Youth Health and Housing Lab receives 3-year grant to advance health equity among youth experiencing homelessness across Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (10/25/2024) — The University of Minnesota Medical School’s Youth Health and Housing Lab received a 3-year, $500,000 Impact Award for a project that aims to improve the health of youth experiencing homelessness in Minnesota. The funding comes from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Systems for Action program, housed at the Colorado School of Public Health. 

This Impact Award builds off a prior System’s for Action Developmental Award in which this team tested the feasibility of an integrated system of medical, social, and public health programming designed to improve health outcomes and reduce longstanding inequities for youth experiencing homelessness in Hennepin County, Minnesota. They developed the systems alignment strategies alongside youth and community partners.

“Youth experiencing homelessness are remarkably resilient in the face of significant trauma, marginalization and oppression, often at the hands of systems that are meant to serve them. This study aims to center youth voices across multiple systems and test drive youth-driven strategies to advance health equity within this historically marginalized population of young people,” said Janna Gewirtz O’Brien, MD, an assistant professor at the U of M Medical School and Medical Director at The Bridge for Youth.

This team’s previous 12-month grant through the Systems for Action program tested the feasibility and acceptability of their systems alignment approach. During this 36-month Impact Award, the University team will apply a youth participatory action research (YPAR) framework to scale and evaluate a multicomponent systems alignment intervention, which was developed and pilot-tested in collaboration with youth, community and multi-sector partners over the past two years through prior grants. Within this youth-participatory action research framework, the team engages youth experiencing homelessness as partners and scholars to drive forward structural change.

Each component of this youth-driven intervention seeks to uplift the voices of youth experiencing homelessness within systems that have excluded them. This grant includes three components that were co-created with youth: 

• Implement, scale and evaluate the impact on health equity of YouthHealthConnect — a digital community health resource map that allows youth to find vital health services that meet their health needs — coupled with youth co-facilitated training for youth-serving professionals on how to support youth in navigating across complex healthcare systems. 
• Develop and apply youth-driven, trauma-informed data collection and data sharing practices from multiple sectors to create a more equitable data ecosystem across systems that serve youth experiencing homelessness.
• Leverage existing multisector data to assess population-level regional trends and equity outcomes by race/ethnicity and other marginalized identities in mental health and healthcare access among youth experiencing homelessness.

Within the U of M, the team includes collaborators from the Medical School’s Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, School of Nursing, School of Public Health and the Center for Healthy Youth Development. Other members of the project team include youth collaborators, youth-serving agencies from across Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota Department of Human Services, public schools and multiple public health and healthcare organizations. 

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About the University of Minnesota Medical School
The University of Minnesota Medical School is at the forefront of learning and discovery, transforming medical care and educating the next generation of physicians. Our graduates and faculty produce high-impact biomedical research and advance the practice of medicine. We acknowledge that the U of M Medical School is located on traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe, and scores of other Indigenous people, and we affirm our commitment to tribal communities and their sovereignty as we seek to improve and strengthen our relations with tribal nations. For more information about the U of M Medical School, please visit med.umn.edu. 

About Systems for Action

Systems for Action is a national research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that aims to discover and apply new evidence about ways of aligning delivery and financing systems across the medical, public health, and social services sectors that advance health equity. For more information, visit systemsforaction.org.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. In partnership with others, we are committed to taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime and paving the way together to a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. To achieve that vision, we are deepening our focus on dismantling one of the biggest barriers to health in America, structural racism. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org.