Youth Policy Team (YPT)
We take "nothing about us without us" seriously.

At A Way Home America (AWHA), shifting and sharing power with youth and young adults with lived expertise (YYALE) is a cornerstone of our mission to end and prevent youth homelessness. This is why our Youth Policy Team (YPT) drives our advocacy for policy transformation for youth and young adults, as well as the systems that serve them.

This commitment goes beyond inclusion—it is about creating intentional opportunities for YYALE to lead, influence decisions, and shape the future of our movement. Through structured collaboration and skill-building initiatives, AWHA ensures YYALE are not just participants but co-creators in our work.

The Work of YPT

Helping Shape Public Policy

YPT members help develop and refine AWHA's federal, state, and local policy agendas, including recommendations rooted in

The New Deal to End Youth Homelessness and other transformative policy frameworks. Members work to advance policies that address both the causes and effects of youth homelessness while centering long-term systems change.

Informing Decision-Makers

Members contribute to advocacy strategies, talking points, public education efforts, and meetings with policymakers, helping elevate youth and young adult voice in spaces where decisions are made.

Research & Analysis

YPT members, alongside our Policy Analyst, research legislation, analyze potential policy proposals, identify emerging issues, and help translate complex policy topics into accessible information for advocates, practitioners, and decision-makers.

Coalition
Power-Building

A Way Home America transforms systems through public policy to prevent and end homelessness for Black, Indigenous, youth of color, and LGBTQIA+ youth, on a path to housing justice for all. We are a leader in the youth homelessness movement, uniting with national partners to ensure our systems work for all youth.

Centering
Lived-Expertise

YPT members and AWHA staff help ensure AWHA’s policy priorities, advocacy strategies, and movement-building work are shaped by young people who have experienced homelessness and/or other youth-serving systems. The team moves lived expertise beyond consultation by positioning youth and young adults as leaders who help shape the decisions, narratives, and solutions that affect the lives and communities of young people throughout the country.

The Youth Policy Team consists of up to eight paid members with lived expertise from across the country. Members serve alongside AWHA's policy staff and contribute through policy initiatives rooted in our New Deal to End Youth Homelessness.

Members receive monetary compensation for their expertise and leadership, alongside skill-building opportunities relevant to their individual and collective professional development. At the same time, AWHA recognizes that lived expertise leadership often includes forms of care, insight, trust-building, and relational labor that traditional institutions are not always equipped to honor.

Through a reciprocal partnership, the AWHA staff and the YPT create a reciprocal space for young leaders to bring the depth of their experience, analysis, and vision into the work without reducing that contribution to token input or unpaid emotional labor.

Young people experiencing homelessness and other youth-serving systems are often excluded from the policy conversations and decision-making process that directly affect their lives. The Youth Policy Team changes that dynamic.

AWHA believes that the people closest to the challenges are also closest to the solutions. By investing in Youth and Young Adults with Lived Expertise, the YPT helps ensure that policies are informed by those who have navigated homelessness and other youth-serving systems firsthand and understand the barriers facing young people today, alongside our policy team, in partnership, together.

Through this work, the YPT helps advance AWHA's vision of preventing and ending homelessness for Black, Indigenous, youth of color, and LGBTQIA+ youth on a path toward housing justice for all!

The Youth Policy Team is a short-term investment with long-term impact. Its structure supports young leaders in building policy, advocacy, research, and organizing skills through trust, relationships, and principled struggle, not by avoiding difficult conversations, but by creating the environment necessary to have them well. The model recognizes that lived expertise is essential, while also holding that it works best in partnership with other forms of expertise, including AWHA staff’s policy, research, and collective knowledge.

This balance allows the team to honor what individuals bring, while also translating their insights into strategies that can serve youth and young adults on a broader scale. YPT members are trusted to take on meaningful work, try new approaches, and lead beyond what other spaces may have invited or equipped them to do. Through structures like ad hoc project teams, members can practice independent leadership, shape new projects, try new skills, and build confidence while contributing directly to AWHA’s policy and movement-building work.

When YYALE are co-creators of the work, policy recommendations get closer to the solutions communities need.