Empowering Futures: THE COLLECTIVE IMPACT OF GRANTMAKING ON HOUSTON’S UNHOUSED YOUTH THE INITIATIVE: YOUTH HOMELESSNESS FUND —
Over the course of ten years, the Youth Homelessness Fund (YHF) has awarded over $536,000 in grants to nonprofit organizations that develop and implement strategic solutions to aid youth experiencing homelessness in Houston. Established in 2013, this small group of committed funders has focused on preventing youth from experiencing homelessness at a systems and community level. The YHF was a Field of Interest Fund facilitated by Greater Houston Community Foundation (Foundation) to help build a local network of funders committed to reducing homelessness through leadership, education, advocacy, and collaborative grantmaking. We spoke with Nancy Frees Fountain from the Frees Foundation and one of the founding funders of YHF about how they started this collective group, and she shared, “This was such an impactful initiative and way of working together. Individual foundations have a hard time coordinating. Working together in this way, we could move the needle more. We focused on a time horizon that was beyond one year, and we continued to build upon successes with sequential steps toward effecting community and systems changes.”
GETTING STARTED —
A national group, Funders Together to End Homelessness, works to end and prevent homelessness. Through working together with this national group and the Foundation team, local Houston funders educated themselves and identified ways they could make an impact closer to home. This realization led to the establishment of the YHF, with the original name of Greater Houston Fund to End Homelessness, through the Foundation. After researching more, this group recognized how the youth population facing homelessness was often overlooked or deprioritized. Federal funding and government agencies focused on chronic or veteran homelessness, but not enough data existed for these agencies to know how best to focus on youth facing homelessness. YHF funders quickly realized they wanted to focus on unhoused youth as they saw this as a population with significant needs with little data or metrics and therefore, little investment. 8
2023 Annual Report
The YHF’s first focus was to help obtain more accurate data on youth experiencing homelessness. The number of youth who were ‘counted’ during the national homeless count annually was always lower than the reality in our community. The community needed answers to questions like ‘Where do youth facing homelessness go?’ or ‘What goes on at the school level when kids are identified as homeless?’ These types of critical questions were the catalyst in the YHF’s 2014 decision to award their first grant of $90,851 to the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work to help administer the YouthCount 2.0, a survey of unhoused youth in the greater Houston area that helped
Homeless youth look really different than homeless adults – they blend in, want to be with their friends, and need more support and case management rather than housing. However, homeless youth are also the most vulnerable and at risk. It was evident early on that there was a need for more facilitation and collaboration at the community level, and this is where we knew that private philanthropy could come into play to make a huge difference.
– Nancy Frees Fountain Frees Foundation
