Creating Homes & Hope for Homeless Youth & Students

From its roots as a shelter for adolescent Latinos in 1989, Jovenes has become a leading provider of support services for homeless youth by recognizing, as Executive Director Andrea Marchetti says, that “homelessness is not just a housing problem.”

Since taking the helm in 2010, he has ambitiously expanded Jovenes’ mission, building a continuum of care to help the youth it serves lead productive, self-sufficient lives. That portfolio includes short- and long-term housing options, rigorous case management, and partnerships to address needs like healthcare, mental health, employment and education. In recent years, Jovenes’ housing capacity has quadrupled to accommodate 400 youth, and its staff has grown from 10 to 75.

Marchetti’s team often discovers hidden populations and unmet needs of vulnerable youth. In 2015, Jovenes organized community college tours to encourage its older clients to enroll. As college officials pitched higher education as a stepping stone out of poverty, they surprised Jovenes staffers by asking for help with their own homeless crisis.

Turns out, one in five students at Los Angeles-area commuter colleges has no permanent home to commute from.

“We encountered a problem that even we weren’t fully aware of,” says Eric Hubbard, Director of Development and Strategic Partnerships. So Jovenes got right to work on a solution. The result is the College Success Initiative (CSI), a pioneering student-housing strategy that started in partnership with community colleges and has expanded to four-year schools.

Now in its sixth year, CSI has given over 200 students one less thing to worry about as they pursue their degrees. It’s working: Virtually all the participants have maintained steady housing and almost two-thirds have graduated or are still enrolled – putting these hardship students nearly on par with overall graduation rates at community colleges. CSI’s 42-strong class of ‘21, which includes two graduates from December 2020, earned diplomas ranging from associate’s degrees from Cerritos College to the program’s first master’s graduate from California State University Long Beach.

Thanks to Jovenes’ success and its advocacy for California to fund programs supporting students experiencing homelessness, CSI has become the model for other communities where housing insecurity is a major impediment to finishing college. The initiative is just one example of how Jovenes innovates and tailors solutions that benefit homeless youth far beyond its service area in southeast L.A. County.

“I’m proud that we try to be a learning organization, to understand what the need is before just coming out with ideas and pushing those ideas from top down,” says Marchetti.

Jovenes’ novel solutions include “The Village,” California’s first college-housing project exclusively for homeless students. Cerritos College bought land near its campus, and Jovenes leases the units to provide no-cost housing for 28 students. Working with L.A. County, Jovenes converted part of the shuttered Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey into the area’s first emergency shelter solely for young women. Opened in 2021, the 20-bed facility is a metaphor for Jovenes’ mission: A grim former incarceration center is now a welcoming, safe space with support services to steer homeless youth toward a more promising future.