On Thursday February 27th, 2025, Professor Coco Auerswald & Assistant Researcher Sahra Nawabi visited the House of Senate in Washington D.C. to meet with the policy advisors and legislative aids of Senator Alex Padilla and Senator Adam Schiff. Here are the highlights:
For over 30 years, National Network for Youth has brought thousands of grassroots advocates for their annual Capitol Hill Day to educate Members of Congress about budget investments, legislative bills, and solutions to prevent and end youth experiencing homelessness (YEH).
Sahra advocated on the Act for Housing for Homeless Students through storytelling and sharing the current education system data of YEH and how their support on this act can be a visibility and accessibility mechanism to all students who are experiencing homelessness to get the resources they need to maintain safe and stable housing.
Professor Coco spoke to the overall funding increase for YEH and with the help of our research undergraduate student Jennifer Pham we were able to create an advocacy one-pager to share physically with our representatives and walking them through the of counts of unaccompanied minors and transitional aged YEH in CA and how that varies across multiple data systems. This is important to understand because these data systems are counting and capturing YEH based on their own homeless definition qualifiers that ultimately leaves out a hidden population of YEH that is not accounted for when in planning and implementation of programs and services.
