After the successful completion of multiple pilot programs, we proudly revealed our new expansion modules at the end of 2024. We are excited to share even more training opportunities designed to complement our existing programs and support the needs of the providers working directly with youth, families, and chosen family hosts.
As you know, in the homelessness field, it is often the direct-care providers who become a youth’s first and sometimes only consistent connection. These are the individuals who:
- Look for young people when they go missing
- Understand their journey with empathy and depth
- Celebrate every accomplishment with genuine joy
- And too often, become the only ones who grieve when a young person’s life is lost
CloseKnit recognizes the emotional weight of this role and the transformative power it holds. That is why our expanded training lineup includes skill-building, legal guidance, chosen family justice tools, disability-focused resources, emotional intelligence development, youth life-skills curriculum, and system-focused training through an equity lens.
CloseKnit Training Series: Building a System of Belonging
Grounded in evidence. Rooted in relationship. Ready for impact.
CloseKnit’s training series offers a bold reframe and practical toolkit for providers, community organizations, educators, and system partners committed to ending youth homelessness. Drawing from original research and field-tested tools, this training suite builds provider capacity to center chosen family, informal support systems, and culturally attuned care.
CloseKnit’s Training Series is rooted in community-driven research and real-world practice. We help organizations reimagine care for youth facing homelessness centering belonging, natural support networks, and system accountability.
This training suite equips direct service staff, supervisors, leaders, and cross-sector collaborators with tools to shift organizational culture and practice from transactional service models to transformational relationships.
THE CHALLENGE
Traditional systems often overlook the everyday heroes trusted adults, extended kin, and chosen family who help youth survive homelessness. Without investment in these natural supports, youth remain disconnected from the most powerful source of long-term stability: belonging.
THE CLOSEKNIT SOLUTION
Our evidence-based System Change Model helps organizations move from transactional services to transformational relationships. We train and coach teams to recognize and engage natural supports as part of the solution not a workaround.
ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT
We work with leadership teams, programs, and departments to:
- Integrate natural supports into policy, practice, and supervision
- Align services with federal homeless prevention priorities
- Shift organizational culture toward connection, dignity, and long-term belonging
- Build capacity for data collection, story-telling, and equity accountability
- Equip staff to support youth with emotional intelligence and relational consistency
OUTCOMES THAT MATTER
Organizations that implement the CloseKnit model:
- Increase youth housing stability through informal networks
- Reduce burnout and compassion fatigue among staff
- Improve racial equity and cultural alignment in services
- Strengthen community partnerships rooted in trust
Organizational Change & Implementation Track
Transforming systems to center natural supports at every level
Natural Supports Implementation for System Change
This deep-dive, multi-session training equips leadership and frontline teams to integrate natural supports, chosen family, and informal care models across the entire organization, department, or program.
Participants will:
- Understand the foundations of CloseKnit’s systems change framework
- Map current organizational practices and identify gaps
- Design strategies to align policies, intake, supervision, and service delivery with natural support integration
- Build leadership and staff capacity to sustain culture change
- Learn how to track and report outcomes aligned with federal and local funding streams
Ideal for: Executive teams, program directors, change champions, DEI leaders, quality improvement staff, and funders.
Can be delivered as:
🔹 Full-day strategic planning session
🔹 3-part organizational workshop series
🔹 Custom implementation coaching (in-person or virtual)
Implementing the Welcome Home Model
A culture shift to recognize relationships as resources
As a core component of systems change, the Welcome Home Model offers a framework for cultivating a culture of hospitality, emotional safety, and mutual respect between youth and providers. This training supports full implementation across your organization by:
- Embedding the Welcome Home philosophy in staff onboarding, supervision, and accountability structures
- Coaching staff to recognize and engage the natural supports youth already trust
- Operationalizing relationship-first practices in service delivery, home-sharing programs, and transitional care
- Equipping teams to uphold boundaries, expectations, and safety planning without sacrificing warmth or dignity
- Creating shared language and expectations that center belonging and chosen family
Research-Based Foundations
Published by Creating Home Inc. & CloseKnit Research Team
Our training series draws on peer-reviewed, community-grounded research that reimagines the path to home and belonging for youth facing instability.
- Creating Home in Community
Reframing and resourcing shared housing with chosen family and kin as part of the solution to youth homelessness.
(Published April 2023) - Defining Permanent Connection
Centering and strengthening informal supports as lifelong safety nets.
(Published April 2023) - Building a Host Home Model Around Chosen Family
Creating culturally rooted, trust-based host models that reflect youth realities.
(Published April 2023) - Bend and Beyond
Highlighting the value of youth-adult relationships that emerge organically between couch-hopping youth and community hosts.
(Published April 2020) - The Cost of Caring
Exploring the material and emotional realities of adults who informally host unstably housed youth.
