The roles of professional experts and lived experts in understanding a system
A systems approach to solving social problems
In this Module
In this module, you'll continue to explore the value of learning from both professional experts, including practitioners and researchers, and “lived experts”—actors in a system who experience the problem you're concerned about.
Through a case study on youth homelessness, you'll see how combining these sources of information can inform a systems approach to policymaking.
Understanding the Problem
Homelessness is a growing problem in the United States and worldwide. Young people who are homeless face significant hazards, and they are at risk of physical or sexual abuse, being lured into prostitution or trafficked, illness, suicide, dropping out of school, mental health problems, and substance abuse.
The problem isn't mainly that youth are unhoused, since many of them go to sleep with a roof over their head, but that youth lack the stability of a home—whether with family members or on their own.
The state of Washington created an Office of Homeless Youth (OHY) to address this problem. OHY prioritized developing a plan to achieve the Washington state legislature's mandate that “no youth is discharged from a public system of care into homelessness.” Its scope was later expanded to include all homeless youth in the state.
Approach to Learning About Homelessness
As policymakers began their work, they wanted to learn how youth become homeless. They also sought to understand the issues young people face before, during, and after interacting with various state systems, and more broadly to learn about issues facing all youth experiencing housing instability.
Consulting with lived experts—youth who have experienced homelessness—was an integral part of the learning process in Washington. In a series of meetings, youth and caregivers (parents, relatives, and foster parents) shared their stories.
Learning from Key Stakeholders
It may seem obvious that a problem-solving process should engage people with different perspectives on the problem. But recall that the U.S.-led Coalition's failure to do this contributed to the disastrous occupation of Iraq. The state of Washington did not make the same mistake in addressing the problem of youth homelessness.
Expert scholars and practitioners: They examined scholarly research concerning youth homelessness in the United States and other countries and took particular note of The Roadmap for the Prevention of Youth Homelessness, a comprehensive analysis of youth homelessness in Canada
The group of lived experts became a 22 member Steering Committee on Prevention of Youth Homelessness, representing urban, rural, and Tribal areas, including BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) and LGBTQ2+ youth, who account for a disproportionate number of homeless youth.
Mapping the Homelessness System
Policymakers used systems thinking to analyze youth homelessness in Washington as they considered leverage points for intervention. This required maps to help them explore the systems that contribute to youth homelessness and understand how to prevent or reduce it.
Identifying the Causes of Homelessness
Addressing any problem requires understanding its causes. The Canadian researchers' Roadmap organized the causes of youth homelessness in four categories.
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Mapping the Relationship Between the Causes
Some of the causal factors interact with each other, as shown in this systems map:
Young people experience conflict and abuse at home and leave.
This reduces their personal resources—material, social, and emotional.
As shown by the reinforcing loop on the left, the lack of personal resources increases their likelihood of committing theft and other criminal offenses.
Committing criminal offenses increases their likelihood of entering the juvenile justice system.
After exiting the system, they find themselves socially isolated and at risk of unemployment, thus depleting their personal resources.
As shown on the right side of the map, leaving home reduces youth's stable housing both directly and by diminishing their personal resources, including their ability to pay rent.
A decrease in stable housing increases their likelihood of couch-surfing or doubling up with unrelated people, which also increases their vulnerability to sexual exploitation and trafficking. This increases the likelihood of their being charged with criminal offenses—such as prostitution—which leads to incarceration.
However, quality counseling and care upon exiting the juvenile justice system increases the likelihood that youth will gain personal resources (e.g., through employment), which reduces their likelihood of committing offenses.
Mapping the Remedies
With these and other insights into the systems that contribute to youth homelessness, OHY wanted to understand the possibilities for ameliorating youth homelessness once it occurs and preventing youth homelessness in the first place.
Watch the video to explore some potential remedies for youth homelessness.
Solutions Informed by Lived Experts
The Steering Committee of lived experts conducted numerous interviews and proposed recommendations based on their own experiences and what they had learned. Their recommendations included:
Together with lived experts, co-design a single entry point to a comprehensive, multigenerational, preventative well-being service system, which would provide services to youth before and during crises without the involvement of Child Protective Services or the courts.
Modify zoning laws to increase high-density housing options to counter the lack of affordable housing in the state.
Employ, train, and support youth who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQ2+, neurodivergent, and/or experience physical, intellectual, or developmental disabilities as peer specialists in delivering services and system navigation across behavioral health, health and human services, schools, housing systems, and the legal system.
Require history, diversity, equity, and anti-racism training for all state agency workers.
Build strong partnerships with private sector industries to create and increase entry-level positions in high-growth industries across the state.
Divert the majority of state funding to BIPOC grassroots organizations and to “By and For” organizations—organizations led and staffed by people who have personally experienced the issues that the organization is addressing. (You'll explore this recommendation in the next module.)
Wrap-up
The case study of youth homelessness emphasizes the importance of engaging lived experts in analyzing a problem and designing solutions that address the causes of the problem from their perspective.
In Washington state, professional and lived experts helped policymakers reimagine support systems for young people and caregivers that they believed to be more effective than existing systems in preventing and ameliorating youth homelessness.
As we've seen in other examples, systems analysis pushes stakeholders to develop a greater understanding of a system. Policymakers can use systems maps to identify opportunities to intervene in a system and guide conversations about how to allocate resources.
