By Andy Allen, Vice President of Placement, AYA Youth Collective
AYA Youth Collective (AYA) is a non-profit organization in Grand Rapids, MI that supports youth aged 14-24 who are experiencing housing insecurity. Everything AYA does is built upon, centered around, and imagined through the voices, opinions, and criticism of young people with lived experience who utilize our services. Whether it be a wellness program offered at our Drop-in Center, organizational strategies that shape our organizational chart, or future initiatives that guide where we head in the next 5 years, every direction chosen is because young people have claimed that AYA should help create that pathway.
So, how does AYA Youth Collective do this? And maybe more importantly, why does AYA prioritize the lived experiences of young people during decision-making?
The answer is simple—because every program and initiative AYA has ever built has been driven by young people’s voices. This has been and continues to be a proven method of promoting and creating authenticity, inclusivity, agency, community, and, ultimately, effectiveness.
Listening, Learning, then Doing
In 2012, when Lauren Gamelin VanKeulen, AYA’s CEO, and her husband Jon were first creating AYA’s housing program, the idea stemmed from young people in their community asking for more housing options for youth aged 18-24. At the time, there were four beds devoted to that age range. So, Lauren and Jon dug deeper, and they listened and learned more from the area youth about what they said they needed most:
- Privacy—they wanted their own room and didn’t want to bunk up with others.
- Responsibility—they wanted to pay rent because they needed to learn how to budget but knew they couldn’t afford market-rate rent.
- Flexibility—they didn’t want a time constraint on how long they could live at the house.
- Mentors—they wanted an adult to live with them but not be a parent. They needed someone who could offer advice, build accountability, and do life with them.
- Non-paid Mentors—they “never had an adult in their life care about them that wasn’t paid to do so.” So, the youth wanted these mentor adults to be non-paid.
Lauren and Jon took their advice and built what is now our housing program. AYA currently operates 12 duplexes where youth pay about $300 a month in rent. Each youth has their own room, and they can live there as long as they want, with the average stay being between 18 and 24 months. Mentors live on the other side of the duplex and are not paid by AYA – though they do live there rent-free.
Twelve years later, of all the young people who have lived in an AYA home, 93% have moved out into stability. AYA would argue that this is because its housing model is centered around youth’s named needs and what they prioritize as essential for their stabilization.
We also operate a Drop-in Center (formerly known as HQ Grand Rapids), where over 700 youth visit annually. When HQ started in 2014, it was born out of young people stating their needs. Runaway and homeless youth were sleeping outside, and they were having difficulty getting their basic needs met and getting connected to community resources, and they were in danger of being exploited, trafficked, or worse. The founders of HQ built what is now AYA’s Drop-in Center – a building located near downtown. It’s a space where youth can get away from the noise and access free food, free laundry, free showers, and free clothing. It’s a resource hub where 30+ community partners – including the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) – visit and come to youth so they can better access the resources available to them.
Lived Experience: It’s Our Secret Sauce
Listening to our youth with lived experience in housing insecurity when making AYA leadership decisions is our “secret sauce.” It’s why so many young people avoid homelessness or achieve stability. Based on their reported feedback, 95% of the young people we see say they feel supported, respected, and dignified, and that makes a huge difference.
Here are a few more ways AYA continues to lean into this model:
- Our measurable outcomes are centered around youth and their own definitions of success. Our logic model showcases AYA’s resources and activities and how they directly impact the effects on a young person’s life.
- We partner with a local lived-experience youth advisory board. The Youth Advisory Board (or YAB) is integral to AYA’s development as an organization. We have hired people from YAB to review our processes and protocols to ensure our programs are curated to the specific needs of our clients. YAB Members also sit on AYA’s Continuous Quality Improvement team to provide input and advice on whether AYA does what we say we do.
- We analyze client-reported data directly from our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and use it to guide our efforts as an organization. As an example, AYA catalogs all the barriers youth disclose during every interaction they have with an AYA youth advocate. We compile it into a report to track over time, and then we use the highest reported barriers to determine where we need to ramp up services.
- Every six months, we administer a standard, unchanging survey (along with some very impressive incentives) to AYA youth. We also facilitate listening sessions and create space for 1:1 feedback conversations with our CEO. In doing so, AYA addresses the issues youth name and then responds to observed trends to prevent these issues from being further perpetuated. A key part of this feedback loop is that AYA directly asks youth what they think AYA should do with their resources. How should we spend our money? What should we advocate for within the city? What programs should AYA build out, and which programs should we do away with?
AYA deeply believes in the importance and vitality of listening to youth with lived experience. And for any organization that is trying to implement these methodologies into their own practices or is trying to increase how often they do so, we would strongly encourage them to take those next steps. It truly is the number one reason why so many young people trust AYA and are utilizing our services to make strides towards health and stability. So, we will continue to enthusiastically infuse youth voices into every decision we make. And that enthusiasm will continue to grow stronger! Our primary focus on the lived experience voice, along with our values, propel us to infuse these four pillars into our work:
- Agency – Every person has power and choice.
- Authenticity – We ask. We listen. We keep things real.
- Inclusion – Every person has inherent dignity and worth to share with others.
- Community – Every person needs connection to thrive.
For more information about how AYA centers youth voice, please email Advancement@ayayouth.org. We’d love to give you a tour of our Drop-in Center and/or find ways to partner.
Andy Allen is the Vice President of Advancement for AYA Youth Collective (AYA). Although from Ohio, he’s called Grand Rapids home for the past 20 years and deeply cares about this community. When he’s not working at AYA, you can find him on stage with his improv comedy team, Pop Scholars.