Youth leadership and youth voice are critical to the success of Youth Services (YS). The YS Youth Action Board (YAB) provides this opportunity. In collaboration with our community, their vision is to prevent and end youth experiencing homelessness, by housing that is supportive and equitable, creating pathways of employment, education, and leadership to ensure youth experiencing homelessness is rare, brief, and nonrecurring. With an emphasis of recognizing systematic failure for youth identifying as BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+.
YAB provides an opportunity for youth to advocate, it gives them a voice and aids them in progressing through emerging adulthood with a sense of leadership and a focus on lived experience and youth voice. It provides an opportunity for youth to lead through a paid Peer Mentor position that requires an average of five hours of work monthly. YAB provides feedback at a monthly meeting on policies and rules for YS from a youth/client perspective and collaborates with State and local partners including the SLCo Mayor as requested. YAB is actively involved in supporting and participating with the SLCo Milestone Transitional Living Program (MTLP) service projects and program implementation.
The lived experience experts of YAB, in partnership with MTLP staff, provide MTLP youth and youth in the broader community with opportunities to be involved in community service and service-learning activities. All participating youth receive education on how to become a YAB member, which provides ongoing referrals for YAB, fosters the peer mentor role, and promotes long-term youth engagement.
YAB was involved in the renovation of a Sandy Milestone Home, providing design feedback and engaging in a service project for the Ribbon Cutting and dinner on July 15, 2024. In partnership with MTLP staff and participants, YAB helped set up, decorate, present, and take down a dinner for 180 community members. The purpose of the dinner was to educate public officials and community members on the MTLP and how to duplicate the MTLP model throughout the state.
For the past two years, the MTLP and YAB have partnered with VOA YRC, to complete a youth-specific PIT, previously described. This required the MTLP and YAB leadership to attend PIT Work Group meetings and collaborate with YRC administration to plan the youth count at the YRC youth shelter, including the plan for food and activities for youth experiencing homelessness. YAB members create flyers to notify YEH of the date and time of the count, collect donations, and deliver donations on the day of the event. YAB produced a youth-specific PIT count training video, as an online education resource for the community. The YAB further improved the PIT and Housing Inventory Count for youth who enter the homelessness system.
YAB members have also presented at national trainings, to local elected officials, and to community members.