It Takes More Than Child Welfare: Why Cross-Sector Partnerships Matter to Connect Education, Housing, Workforce, and Health Systems

Written by Caitlyn Eccles

Oftentimes, a young person transitioning from foster care does not experience housing, education, employment, transportation, and healthcare as separate issues. A young adult might be starting college while looking for somewhere stable to live. They may have a job but no reliable way to get there. They may be navigating a change in healthcare coverage while trying to understand financial aid, public benefits, a lease, and workplace expectations, all at the same time.   

Our systems, however, rarely operate that way.  

Child welfare addresses one set of needs while education, healthcare, and housing address distinct but critical needs. Each with its own process and doing exactly what it was designed to do.  

And for a young person there is no margin for error. That is the challenge we need to confront: A collection of good programs does not necessarily create a good system.  

‍We have to Stop Asking Child Welfare to Solve Everything

Child welfare has an essential role in preparing young people for adulthood, but expecting child welfare alone to create successful transitions misunderstands what adulthood actually requires.  

Research has demonstrated this complexity for decades.  

A Chapin Hall study in the Midwest followed more than 700 young people transitioning from foster care and examined their experiences across education, employment, housing, physical and mental health, and other areas of well-being. Researchers found challenges across multiple domains rather than within one isolated part of young people’s lives. “For many years, the needs of these young people were for the most part ignored by federal child welfare policy” (Chapin Hall, 2005).The later 2021 California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study similarly examined the same type of outcomes spanning education, employment, health, housing, public benefits, and overall well-being. That matters because outcomes in these areas do not develop independently.

Considering employment, we can create an excellent workforce program, help a young person build a resume, prepare for an interview, and connect them with an employer. But what happens if they cannot reliably get to work? Or consider education, a college can provide tuition assistance and campus resources, but those supports become considerably less powerful if a student does not know where they will sleep next month. Housing, education, employment, transportation, and health are not competing priorities. They are interdependent conditions of stability.  

The Gap Between a Referral and a Partnership

One of the easiest things for systems to call collaboration is a referral. A young person needs housing, so we give them the number for a housing organization. They need employment, so we refer them to a job site, such as LinkedIn, Indeed, or state employment resources. They need mental health support, so we give them the name of a behavioral health provider.   

Technically, multiple organizations have now participated, but from a young person’s perspective, very little may have been coordinated. They may still have to determine who to call, explain their circumstances again, determine whether they qualify, collect another set of documents, complete another application, meet another deadline, arrange transportation, and figure out what to do if something goes wrong. In that model, the young person becomes the system integrator. That should concern us. The burden of making fragmented institutions work together should not fall most heavily on the person with the least institutional power. This means cross-sector partnerships require us to move beyond asking, “Where can we send this young person?” We should be asking, “What happens after they get there?”

What Would Change If We Designed Around a Life Instead of a Program?

This is where cross-sector partnership becomes more than a phrase. It means organizations establish shared goals and understand their responsibilities before a young person reaches a crisis. It means warm handoffs rather than phone numbers. It means examining whether eligibility requirements, enrollment periods, documentation requirements, and timelines across organizations unintentionally contradict one another. It means creating appropriate ways for institutions to communicate that way young people are not repeatedly responsible for carrying information between systems. And sometimes it means recognizing that the outcome on organization cares about depends heavily on something another organization controls.  

Research provides compelling examples of these relationships. A Chapin Hall analysis of employment among former foster youth found strong connection between education and employment. Young people with high school diplomas or GEDs were twice as likely to be employed as those who had not completed high school, while those with at least some colleges were more than three times more likely to be employed. The researchers specifically pointed to the need for greater collaboration between child welfare and other institutions serving young adults. More recent research provided another example. In the 2025 Evaluation of My First Place, a program combining subsidized housing with intensive case management for young people in extended foster care, found that program completers were 1.7 times more likely to be employed and had on average 65% higher earnings than nonparticipants. Longer participation, planned exits, and exits to stable housing were also associated with stronger employment outcomes. The lesson is larger than any individual program. If we want better workforce outcomes, we may need to think about transportation. If we want housing stability, we may need to think about employment and health. Cross-sector work is not peripheral to outcomes. In many cases, it is how those outcomes become possible.  

Young People Can See the Gaps Institutions Cannot

There is another problem with designing solutions entirely from inside institutions: every organization sees only part of the experience.Young people are the only ones who are living the entire experience. They know that the housing application requires a document they cannot easily obtain. They know that the workforce program ends after the last bus leaves. They know that one program’s eligibility requirements conflict with another program’s timeline. Those experiences are not anecdotes to collect after a system has already been designed. They are information about how the system functions. If we are serious about cross-sector partnership, lived experience cannot simply be represented at the end of the process. Young people should have meaningful opportunities to influence how programs, partnerships, policies, and processes are designed, including through compensated participation, co-design, and shared decision-making. That is not simply about inclusion; it is about building better systems.

The Next Innovation May Be Between Our Organizations

There is tremendous value in improving individual programs. We should continue doing it, but the next major opportunity may not be another program. It may be the connection between the programs we already have.  

Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Foster Youth to Independence initiative, for example, illustrated why addressing housing for young people leaving foster care inherently requires work across institutional boundaries: Housing authorities administer the voucher while child welfare agencies and other partners play roles in identifying eligible young people and connecting them to support. That kind of thinking should extend beyond any single initiative. Education institutions should know what happens to students when housing becomes unstable. Workforce organizations should understand the transportation barrier. Housing providers should understand how employment requirements interact with education. Healthcare organizations should understand what happens to continuity of care during major transitions. And child welfare should not be expected to coordinate all of this alone.  

The question for leaders across these sectors is no longer:  

“What services do we provide?”

It is:  

“How does what we provide connect to everything else a young person needs?”

That question requires all of us to look beyond organizational boundaries. Where does your organization intersect with a young person’s transition out of foster care? What happens after you make a referral? Which of your policies unintentionally create barriers somewhere else? Who is responsible for the space between your organization and the next one? And, perhaps most importantly, have young people themselves been given enough power to tell us where those connections are failing?  

No single institution can guarantee a successful transition to adulthood, but we can build a system in which young people no longer have to do the work of connecting every institution themselves. That is what meaningful cross-sector partnerships should ultimately accomplish.