Runaway and Homeless Youth

This year, NCFY’s Primary Sources column examined research on a wide variety of topics, from improving mentoring practice to working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth to smoothing the rough road to adulthood. Here are some highlights:
Ice breakers ease new members into a group and help develop cohesion, whether among youth or staff. In an updated Youth Development Network tool, YDN shares more than twenty activities that break the ice. The games represent a wide variety of participation and contact levels, which acommodate the varying levels of comfort felt within programs and even from group to group. With new groups, start...
The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth has released a new publication, "Immigration and Schools: Supporting Success for Undocumented Unaccompanied Homeless Youth" (PDF, 1.43 MB), published in collaboration with Kids In Need of Defense, or KIND. The 16-page guide reviews the education rights of undocumented, unaccompanied homeless...
Last year, Francisco Monzon and his colleagues at the Uhlich Children’s Advantage Network, or UCAN, were approached by a woman recently returned from Minneapolis, where she had witnessed that city’s host home programs for its homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth population. Drawing on the help of unpaid volunteers, the programs placed 18- to 24-year-...
Grantees of the Family and Youth Services Bureau have long worked on multiple fronts, addressing many problems that youth and families may face, from homelessness and hunger to substance abuse and mental illness to low education levels and unemployment.
The Family and Youth Services Bureau is offering grantees of its Runaway and Homeless Youth programs the chance to win the materials to paint a wall mural in their facilities -- and to have their young people's creativity be nationally recognized! 
“Homeless, Street-Involved Emerging Adults: Attitudes Toward Substance Use” (abstract), Journal of Adolescent Research, Volume 25, Number 2, March 2010. What it's about: This study looks at attitudes toward alcohol and drugs among homeless youth who abuse substances. The authors surveyed and interviewed 87 young people between the ages of 18 and 23 who came to a Texas...
If you could peek through the third-floor window of a narrow townhouse in Washington, DC, you’d see exposed bricks, a broken wall, and beyond that a young man standing on a cliff above crashing waves. To the left, you’d make out a poem describing the young man’s journey from uncertainty to possibility. “I'm lost in an ocean of madness/In the desert of hesitation,...
“Better to Bend Than to Break: Coping Strategies Utilized by Substance-Abusing Homeless Youth” (abstract). Forthcoming from the Journal of Health Psychology; published online October 7, 2010.
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