Homeless Youth Needs Assessment and Media Toolkit Released

The Needs of Unhoused Youth through a Lens of Data, Equity, and Lived Expertise

The purpose of the Homeless Youth Needs Assessment is to provide meaningful insight into the nature of homelessness for unaccompanied and parenting youth aged 24 and under. The first of its kind in metro Denver, it examines six data sources to depict the overall issue of youth homelessness as it occurs across systems for a deeper understanding of the problem.

This report includes Community Outreach conducted in the Spring of 2023 with youth and providers across metro Denver to better understand their needs and experiences. While the ‘Causes’ and ‘Disparities’ identified in this report use all of the available data sources, the ‘Needs’ section that follows relies heavily on this outreach data.

We hope that by the end of this report, readers understand homelessness as a matter of systemic failures rather than personal shortcomings, by and large; recognize the disparities that exist for specific populations of youth; and use our findings to help guide decisions about housing resources and improvements to make the homeless system better for youth.

Homeless Youth Awareness Media Kit

We wanted to make our youth Needs Assessment as accessible and impactful as possible. That’s why we developed a social media toolkit to help you promote #HomelessYouthAwareness and #YouthHomelessness in the month of November and beyond. Explore the full content suite.