King County Youth Wellbeing Project

In 2026 AHSHAY is launching a prevention network, called King County Youth Wellbeing Project, to create a broader infrastructure for prevention of unstable housing and youth incarceration rooted in community leadership. The project aims to reimagine belonging for youth, moving away from punitive, isolating, illegitimizing, or fragmenting approaches, and moving toward abundance, resilience, and community-rooted care. This prevention network will create conditions for young people to thrive while simultaneously informing larger cultural and policy shifts, becoming the next cornerstone of AHSHAY’s work.

This prevention network builds directly on the learnings from Fortifying Futures grounded in an understanding of the shared roots of youth incarceration and unstable housing, as well as the importance of building protected spaces to cultivate ecosystems of prevention. It will focus on serving the most-impacted youth—such as those aging out of foster care—through a long-term, multi-year commitment. This design creates optimal conditions for cultivating trust, fostering intergenerational mentorship, and enabling young people to pursue sustained self-actualization. Programming will be youth-led and organized around creative expression, life skills development, and restorative practices, ensuring participants not only receive support, but gain agency in shaping their communities.

Core partnerships with community organizations across King County will anchor the prevention network in existing infrastructures while pushing toward systemic transformation. Collaborations will span seven primary areas identified by Fortifying Futures participants:

Our aim is that all youth involved in the project will experience at least four of the primary areas listed above. We will lead with relationship-building and common grounding to build a shared sense of purpose. We will track uptake, consistency, and sustainability of services over two years. A marker of success will be subsequent decreasing community levels of youth incarceration and youth experiencing unstable housing.

This project will combine a hyper-local implementation process with a broader countywide network-building component. Local partners will bring specialized expertise while aligning with the Fortifying Futures vision of interconnected wraparound supports.

The prevention network will serve as a convening space where organizations can build trust, share learning, and co-develop upstream strategies. It will also provide a critical opportunity to uncover and understand hidden barriers to collaboration that have previously hindered collective progress. Given the overlapping factors driving youth homelessness and incarceration, coordinated prevention efforts are not only more efficient but also more likely to be effective. The prevention network will be thoughtfully designed to foster deep relationship-building, protect time for creative problem-solving, and push back against scarcity thinking by laying the groundwork for systems-level change. It will also prioritize care for the caregivers, including organizational leaders who are doing the emotionally demanding and complex work of supporting impacted youth and families. By supporting their well-being and professional sustainability, the network will strengthen the entire ecosystem of care.

The prevention network development will be supported by funders who have been convening partners in service of these issues, as well as key players in other efforts involving multilateral collaboration. Like Fortifying Futures, the project will center youth in multigenerational cohorts. Community organizations will be involved in project planning and the implementation of belonging-oriented community programs. We will utilize participatory measurement strategies cultivated in the Fortifying Futures project to track progress and learnings, and outcomes will drive organizational policy and long-term investment decisions.