Connor Schoen, co-founder of Breaktime in Boston

Connor Schoen, co-founder of Breaktime in Boston, thoughtfully addresses the root causes of young adult homelessness and effective measures to break the persistent cycle of homelessness.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome back to What's at Risk. I'm Mike Christian. Break
Time co founders Connor Shoon and Tony Schue met as
undergraduate students at Harvard while working at the Wide to
Wise shelter for young adults experiencing homelessness. After noticing young
adults staying at the shelter wanted to work and learning

(00:23):
that stable employment is the most critical factor in achieving
stable housing, they founded break Time in twenty eighteen with
a mission to break the cycle of young adult homelessness.
In twenty twenty one, Honor and Tony were winners of
Forbes' thirty Under thirty Award for Social Impact. Well, hello everyone,

(00:46):
We're here with Connor Shoon, co founder and executive director
of break Time. Break Time's mission is to break the
cycle of homelessness by equipping young adults with the job
and financial security they need to establish housing security. Connor,
you co founded break Time in twenty eighteen and have
dedicated yourself to this mission. Maybe tell us a little

(01:09):
bit about your background and your path in life.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, first of all, thank you so much Mike for
having me on the show. It's always great to have
the opportunity to share more about the work, and it's
really important that people know about it. My journey with
break Time, it really all started back in twenty seventeen
when I was working at a youth shelter called Why
to Why in Cambridge. Why To Why I work specifically
with eighteen to twenty four year olds experiencing homelessness, which

(01:35):
is a really unique demographic of young people for whom
homelessness has come because of transitioning out of the foster
care system, because of getting kicked out after coming out,
and other reasons that you really impede a young person's
ability to enter adulthood, to explore who they are, to
explore what they want to do, and to do all

(01:56):
the things that every single young person deserves the opportunities
and work to do. And so when I was nineteen,
when I was working at this shelter, I was in
my own process of coming out when I realized that
forty percent of young people experiencing homelessness are LGBTQ plus
and the experience I had working in the shelter with
young people my age who are experiencing an incredibly different

(02:19):
set of circumstances was something that completely changed my life
inspired me to be more authentic to who I am
and also inspired me to start break Time because I
saw the gaps in the system, in the ways in
which these young people were not being fully supported, and specifically,
as you mentioned in the intro, there's a gap when

(02:39):
it comes to job and financial security for young people.
We all need job in financial security to sustain housing.
And while there are housing organizations that exist, I really
saw an opportunity to start something new to connect young
people with the economic opportunities that can help them actually
sustain that housing.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I saw stat which is amazing to me, one in
ten young people ages eighteen to twenty four experience homelessness
in a given year in the United States. That seems
like a staggering number to me. You touched on some
of the reasons, but what are some of the underlying
causes of that, because that's just ten percent of our
young people? Seems crazy.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
That stat, out of shape at Hall at the University
of Chicago, implies that over four million young people in
a given year will experience some form of homelessness, and
I want to emphasize a few key things about that stat.
One is that the way it defines homelessness is broad
in a way that it should be broad because the

(03:39):
young people that are counted in the surveys experiencing homelessness
include young people who have been CouchSurfing, who are doubled up,
who are living somewhere but not on a lease, who
are living somewhere but it's unsafe or inadequate for their needs,
or they're living with someone who's unsafe and violent. And

(04:00):
so when you think about all those ways in which
you can be housing and secure, not just living on
the street, not just living in a shelter, but all
of these other aspects that can influence housing and security,
it's a much broader spectrum than we think, and a
break time, we're committed to really working upstream to ensure
that we're not only addressing folks who are in crisis

(04:23):
with their housing, who might have lost housing, who are
on the streets, who are in shelters, but working upstream
with folks who are in unstable housing situations that can
be rectified if they can get on the right path
to economic stability and be able to afford and sustain safe,
adequate housing for themselves. It's something we share a lot
about our great time because it reminds us all that

(04:44):
homelessness is not a narrow issue. It's a broad issue
that affects millions and millions of people, and for young people,
if we invest in the right solutions to get them
on a path to economic sustainability, we can actually prevent
the type of homelessness that's more visible that we see
in our day to day lives by helping those young
people break the cycle and build stability for themselves.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
You reference, and a big part of Break Times mission
is job security. And you know, homelessness is such a
controversial topic. I hear things all the time and there's
a variety of different perspectives on it. Often you hear
why can't they just get a job? So what are
those the individuals that are facing homelessness and experiencing homelessness.

