Homework Starts with Home Research Partnership

The Homework Starts with Home Research Partnership is a collaborative state-university-school-community project designed to integrate multisystem administrative data and analyze it in order to produce and disseminate high quality evidence pertinent to addressing the State and national challenge of student homelessness.

Homelessness among children and youth is a complex but tractable challenge requiring integrated system approaches. Through the University of Minnesota Grand Challenges Initiative, a research partnership was created to focus on ending student homelessness and mitigating its consequences for individuals, families, communities, and society.

Our project team began by designing and implementing an evaluation of the Minnesota State program to address student homelessness, grounded in rental assistance, called “Homework Starts with Home.” The program awarded funding to three pilot rental assistance programs and five additional programs in a second round of programming implemented more recently. Our project engaged multiple partners from the University, State departments of Education and Housing, and other agencies to bring together administrative datasets for analysis.

This project represents an extraordinary opportunity to align University expertise with an interagency State initiative on homelessness. We have engaged government agencies, schools, and nonprofits across Minnesota, with the support of a philanthropic funding collaborative, collectively aiming to eliminate the threat of homelessness to educational success and human capital development in children and youth.