Covenant House

In 34 cities across five countries, Covenant House builds bridges to hope for young people facing homelessness and survivors of human trafficking, meeting their immediate needs for food, clothing, protection, and medical care, and supporting them to advance their goals of education and employment. Covenant House encompasses a robust network of "houses," with best-in-class services and a shared commitment to unconditional love, absolute respect, and relentless support for each young person who walks through our doors. Founded as a drop-in center in New York City in 1972, Covenant House now serves tens of thousands of children and youth every year in our residential, outreach, and drop-in programs. Our dedicated staff across the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Canada employ a strengths-based, trauma-informed practice model that helps young people discover and develop their resilience to overcome adversity now and into the future.

Covenant House envisions and works toward a world where every young person has a safe place to sleep

Goal One: Improve the quality of core programs and improve our impact

Goal Two: Enhance our capacity and standing as a data-driven learning organization

Goal Three: Grow our housing continuum to meet the needs of even more young people experiencing homelessness

In 2020, Covenant House International piloted a new Career Ladders Initiative to provide leadership training and professional development and advancement opportunities for our staff. The initiative kicked off with a Leadership Mentoring Pilot, which matched individuals at different levels of experiences and career tenure with mentors within the organization. Mentors and mentees met over a six-month period to focus on professional growth and career goals. This work also included a career mapping exercise.

Beginning with what was revealed during the pandemic about socio-economic disparities, followed by a racial reckoning across our world, and now a collective recovery that is exposing new weaknesses in our systems, Covenant House has established a new set of imperatives that obligates our federation to do a deep dive into equity, inclusion, and diversity in our own spaces. While the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the countries where Covenant House serves, the racial reckoning in the U.S. also had deep implications for our work. Nearly 90% of our youth are young people of color, and 58% are Black or African American. In listening sessions across our houses, we learned how deeply disturbed they were by the events we all witnessed. Covenant House felt obliged to do a deep dive into equity, inclusion, and diversity in our own spaces. We hired experts to evaluate our environment, hiring and promotion practices, and management of implicit and explicit bias. We created a DEI department with a C-suite-level leader. And we are in the process of building a strategic DEI plan, with goals and targets, to guide our implementation of DEI principles at every level. Over the past year, our youth called on us to amplify their voices and revisit the ways in which we share their stories. With their input, we rewrote our youth engagement principles on the basis of ethical storytelling and trained our development staff across our federation in their use. Ethical storytelling recognizes the youth as protagonists and owners of their own story, with control over how and for how long their testimonies and experiences may be shared. While this can be challenging for various reasons, we recognize the singular value of heeding the voices of our youth. In this same period, we have been expanding and refreshing our facilities, and it is the input of our youth that has had the greatest impact in the design or redesign of spaces meant for them and their journeys.