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Youth on the brink of homelessness in Redmond have new resources to stay housed on the horizon.

J Bar J Youth Services, a nonprofit that provides support for youth experiencing homelessness in Central Oregon, plans to use funding from increased state investment announced last week to help prevent homelessness among youth in the city.

A new program, called a “basic center” and funded by a one-time $50,000 grant from the state’s Department of Human Services, should open in the next month and will work to keep kids housed through family mediation services and youth homelessness prevention, according to Eliza Wilson, a program director for J Bar J.

“We’ve always offered some services in Redmond, but this will really change to be full time in Redmond, at the Redmond office, focused on the Redmond community,” Wilson said.

“A lot of times, the focus has been Bend because there’s more people in Bend, but really Redmond has grown, and we need to have more resources for youth there.”

Family mediation can prevent homelessness from the outset of family issues, Wilson said.

If a family is having trouble with a child’s behavior, for example, mediators provide strategies to improve family communication before a child runs away or gets kicked out. And if mediators find a child isn’t living in a safe environment, early intervention can help a child get emergency shelter or other services.

Keeping families together and stopping homelessness before it happens is one of the key strategies to ending homelessness altogether — especially for youth, since unhoused youth are more likely to grow up to be unhoused in adulthood, according to Wilson.

Currently, Central Oregon’s only basic center is in Bend. That center, opened in 1992, now assists between 300 and 400 families a year, according to Wilson.

The Redmond School District’s reported homeless youth population has declined from 5.3% of the district’s students in the 2015-16 school year to 2.3% in the 2019-20 school year. Still, the basic center could provide services for the 172 students classified as homeless in the latest count, plus an untold number of other students and families who could face homelessness without intervention.

District officials say they’re excited about the plans. More accessible resources for youth are “very needed” in Redmond, especially for youth in crisis, according to Kara Pileggi, the district’s homeless liaison.

“Many that I have worked with strive to be as self-sufficient as possible,” Pileggi told The Bulletin in an email. “Having a place to connect them to within our town will greatly benefit their specific needs, and in turn their future.”

State funds for the program were approved during the last legislative session as a part of House Bill 2544, which paved the way for $3.6 million in grants statewide for programs supporting youth in homelessness.

The grant cycle represents a significant increase in support for youth experiencing homelessness, more than doubling the state’s biennial budget dedicated to the population and providing funding for programs in smaller and more rural corners of the state.

In particular, the funding will allow programs in some rural areas to flesh out their services, according to Matthew Rasmussen, the state’s Runaway and Homeless Youth Program coordinator.

“We were able to really go from that into some much more hefty investment in those areas, which I think will only turn the needle at the local level,” Rasmussen said.

Still, the grant funding only scratches the surface of need, he said. His department could only fund less than half of what service providers requested through the grant process, and the grants are one-time, meaning programs will need to find other sources of funding if they want to keep them operating.

For some communities, though, Rasmussen is hopeful the boosted funding will provide much-needed visibility for programs serving youth in homelessness and push communities to support them.

“The way that youth homelessness gets tackled is not from grant cycle to grant cycle with the state,” Rasmussen said. “It’s a community that is doing planning on homelessness — the global need of homelessness, and incorporating a youth focus into the homelessness response is really how that will get taken care of.”