It takes a collective to end YYA homelessness.
Core Teams, Youth Action Boards (YABs), and larger community groups all play important roles in weaving together the knowledge and authority to make lasting changes to youth homelessness systems. Ensuring that everyone gets accurate, clear information about things like decisions made and requests for change or support are critical for everyone to be moving in the same direction.
This resource offers some key considerations and questions to help you build and maintain strong communication loops across these different stakeholder groups.
What is the goal of your collective?
The first step to building strong communication loops is to establish a goal that the group is working towards. At a high level, your community is working to prevent and end youth and young adult homelessness by reaching functional zero, creating a “Yes to Yes” system by the end of 2022. Every six months, your communities select a process measure goal that feeds into the overall goal. These two goals serve to ground your collective and contextualize the information and asks exchanged between parties.
PRO TIP 1: Start every meeting off with your goals and objectives and center your conversations around them to drive towards productive and actionable conversations.
PRO TIP 2: Members of every group should be able to clearly state the goal your community is currently working on
Who is in the loop?
You should be able to clearly articulate which groups play what roles in your community and what kinds of decisions need approval from which groups. If members have different expectations, communication can easily break down, members can’t hold each other accountable, and it becomes harder to make quick decisions.
In your collective, think about:
Who needs to be in the loop to move the work forward?
What groups are represented? By what individuals?
What perspectives do they bring?
What are their roles and responsibilities?
What decision-making authority do they have?
Consideration: who needs to be “in the room” and who needs to be “in the know” might not be the same people.
Click through for a downloadable version.
Get on the same page.
Once you know who needs to be in the loop, you should get on the same page of what you are asking each other to do. Your collective should be clear on what information each group is at the table to bring and who is responsible for sharing that information. Here are some questions to reflect on:
What information does each group need to know to fulfill its purpose? Focus on sharing that information, as opposed to all possible information to avoid information overload.
What information needs to be delivered between groups after each meeting? Who are the messengers? Do they know they are the messengers?
Who is the point of contact for the different workgroups involved? Are they the same person that will share updates from their workgroups? The same questions apply for Youth Action Boards (YABs) and the Core Team.
How will information be shared? You can try distinguishing different levels of information your collective works with to target communication appropriately.
Establish a shared or working vocabulary
Everyone in your group should be clear on the key terms, frequently used acronyms and their working definitions to ensure everyone has access to the conversation. It is valuable to spend time as a group establishing this vocabulary so that everyone is talking about the same thing when using specific language. Use plain language when possible: ask yourself, “How would I explain this to my nephew?” Create pathways for people to learn technical language where needed.
Pro-tip: onboard new members thoughtfully - make sure they know their role, understand the purpose and goal of their group, and the technical terms used. Check out the New Core Team Member Guide here!
PRO TIP: Google Drive can be a great tool for holding glossaries, as they can be accessed by anyone with the proper link; just be sure to change the sharing permissions accordingly.
Some things to consider:
Organizational representation: who needs to be “in the room” and who needs to be “in the know” might not be the same people.
Those “in the room” should have access to quantitative and qualitative data that empowers their group to ask questions and identify changes to test.
Those “in the know” should be able to act on information they are given to enact positive change using their role in the system. People who offered any kind of feedback or ideas should be “in the know” of what has come of their input.
YABs need to be clear on their purpose and decision-making authority to be able to advocate and hold other groups accountable to the collective work. Young people are marginalized from true decision making power, unlike groups such as CoCs and Core Teams, and only have the power that these groups grant them. Clarifying the role and purpose of each group creates a container for positive partnerships to happen. See our guide on Big Goals and Small Questions.
Sharing learnings and scaling changes: When a test has proven successful, the next step is to expand these changes. In order to scale, there is likely going to be some kind of permission needed. Identify who that is and be sure to keep them informed with appropriate updates. To identify this person, ask: “If we were to try to implement these changes immediately, who would stop us?” Be sure you inform this person of the work you do and the learnings that come of it.
This one-pager below captures the most important questions you should consider when building strong communication loops. Use this to help you establish key elements of collaboration in your community's work to end youth and young adult homelessness.
Click through for a downloadable version.