(05:28):
What are the challenges to just getting a job?

Speaker 2 (05:31):
This is something that I saw firsthand when working at
the Why to Wi Shelter and have seen firsthand ever
since in building up Break Times work. There are many
many barriers to young people experiencing homelessness getting a job.
The number one thing is a lack of stability in
their day to day lives. They might be looking for

(05:51):
a place to sleep every single night, which takes time, energy, work,
and involves a ton of stress. It means that they're
probably having they're probably exhausted, having underslept, having slept in
not great conditions, and constantly fighting for stability. Also, alongside

(06:12):
that lack of housing stability comes food insecurity and other
challenges that get in the way of them being able
to execute with excellence on a day to day and
their job. And that's really the number one issues that
lack of stability, and that's something that we help young
people to navigate so they can overcome that. But they're
also additional barriers. One of them is that getting an

(06:32):
ID for a young person, even if they've lived in
the same place their entire life, can be very hard
because when you've moved around a lot, and when you're
potentially estranged from your parents, you don't have access to
all the same documentation or it might be completely lost.
Things like your birth certificate might be long gone. So

(06:53):
there's barriers logistically as well as barriers in terms of
folks stability. And the last thing I'll say is that's
just there's just a lot of stigma. There's a lot
of stigmatization and discrimination of folks experiencing housingness that happens
in the screening process. But I think more importantly than
just getting a job, all of these factors also make
it challenging to maintain a job, and having a lack

(07:15):
of stability makes it so hard to show up as
your best self at work every day and put in
your all because the entire day all you can think
about is the fact that you didn't have dinner, breakfast,
that you don't have a place to sleep tonight, and
being expected to perform with excellence in those conditions is
almost impossible. Folks are losing jobs within a few weeks

(07:38):
and they're going back to square one of having no savings,
having no access to housing. So if we can't help
people overcome that initial barrier, they're just going to get
stuck in a cycle unless they're tremendously resilient and more
resilient than almost anyone I know, and being able to
work with excellence under such adverse conditions.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Now, you just use the word cycle, and I often
hear that term the cycle of homelessness. What exactly is
that cycling? I think by what you just talked about
preceiving this question, I can infer a bit of it,
But what's the cycle of homelessness? And then what are
some of the ways that break time breaks that cycle exactly?

Speaker 2 (08:17):
So, as you alluded to, that's actually where our name
comes from. And the inspiration behind that was the fact
that I get to know a lot of people really
while working at the shelter. And one of the things
that you really want to see is after they leave
the shelter, you don't actually want to see them back
there ever again, because you hope that they're being given
a path and opportunity to stability and that they never

(08:40):
have to go back to a situation where they're having
to stay in a shelter. Unfortunately, all too often I
saw folks coming back. They had gotten a job for
three or four weeks, that started to get income, they
had found another place to say, and then something happened.
They're being set up for failure because there weren't enough
supports in place and they didn't have access to the

(09:03):
right job opportunity that fit their interest in needs and
have access to the right housing opportunity that was safe
and adequate for them. And so they could find these
short stints of stability, but without a really robust pathway
into a long term, stable life, and without long term
supports and services, they were just falling back to square

(09:27):
one because they didn't have the right supports in place.
If you don't have the job security needed to have
the income needed for housing, then you're not going to
have housing at housing security. If you don't have housing security,
as they describe, it's incredibly hard to secure and sustain
a job. So that's really the cycle. Our program model

(09:49):
has three million parts. Launch Pad, which is three weeks
of job readiness training and financial literacy that happens at
the beginning to get folks work ready. It's all paid,
it's stipend it, so we're investing in their financial security.
We're providing wrap around supports even before day one to
help them figure out short term housing solutions that can

