StreetWorks Guiding Principles
Organizations and individuals who successfully support homeless youth take a principles-based approach to their work, rather than a rules-based approach. Principles provide guidance and direction to those working with homeless youth. They provide a framework for how we approach and view the youth, engage and interact with them, build relationship with them and support them.
The challenge for youth workers is to meet and connect with each young person where they are and build a supportive relationship from there. Principles provide the anchor for this relationship-building process. [9 Evidenced Based Guiding Principles to Help Youth Overcome Homelessness” (Homeless Youth Collaborative, 2014)]
1. Journey-Oriented: Interact with youth to help them understand the interconnectedness of past, present, and future as they decide where they want to go and how to get there.
2. Trauma-Informed: Recognize that most homeless youth have experienced trauma; build relationships, responses, and services on that knowledge.
3. Non-Judgmental: Interact with youth without labeling or judging them on the basis of background, experiences, choices, or behaviors.
4. Harm Reduction: Contain the effects of risky behavior in the short-term and seek to reduce its effects in the long-term.
5. Trusting Youth-Adult Relationships: Build relationships by interacting with youth in an honest, dependable, authentic, caring, and supportive way.
6. Strengths-Based: Start with and build upon the skills, strengths, and positive characteristics of each youth.
7. Positive Youth Development: Provide opportunities for youth to build a sense of competency, usefulness, belonging, and power.
8. Holistic: Support youth in a manner that recognizes the interconnectedness of their mental, physical, spiritual, and social health.
9. Collaboration: Establish a principles-based, youth-focused system of support that integrates practices, procedures, and services within and across agencies, systems, and policies.
Additional Research, Tools & Resources
Homeless Youth Legal Rights Handbook — Baker & McKenzie, Ecolab and Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services with additional support from Children’s Law Center of Minnesota launched the Homeless Youth Handbook – Minnesota, a free resource to help homeless youth in the area understand their legal rights.