by Laura Glesby The New Haven independent
Youth Continuum is shuttering its doors at the end of November due to financial straits, after nearly 60 years of providing teens and young adults with shelter, housing, mental health support, human trafficking intervention, and more.
Its upcoming closure also means that the nonprofit will not follow through on building a long-planned youth homeless shelter and community center on Grand Avenue.
The Board of Directors decided about a month ago to close the organization, according to Yari Ijeh, who has served as Youth Continuum’s interim executive director since former director Tim Maguire’s departure last April.
Youth Continuum has faced “significant deficits, both this fiscal year and the last fiscal year,” Ijeh said. “There were many efforts made to secure additional funding,” but financially, “it was just not sustainable.”
“It was a staple and a fabric of this community,” she said of the organization.
Youth Continuum has stopped accepting new shelter or housing referrals and will stop operating all of its programs, including its drop-in center on Grand Avenue, by the end of November.
For now, Ijeh said, “the youth are our number one priority.” The organization is focused on ensuring that the young people it currently serves, including those living in transitional and crisis housing programs, can continue receiving the resources they need after Youth Continuum closes.
During the 2023-24 fiscal year, Youth Continuum served 500 young people across all of its programs, including walk-in, part-time, and residential services, according to an impact report.
According to Ijeh, Youth Continuum is figuring out plans to transfer as many of its programs as possible, including those funded by state and federal grants, to other local nonprofits.
“That’s a process that is underway right now,” she said. “There’s an incredible community of providers who have joined forces with us to ensure that we identify places for the young people we currently have housed to transition into.”
Currently, the organization is providing some form of housing to 22 young adults. “There’s a plan for every single one of them,” said Ijeh.
Additionally, Ijeh said she is working to connect Youth Continuum’s 40 or so employees to other opportunities.
As the organization works on reducing its debt, it will need to sell some of the properties it owns. According to Ijeh, the East Haven site of the Bradley House, a former group home operated by Youth Continuum, is already on the market and other properties will be put up for sale soon.
Meanwhile, Youth Continuum’s long-awaited plan to build a peer-led youth homeless shelter and community center is no longer going to happen. Ijeh said that the organization had applied for a state Community Investment Fund grant in a final effort to close the funding gap for that project, but learned last week that it would not be awarded the grant.
The vision for that project grew from a partnership with Y2Y, an organization that enlists college students to work with unhoused youth around the same age. As Y2Y advocated for the Grand Avenue shelter, it connected students from local colleges to volunteer at existing Youth Continuum programs.
According to Y2Y’s director, Tim Maguire (who formerly ran Youth Continuum), the organization will remain active in New Haven. “We’re positioning ourselves to respond to the need we’re gonna see pretty soon,” he said. “The student volunteers are making plans for supply drives, clothing drives. We will plan to partner with whoever gets the funding next.”
“I believe that one of the greatest challenges that nonprofits are facing today is that of funding,” said Ijeh. Many programs are “woefully, woefully underfunded” by government grants, leading non-profits to seek out philanthropic donations to fill funding gaps. Now, “a lot of funding streams are drying out,” she said. “It’s time for a different level of creativity” to figure out how to more sustainably fund social services.
Ijeh noted that while there are transition plans for every young person currently enrolled in Youth Continuum’s services, she’s most worried about the kids who aren’t yet connected to services.
“We know the need exists,” she said, noting that on average, about 100 young people visit Youth Continuum’s drop-in center each quarter. Some come in seeking housing referrals, addiction or mental health support, domestic violence or human trafficking assistance. Others are simply looking for a place to charge their phone, do laundry, or find momentary refuge from the outdoors.
Going forward, those young people “will not have the specialized services we’ve been able to offer as an organization that has solely focused on the young adult population between the ages of 18 and 24,” Ijeh said.
“It’s starting to get cold outside,” she added.
Youth Continuum’s vacant former building at 924 Grand Ave., which was going to be the site of a Y2Y peer-led youth homeless shelter that never came to be.