(10:11):
give them the stability to engage in that opportunity. And
then after Launchpad is lift Off, which is a three
month paid job placement where we actually hire and staff
young people to work at other job sites based on
their career interests, everything from hospitals to restaurants and everything
in between. During these three months, they get a great
job opportunity that they can potentially turn into a full,

(10:34):
full time, long term job while having our support in
us being the employer, so they don't hit that three
to four week mark something happens they lose their job.
We actually provide a tremendous amount of flexibility. They can
take two weeks off, they can work with our team
to figure out an individual path forward so that they
can get through that first three months, have that on

(10:56):
their resume, have a great relationship with an employer, and
then for the long term, through our Stable Orbit program,
we provide three years of continue rapp brand support to
really help young people fully overcome that sort of initial
inertia to getting housing secure, jobs secure, and financial secure
and help them get on a long term path of

(11:17):
success so that this cycle doesn't repeat itself. So that's
really our strategy through that three part model. Every single
young person needs a little bit of something different, and
that's why every young person has a pathway coach on
our team, a social worker who's trained to work with
them on their individual needs.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
How do you find young people to come into your program?
How are they referred to you? It's probably a variety
of different ways that you bring them into your program.
Maybe just touch on a few.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
At the end of the day, most of our recruitment
is done through referrals from other organizations places like why
to why We're young people are staying, other housing organizations,
organizations providing other services to young adults, and it really
creates room for a partnership between break Time and these
other organizations, where we can provide the services we're best at,

(12:07):
they can provide the services their best at. We can
bring in other partners for gaps that exist, and all
together we can solve the problem versus solving part of
the problem and just having to cycle repeat itself. And
so we find that partnerships and doing cross referrals, both
having young people referred to break Time and us referring

(12:28):
young people to other organization services is extremely critical and
is at the heart of our value of collaborative innovation
or working together to create social change. Young people can
also apply directly to Break Time on our website at
break time dot org slash youth.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Do you find that homelessness is generational?

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Absolutely? Intergenerational poverty is a huge driver of homelessness. A
lot of the young people we serve have experienced homelessness
in their youth under the age of eighteen, they've experienced
family homelessness, and many young people actually become homeless. For
those who don't become homeless because of a family conflict,

(13:11):
they might have a great relationship with their family, but
their family isn't able to support them financially. It's such
a privilege to have a family that can give you
a financial safety net and can support you in times
of need, or that owns property, owns a house that
you can stay in if other things aren't working out
in your life and you need to save on rent.
And that is one of those fundamental things that only

(13:33):
a very select few folks have access to, and for
all the other young adults, the second they turn eighteen,
they're treated like an adult in the legal system and
the benefit system. And so intergenerational poverty directly feeds into
young adult homelessness because young people who don't have that
financial safety net, who don't have the resources to support

(13:55):
them going into young adulthood, aren't able to one get
housing and to invest necessarily in education or something that's
not paid because the urgency of every dollar they make
is so high. So we see that repeated again and again,
and I think that's Another way in which homelessness is
cyclical is that family homelessness can be get young adult homelessness,

(14:20):
can be get adult homelessness, can be get family homelessness,
and the cycle just continues.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
Homelessness is a national problem. I grew up in California.
When I go back to Los Angeles and I lived
in San Francisco a bit, it's just dramatic what you
see on the streets in certain parts of both of
those cities. It's heartbreaking on so many levels. You've talked
a lot about the work that you've done and the

(14:46):
process that you have and the cycle of homelessness. What
is the root problem? Obviously poverty is, and people speculato
it's drugs and alcohol and mental health and all those
types of things, But those aren't the root problems, I
don't think. I think there's something even more basic to that.
What are your thoughts about that.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
In the United States, we've decided as a society that
housing is not a basic human right, and that is
I think the fundamental reason why homelessness exists. It's truly
a policy decision. And I say that first and foremost
because I truly believe that homelessness is a solvable problem.
We've seen it grow, we've seen it evolve. It can

(15:28):
make people feel hopeless that there's nothing we can do
to solve this problem. But there's key systemic change that
can happen to completely eradicate this problem, and there are
key things that are not happening that are perpetuating and
exacerbating the problem. Our benefit programs and our social supports
should ensure that folks have access to safe, affordable, sustainable housing,

