A new report from WestEd and UCLA finds that migrant, justice-involved, and homeless youth aren’t refusing services — they’re being failed by siloed public agencies, inconsistent data definitions, and funding structures too rigid to meet their overlapping needs.

There’s a perception that many homeless youths won’t engage with the services available to them for one reason or another. But a new report calls that myth into question by revealing the systemic issues that prevent youths from receiving the help they seek.

WestEd, a nonpartisan research center, and UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools teamed up to study how two states, Colorado and Washington, provide services to highly mobile homeless youth. Those homeless youth include those who are without housing, living in foster care, are from migrant families, or who have been involved in the juvenile justice system.

The two states take vastly different approaches to helping these at-risk youth. For instance, the report noted that Colorado uses a bottom-up strategy in which service providers innovate, and the state then creates public policy to scale the solutions. Washington, on the other hand, uses a more top-down approach where state policy largely dictates how service providers can help youth homelessness.

While their approaches are different, the report found that both states run into the same issue — both justice-involved and migrant youth often fall through the cracks. That finding suggests structural factors inhibit a vulnerable youth’s ability to access services.

Jason Willis, a senior policy advisor at WestEd, told Invisible People in an interview that one of the issues driving this trend is that public policy is often siloed and does not incentivize state agencies to work with one another to solve problems. State governments are also less flexible in responding to issues related to highly mobile populations such as homeless youth, he added.

“These public agencies have no incentive to work with one another to ensure that these students are getting a continuity of support,” Willis said.

What Two Very Different State Approaches to Youth Homelessness Have in Common

WestEd’s report analyzed Colorado’s Educational Stability Grant, a 3-year grant that provides school districts with funds to build community partnerships to address barriers to school stability for highly mobile homeless youth, and Washington’s Project Education Impact, a state law that requires public agencies and schools to improve educational outcomes for students.

Read the full article about the myth of the service-resistant youth by Robert Davis at Invisible People.