Over 700,000 unaccompanied minors experience homelessness in the United States. During early developmental stages, being unhoused can seriously impact individuals’ future housing and health outcomes. To accelerate homeless exits, Missouri and 12 other states granted legal rights and protections to unhoused minors to access housing and other services independently.

Still, Missouri’s Balance of State Continuum of Care (BoS CoC) observed that minor youth faced longer wait times and additional barriers to housing resources than adults. In response, a provider-initiated qualified minor verification form (QMVF) was developed in 2021 for youth aged 16-17. The form serves as a legal certification for qualified minor status, a type of emancipation that does not require a judge’s determination. 

To determine whether the form was serving its intended purpose in rural Missouri, the Housing Solutions Lab awarded a grant to Hsun-Ta Hsu, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina, and Sarah Myers Tlapek, Ph.D., Director of Community Research for Community Partnership of Southeast Missouri (CPSEMO) and adjunct instructor at the College of Health Sciences at the University of Missouri to study its implementation. The investigators’ findings indicate that both youth and service providers find the form useful, and it has the potential to reduce demand on Missouri’s court system, create an official pathway towards independent living, and connect youth with services that might otherwise be unavailable. However, greater awareness among service providers is needed to disseminate the form and determine its effectiveness.  

Read the referenced paper on housing sustainability for homeless youth here. Learn more about the Lab’s research grant awardees and how the Lab supports research on our Research page.  

For questions about this research, contact Hsun-Ta Hsu, Ph.D., from the University of North Carolina, and Sarah Myers Tlapek, Ph.D., from Community Partnership of Southeast Missouri (CPSEMO) and adjunct instructor at the College of Health Sciences at the University of Missouri

For support on how your city can assist unhoused youth, contact the Housing Solutions Lab team at Ask the Lab.