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Amplifying Youth Voices to Find Solutions to Housing Instability in Detroit
Summary
A multi-year collaboration between U-M's Poverty Solutions and the Detroit Phoenix Center aims to include the perspectives of Detroit youth who have experienced housing instability in conversations about homelessness response.
Poverty Solutions and DPC co-produced a mini-documentary in 2025 that highlights the role youth played in shaping Detroit's new youth rapid rehousing program.
Poverty Solutions offered a series of communications workshops to young leaders involved Detroit Phoenix Center's Summer Leadership Academy in 2022 and 2023. Workshop topics included owning your narrative, defining your point of view, using data to support your point, and crafting advocacy statements.
Youth put their communication skills into action in on-camera interviews on what giving back to the community looks like to them, and they wrote poems that explored their personal identities and how issues they care about impact their community. They also worked in groups to develop advocacy statements on the issues that are most important to them, which included mental health, basic needs, and criminal legal system reform.
