also bring the right people together
around young people with particularly complicated transitions: housing, education, behavioral
health, legal services, community organizations, and others as appropriate. Not another meeting
because we need another meeting. A small group with a very practical question:
Did this young person land?
This may be the most important part. Before we design the solution, we should ask the people
who have already lived through the problem.
- What happened when you turned 18?
- What did you know?
- What didn’t you know?
- Who helped?
- Where did the system lose you?
- What would have made that transition easier?
We may discover that some of the things we think are most important aren’t the things young
people identify at all. That’s why their voices belong in the design process from the beginning.
We can learn a great deal from data. But spreadsheets don’t tell us what it felt like to make that
first phone call and not understand the instructions. They don’t tell us what happened when a
temporary place to stay disappeared unexpectedly. And they don’t tell us which person made the
difference when everything else started falling apart.
Young people can tell us that.
We should listen.
I want to be clear: this isn’t an argument about immigration policy. People can have very
different views about immigration and still recognize the problem I’m describing. This is about
what happens when a young person connected to a system reaches adulthood, and that system
changes around them. It’s about preventing homelessness. It’s about continuity. And it’s about
whether the outcomes we report on paper match what happens in someone’s actual life. Leaders
in housing, education, behavioral health, youth services, legal services, philanthropy, and
community organizations don’t have to agree on every policy question to ask:
When a vulnerable young person leaves one system, where do they land?
If every discharge requirement is completed and that young person ultimately ends up sleeping
on the street, we need to be willing to say that something didn’t work. The paperwork may be
complete. The outcome isn’t.
At Innovative Health & Housing Solutions, we spend a lot of time thinking about what happens
in the spaces between systems. Those spaces are easy to overlook because they don’t always
belong to one agency, one contract, or one funding source. But people live in those spaces. Real
leadership means being willing to look beyond the edge of our own responsibility and ask what
happened next. For young people approaching adulthood, that means building the bridge before
the birthday, not waiting until someone falls and then trying to figure out how to pull them back
up. Maybe we need to change the question we ask when a case closes.
Not simply:
Did they exit?
But:
Where did they land?
And most importantly, we need to stay interested long enough to hear the answer.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness: https://usich.gov/news-events/news/homelessness-prevention-series-spotlight-youth-homelessnes s
CoC Homeless Populations and Subpopulations Reports:
https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/coc-homeless-populations-and-subpopulations-repo rts