Statement on the Release of the New Deal to End Youth Homelessness


“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

-Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider


We can no longer play in the margins of trying to fix racist systems, and instead demand a new way of doing business that is rooted in justice. Today A Way Home America, in partnership with NIS, released the Housing Justice Pillar, the first of 5 pillars that will make up the New Deal to End Youth Homelessness. The Center for Housing Justice at NIS stands steadfastly behind the truths young people have breathed into this roadmap, and into transforming our current systems into ones that actually work for them.

The New Deal to End Youth Homelessness is a federal policy proposal that offers a roadmap to transform the systems that serve youth and young adults, reorienting them towards justice. 

This release comes at a critical time for our country, where as a collective movement we are:

  • battling a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, 

  • trying to support Black, Brown, Indigenous and LGBTQ youth at the frontlines of the social justice uprising and Black Lives Matters movement,

  • fighting to ensure that historically marginalized communities do not fall deeper into the economic recession, and

  • preparing for new federal leadership that will have to unwind the past 4 years of racist and anti-LGBTQ policies that have caused serious harm to youth and young adults.

The roadmap to transformation calls for bold new actions rooted in racial and LGBTQ justice across five major systems serving youth and young adults: (1) housing, (2) legal systems, (3) child welfare, (4) economic systems, and (5) immigration.

Join A Way Home America and the Center for Housing Justice at NIS for a Town Hall discussion on Thursday, December 18, 2020 from 3-4:30pm EST.

The New Deal to End Youth Homelessness calls on us to transform the current systems into just systems. If we are feeling uncomfortable in a shift toward transformation, good. It is in this discomfort that we find the courage to speak aloud our words against the tyranny of racist systems. 

You might find you do not yet have the words; but young people, and the New Deal to End Youth Homelessness is calling on us all to find them.



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