(15:53):
and once we provide that, that gives them a pathway
to economic sustainability. It has been well docked and well
studied that investing in housing for folks, investing in their
ability to have stability, leads ultimately to the government saving
money long term on all different types of services, from

(16:13):
health services to benefit programs, and even gaining money from
additional tax income that's coming out of folks paychecks because
they're actually able to work. And so the only way
to truly break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, to end
homelessness is to give folks enough support so they can

(16:33):
have enough stability where they can actually invest in the
types of opportunities that will bring them long term economic
prosperity and ultimately save the government and generate money for
the government in the long term. So that's something I
fundamentally believe.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
From the New York Times, no factor matters more to
homelessness than access to housing. Poverty, men illness, addiction, and
other issues do play roles, that they are less significant.
Many cities and states in the Midwest and South, for example,
have higher rates of mental illness, poverty, or addiction than

(17:13):
other parts of the United States, but they have similar
or lower rates of homelessness. What explains regional variation is
housing market conditions, said Great Colburn, a housing expert at
the University of Washington. Housing researchers use the example of
musical chairs. Imagine there are ten people for nine chairs.

(17:35):
One person weighed down by poor health does not make
it to a chair. Is the problem that person's health
or the lack of chairs. Homelessness, then, is a supply
and demand problem. Without enough housing, not everyone has a
place to live, and the houses that do exist cost
more as people compete for a limited supply, so more

(17:58):
people are priced out and more or end up homeless.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
On the more local level here in Massachusetts and here
in Boston, I really think that we should extend the
right to shelter that we've provided to families where the
state this is in question right now, there's been a
cap put on the system, but traditionally the state has said,
we will guarantee that even if the shelter systems are full,

(18:25):
every family in our state will have somewhere to stay
every single night. I think we need to extend that
for eighteen to twenty five year olds who enter the
secondly turn eighteen, and most young people, myself included, have
had to rely heavily on the support of their families
during that period. So I think this is one way
the state can end homelessness is by extending that right

(18:47):
to more people, by investing in programs like break Time
that can help to break the cycle and get folks
into a pathway towards economic sufficiency, and to do what
the state has already committed to do, which is building
more housing, making more housing that's affordable.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
And do you think restrictive rules around multifamily restrictive zoning
rules around multifamily housing contributes to this.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
I'm definitely not an expert on zoning, but I think
it's abundantly clear that the answer is yes, particularly in
the suburbs. Restrictions where the vast majority of properties are
zoned as single family and not able to be zoned
as multifamily just constricts the housing supplies, the housing supply,
and it creates a basic economic problem of there's just

(19:37):
not enough places for people to live. As the population
grows and the demand supply dynamics are such that prices
are just going to continue to skyrocket and make it
even less affordable and less accessible for someone entering the
rental market like the young people I work with to
access housing. So single family zoning restricts housing supply definitely

(20:02):
exacerbates the problem, and so it particularly does that in
transit accessible areas. It's our ability to create dense pockets
of affordable housing, of multifamily housing that's near transit accessible
areas that connect to job opportunities in the city or
in other places that you can get to using the

(20:22):
train or the MBTA that is so critical, and I've
definitely seen a huge push towards that. The governor released
four plus billion dollar bond bill to help fund investments
in housing and renovations and improvement to existing housing.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
That makes complete sense, and it's a growing problem it's not.
Despite the efforts of amazing organizations like break Time, almostness
is still growing at this point in time in the
United States without a broad constituency of support sort of
pushing back at it. And it certainly includes some of

(21:01):
the things you just talked about. For sure.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
I studied math in college, so I think a lot
about the numbers and the numerical challenges that exist here.
For example, there's almost two and a half million households
in Massachusetts, and so if the population grows, say by

(21:23):
one percent, we're talking about twenty five thousand additional households.
If housing is already maxed out, if we're not able
to provide housing to the people that already here, a
one percent increase in the population means building twenty five
thousand more units of housing. And so I think as
a society, we have to be really comfortable with a

(21:45):
tremendously large investment in fixing this problem, because it's one
of those things, just like making improvements to the MBTA
that's just going to get more expensive with time and
going to get harder to rectify with time.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Connor, you and break Time or definitely doing a lot
to solve this problem, what's next for you and break Time?

