As a multiphase program with each phase building on the previous one, the Youth At-Risk of Homelessness project (YARH) required collaboration, creativity, and transparency among federal funders, grantees, local evaluators, the cross-site evaluation technical assistance (TA) team, and youth and young adults with lived experience in the child welfare system.

This brief begins with the perspective of the federal funders, who laid the groundwork for the grant programs and emphasized the importance of engaging youth and young adults involved in the child welfare system throughout all phases of the project. Next, it describes the collaboration between grantees and local evaluators and their engagement of youth and young adults involved in the child welfare system. The brief also describes how the TA team helped grantees and local evaluators build evidence about their comprehensive service models (referred to as “interventions”) throughout YARH-1 and YARH-2. Lastly, the brief include the perspectives of youth and young adults who received services developed and provided by YARH grantees.

Learnings from the brief will help readers explore intervention design, implementation, and evaluation efforts in a multiphase program.

To date, the success of YARH has largely depended on creative and careful efforts from a close partnership of various partners. This brief describes the factors that supported creativity and collaboration across the three phases of YARH, and learnings from the process. The brief should be of interest to funders, grantees, evaluators, and other partners that might support a similar multi-year, multiphase program requiring collaboration across multiple partners to build and disseminate evidence on an intervention’s effectiveness.