Youth leadership and youth voice are critical to the success of Youth Services. The Youth Action Board 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 black, indigenous, and people of color and LGBTQIA2S+.Refer to 2024 Salt Lake Youth Needs Report.
Youth Action Board 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. Youth Action Board provides feedback at a monthly meeting on policies and rules for Youth Services from a youth/client perspective and collaborates with State and local partners including the SLCo Mayor as requested. Youth Action Board is actively involved in supporting and participating with the SLCo Milestone Transitional Living Program service projects and program implementation. Refer to Salt Lake Youth Housing Needs Report.
The lived experience experts of Youth Action Board, in partnership with Milestone staff, provide Milestone 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 Youth Action Board member, which provides ongoing referrals for Youth Action Board, fosters the peer mentor role, and promotes long-term youth engagement.
Youth Action Board 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 Milestone staff and participants, Youth Action Board 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 Milestone and how to duplicate the Milestone model throughout the state.
For the past two years, the Milestone and Youth Action Board have partnered with Volunteers of America, Youth Resource Center, to complete a youth-specific Point-in-Time Count. This required the Milestone and Youth Action Board leadership to attend Point-in-Time Count Work Group meetings and collaborate with Youth Resource Center administration to plan the youth count at the Youth Resource Center youth shelter, including the plan for food and activities for youth experiencing homelessness. Youth Action Board members created flyers to notify youth experiencing homelessness of the date and time of the count, collect donations, and deliver donations on the day of the event. Youth Action Board produced a youth-specific Point-in-Time Count training video, as an online education resource for the community. The Youth Action Board further improved the Point-in-Time Count and Housing Inventory Count for youth who enter the homelessness system.
Youth Action Board members have also presented at national training, to local elected officials, and to community members.
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