02/04/2014

A Tool to Identify Homeless Transition Age Youth Most in Need of Supportive Housing

With the generous support of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the W.M. Keck Foundation, CSH is pleased to release our report, The TAY Triage Tool: A Tool to Identify Homeless Transition Age Youth Most in Need of Permanent Supportive Housing.

We now have a data-informed tool to help providers and systems identify and prioritize homeless youth who need a housing intervention that is permanently affordable with wrap-around support services and not time-limited.  The beauty of the TAY Triage Tool is that it is very brief and made up of relatively non-invasive questions that, when delivered in a conversational format, is not just a supportive housing prioritization tool, but also a case management tool.

The tool identifies six experiences that increase a young person’s risk of experiencing five or more years of homelessness.  With each experience endorsed, the risk that the young person will experience five or more years of homelessness doubles.  We know that the longer a young person is homeless on the street, the higher their experiences of trauma, violence, substance abuse, and exploitation.  The report contains profiles of youth who endorsed five-to-six of the experiences identified in the TAY Triage Tool, and it’s clear that the experiences in the Triage Tool are indicators of many other challenges that the youth are facing.

The development of The TAY Triage Tool was truly a collaborative effort.  We cannot express enough gratitude to Dr. Eric Rice, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Social Work, for his enthusiastic willingness to lend the dataset from his NIMH study and commit his statistical analysis talents to the development and piloting of the tool.  Quite a few homeless youth housing and services providers, public agencies, philanthropies, and experts in the fields of youth homelessness and child welfare informed the development of the tool, all of whom are acknowledged in the report.  Thank you for your time, energy, and expertise.  We look forward to continuing to engage you in this discussion as we refine the tool in upcoming piloting and data collection efforts.

There are a couple of upcoming opportunities to learn more about the TAY Triage Tool.

On Thursday, February 13, CSH will be speaking about the tool as part of an upcoming webinar hosted by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH).  For more information on this webinar, click here.

If you're going to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) conference on Ending Family and Youth Homelessness in New Orleans on February 18 and 19, Dr. Rice will be presenting on the TAY Triage Tool on a workshop about homeless youth assessments.  Check out your conference agenda for the date and time.

For more information on the TAY Triage Tool, contact Angela Rosales at angela.rosales@csh.org

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