(Published June 2022)
Training & Development Tracks
Facilitator Training Series
- Circle Mapping Foundations
Learn to facilitate CloseKnit’s core practice for identifying, visualizing, and deepening youth support networks. - Circle Mapping + Emotional Intelligence Curriculum
Strengthen facilitation with tools that support youth in emotional awareness, empathy, and boundary-setting. - Circle Mapping + Life Skills Development
A comprehensive personal development toolkit combining social-emotional learning, self-awareness, and decision-making.
Skill-Building for Providers & System Partners
- Youth Development & Risk Factors
Training for understanding individual needs and root causes of instability among youth. - Staff Development Through a Quality Lens
Focus on reflective practice, cultural humility, and strengths-based approaches. - Emotional Intelligence for Providers
Build adult capacity for self-regulation, compassion, and attunement in high-stress environments. - Life Skills Coaching for Youth
Equip staff to support youth through developmental milestones and life transitions.
Targeted Modules
- African American Youth & Kinship Culture
Centering cultural identity, community resilience, and intergenerational healing. - Homeless Families and Children
Interventions and practices tailored to multigenerational instability. - Concentrated Disadvantage & Community Allostatic Stress
Understanding the systemic weight communities carry and how it impacts healing. - Cross-Cultural Provider–Client Relationships
Tools for building authentic, anti-oppressive connections across cultural differences. - Compassion Fatigue & Provider Resilience
Practices for navigating burnout and sustaining purpose in trauma-exposed work. - Federal Homeless Prevention Framework Integration
Aligning CloseKnit’s innovations with federal strategies and funding streams.
Tools & Resources
- Chosen Family Justice Guides
Advocacy-centered guides for protecting and empowering chosen family structures. - Disability Services Guide
Navigating support systems for youth with physical, developmental, or cognitive disabilities. - Legal Navigation Toolkit:
- Shared Expectation Agreements (for youth and hosts)
- Legal Guides for Homeowner Hosts
- Legal Guides for Renter Hosts
- Youth Involved in Legal Systems Guide
- Legal Support Guide for Minor Youth
- Disability Legal Rights & Services Guide
- “Under the Radar or Above Board?”
Navigating the gray areas of informal hosting with confidence and compliance.
Ready to Bring CloseKnit Training to Your Team?
We offer virtual and in-person training, customized to your organization’s needs and rooted in equity, healing, and practical wisdom. Whether you’re a school, shelter, nonprofit, or system partner this training invites you to reimagine support not as a service, but as belonging.
These trainings are vital tools for providers across the homelessness continuum especially now. With the state of the current system, staff turnover, emotional exhaustion, and rising caseloads, it is more important than ever to offer education that:
- holds people in the gap,
- increases real-time skill application,
- reignites compassion and engagement,
- and strengthens the permanent connections that keep youth safe.
We are also proud to offer customized training for agencies, coalitions, school districts, shelters, host home programs, and community-based organizations.
If you or your collective would like more information, collaboration, or scheduling details, please reach out.
We would love to support your staff and strengthen the connections that matter most.
Thank you for celebrating Give to the Max Day with us and thank you for your ongoing commitment to youth, families, and chosen family networks across Minnesota.
Download and explore practical, relationship-centered tools designed to support youth, chosen families, hosts, providers, and systems leaders navigating housing instability and complex life transitions.
These guides combine lived experience, community wisdom, and evidence-informed strategies to help strengthen communication, clarify expectations, reduce barriers, and build lasting pathways toward stability and belonging. Whether you are supporting a young person directly, shaping programs, advocating for policy change, or seeking guidance for your own hosting arrangement, the CloseKnit Decision Guides offer compassionate, actionable resources grounded in connection, dignity, and long-term community care.
We describe how increased household costs and lease and benefits restrictions can impact the stability of informal hosting arrangements, as well as the strategies hosts and youth mobilized to address them. We place hosts’ instability in the context of intergenerational poverty and structural racism, reframing material challenges as opportunities to strengthen the village of support youth need to make sustained exits from homelessness.
VanMeeter M, Curry SR, Tully BA, Ault S, Nesmith A, White J. (2022) The costs of caring: Navigating material challenges when adults informally host youth facing homelessness. Youth & Society (June 9)
Findings suggest that informal hosting arrangements can include support beyond provision of basic housing needs, that hosts sometimes play a social service role, and that youth and hosts often develop family-like ties. These findings challenge the existing narrative of couch hopping as uniformly negative, and suggest that expanding services for youth facing homelessness to support informal hosting arrangements may be warranted.
Curry SR, VanMeeter M, Tully BA, Ault S, Garst N, Adam K, Nesmith A, White J. (2021) Beyond a bed: Supportive connections forged between youth who are couch hopping and adult hosts. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 38(1), 13-26.