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Yeah, So I think what's really special about break Time
is our niche. We have been focused on job, financial
security for young adults experiencing housing insecurity. It's enabled us
to grow quickly because we've proven that our specific model
for dealing with the specific niche challenge has worked and
deserves to be scaled and invested in. As I think

(22:29):
about the rest of this decade, the rest of the
twenty twenties, we've been thinking deeply about how break Time
can more systemically end this challenge in the long term,
because that's our goal. It's to break the cycle of
young adult homelessness, to end this as a problem, and
then to replicate that solution to as many places as

(22:50):
we can. And what we've noticed is that we exist
on sort of what I call a support wheel. If
you think about a wheel on the bike, there's a
lot of different spokes that help to stabilize it and
make it go round and round. Right now, we are
really strong in job security, really strong in financial security,
and we've been very intentional about partnering on everything else,

(23:13):
but on every single spoke around that wheel, whether it's housing,
mental health care, support, legal, support. There are certain gaps
that we can start to fill or that we can
reach deeper to help our young people address those challenges.
So if there's a lack of legal support for young people,
for example, if there's a lack of support for young
people getting an ID to get started with a job,

(23:35):
these are all challenges. If we don't address them, the
work that we're currently doing is not going to go
as far as possible and having the impact we want.
There's certain limitations given the other factors on what's missing
in that support wheel. It's great if you have two
titanium spokes on a bicycle wheel, but if three of

(23:56):
them are missing, you're not going to really expect much
from that wheel. And so that's what's important to us
right now throughout the next year is to really explore
how do we more comprehensively address this problem, and then
how do we more systemically ensure a long term elimination
of this problem through policy change, through partnership, and also

(24:20):
by really ensuring that we are thinking on a systems
level about a lot of the questions we've talked about today,
like what are the central drivers of this, what are
the core causes of this? And really addressing this head
on through some of the policy changes I've already mentioned
in other aspects of our work. So we want to
go deeper here in Massachusetts before we expand elsewhere, and

(24:45):
that's really going to be the focus of the twenty twenties,
and I'm hopeful that by the end of this decade
we have something that we feel like we can replicate
on a larger geographic scale. But in order to do that,
it's important to get right here first. And I want
to eliminate this challenge in Massachusetts, not just alleviate it,
not just reduce it, not just reduce the rate of growth,

(25:05):
but to eliminate this challenge because I think that I
want I'm so proud to live in the state I
live in. I think Massachusetts is such a leader in
so many ways. But I want to live in a
state where every single young person is access to the
opportunities and support they need to reach their full potential.
Every single young person has access to the safe, adequate

(25:28):
housing they need to just go through their daily life
as a young person, explore their career, explore their potential.
So I want to make that happen here, and then
let's replicate it everywhere we possibly can, but let's learn
from doing it on a smaller scale first. So that's
really going to be our focus in the coming years,
and over the next few months we're finalizing a strategic

(25:50):
plan for twenty twenty five to twenty twenty nine of
exactly what it looks like to address more aspects of
the support wheel that an individual young person needs, while
also addressing the systematic factors that are leading a young
person to need that support in the first place.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Well, systems, change and collective impact are very hard to attain.
I think one of the best ways to do it
is to replicate a winning program like Break Time, and
it sounds like your aspirations here to do that. So
we've been talking with Connor shown wonderful insights and just
a wonderful job with Break Time in terms of homelessness

(26:28):
for youth in particular. Thank you so much, Connor, appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Thank you so much for having me on. It's always
an honor to be part of these conversations, and I
appreciate the opportunity to educate folks about our work and
some of my observations in the field.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
A big thank you to our producer Ken Carberry of
Chart Productions, what's on your mind? Send us your thoughts, comments,
and questions to What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
That's one word, What's at Risk at gmail dot com.
Thank you,