A new report on children and youth who experience homelessness in Pennsylvania is now available. Read at “Childhood Homelessness in Pennsylvania” by Joanne Jung (bepress.com), JJ Cutuli, and Joe Willard.
Children and youth who experience homelessness are known to be at risk for a variety of poor outcomes in both the short and long terms. This report summarizes data on the subset of children and youth who are served by homeless housing programs in Pennsylvania.
We document how many children and youth are served by these programs in 13 of Pennsylvania’s 16 regional Continuums of Care (CoC) and draw correlations between the number served in homeless housing programs and the rate of other known childhood risk factors. We make recommendations based on the data for even more effective homelessness prevention efforts and responses to family, child, and youth homelessness to optimally promote resilience.
We conclude that homeless housing programs are inherently child-, youth-, and family-serving programs, given the number of children and youth who stay in these programs.
As such, housing programs need to comprehensively attend to the developmental needs of those they serve beyond just shelter and housing. In this way, homeless housing programs can help promote resilience.
Leave a Reply