Kinship care is a situation where a family member or other close relative/friend already offers care for a homeless youth. This can often times be advantageous in that a bond already exists between the youth and the caregiver.
Kinship matches can look a variety of ways. Sometimes a young person experiencing homelessness has a supportive person in their life that would be willing to house them with some additional backing. It is a situation where the support already exists and can be enhanced by financial aid and access to case management. Other times, it takes some time to work with the young person to identify someone in their life who may be willing to house them. In some cases, the young person is already staying with the supportive person and could benefit from our intervention – this is known as an informal match. Our goal is to identify these informal matches so that we can temporarily support them so the young person can continue to access that safe and stable housing.
