To understand youth experiencing homelessness, this UC Berkeley professor hires them

Coco Auerswald, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine faculty affiliate, has dedicated her life to working with unhoused young people as a new way to research youth homelessness. Doing research alongside them is key to learning about — and solving — youth homelessness, she says. At Berkeley, she founded Youth and Allies Against Homelessness, bringing young people affected by homelessness into the research process. The 29 paid research interns in the program have helped decide over the years which questions to ask, how to collect data, what policy proposals might entail and how to share findings.