A 16-year-old girl in Davis County was working after school and sleeping in her car at night. Her parents were no longer around, and on the nights when a friend let her sleep on a couch, she had access to a shower. On the other nights, she didn’t. Somehow, she was still getting herself to school, although staying awake in class was becoming increasingly difficult and so was hiding what was happening in her life.
One of her teachers eventually noticed. The girl was exhausted, her clothes weren’t always clean, and she was becoming embarrassed about coming to school. “Nobody wants to be the stinky kid,” Emily Bell McCormick, president of The Policy Project, told Utah Stories. “You’re still a teenager. You don’t want to stand out at all.”
The school had something that, at first glance, hardly sounds like an answer to youth homelessness: a teen center with a shower, washer and dryer, food, clothing and an adult who could help connect students with other resources. It didn’t give the girl a permanent home or resolve the much larger problem of going through adolescence without her parents, but it allowed her to take a shower, wash her clothes, eat something and walk back into a classroom without worrying that everyone around her knew she had spent the previous night in a car.
For McCormick, that story captures an idea that has increasingly shaped her work. Utah spends enormous amounts of time and money dealing with social problems after they become crises, but she wants to know what might happen if more attention were paid to the years, months or even days before someone reaches that point. The question isn’t whether Utah needs homeless shelters, food banks, treatment programs and emergency services; it clearly does. The more interesting question to McCormick is whether some people could be kept from needing those services in the first place.
“How are we preventing these problems?” she remembers asking herself earlier in her career. “We definitely need the homeless shelter, but like, why are so many people homeless?”
McCormick didn’t begin her career as a policy expert or political insider. She studied communication, worked as a consultant and eventually owned a dress company, which she later sold. Her interest in poverty developed gradually as she became involved in charitable work and started recognizing how little she had understood about the lives of people growing up around her.
She had come from a stable family, and only later did she begin thinking about children she had known who may not have had enough food or a reliable place to sleep, or whose parents might have been incarcerated. They could have been sitting beside her in school without her ever knowing what was happening when they went home.
Her initial response was the same one many people have when they become aware of those problems: she volunteered. She helped at homeless shelters, collected coats and food and assisted a refugee family. The work was useful and necessary, but McCormick became increasingly interested in why the same needs kept appearing. Giving someone a coat solves the immediate problem of being cold, just as providing a meal solves the immediate problem of hunger, but neither necessarily changes the circumstances that produced the need.
That realization eventually led her toward public policy and, ultimately, to The Policy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works on issues affecting Utah families. McCormick describes policy as a lever capable of changing conditions for far more people than she could ever reach individually through charitable work. Her preferred phrase for the organization’s approach is “going upstream”—looking at a problem that may become enormously expensive and difficult later and asking whether there is a point earlier in someone’s life where a relatively modest intervention could alter the trajectory.
Utah’s teen centers grew out of that thinking.
A few years after the COVID-19 pandemic, with housing and grocery costs climbing, The Policy Project began looking more closely at student homelessness. McCormick said roughly one in 50 Utah children at the time met the educational definition of homelessness, a category much broader than most people imagine when they hear the word. Under the federal McKinney-Vento framework used by schools, a student may be considered homeless while living in a car or camper, staying temporarily with other families or moving from couch to couch without a fixed nighttime residence.
Those students aren’t necessarily standing on a street corner asking for help. Many are doing precisely what the Davis County girl was doing: showing up for school and trying very hard to make sure nobody knows.
East High School in Salt Lake City had already created a teen center, offering The Policy Project a model for bringing assistance directly into schools. The idea appealed to McCormick partly because it didn’t require teenagers to navigate another government agency or travel across town to a social-service organization. If the goal is to keep a teenager connected to education, she argues, then the logical place to provide help is where that teenager already needs to be.
“We don’t want them to go to a community center,” she said. “We want that kid to go to school.”
The Policy Project subsequently worked with the Utah Legislature, schools and private philanthropists to expand the model, and McCormick said the organization has now worked with about half of Utah’s high schools to develop teen centers. They can be found in larger communities such as Ogden as well as smaller rural districts, including Tintic.
What happens inside them can be remarkably ordinary. A student takes a shower before class, washes a load of clothes or picks up something to eat. Another student might mention to the adult working there that the heat at home hasn’t worked for months, opening the door to assistance from another organization. The center itself isn’t expected to solve every problem confronting a family; it becomes a place where someone notices the problem early enough to connect that family with people who may be able to help.
That distinction becomes important when looking at Utah’s larger homelessness debate, because public attention tends to arrive once homelessness is impossible to ignore. By then, the discussion is about shelters, encampments, affordable housing, addiction, mental illness, policing and where services should be located. Those debates are unavoidable, but McCormick’s approach raises a different question: What was happening five or ten years before the person sleeping on a Salt Lake City sidewalk got there?
During the Utah Stories interview, that question quickly expanded beyond homelessness and into the economic pressures facing Utah families generally. The contrast is particularly visible along the Wasatch Front. Park City and some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Salt Lake Valley contain homes worth millions of dollars, while a relatively short drive away families with two working adults can struggle with housing, groceries, childcare and utility bills.
Utah Stories publisher Richard Markosian asked McCormick whether a state that has traditionally celebrated family life can sustain an economy in which raising a family is becoming increasingly difficult for middle-income Utahns.
“We cannot afford to lose the middle class,” McCormick said, describing the danger of an “hourglass” economy with wealth concentrated at the top, hardship concentrated at the bottom and increasingly little in between.
For generations, Utah offered families a fairly recognizable version of the good life: a stable job, a house with enough room for the children and, if things went well, a backyard large enough for a trampoline. That life was never equally available to everyone, but it was attainable enough to become part of the state’s identity. Today, particularly along the Wasatch Front, even families with two working parents can find themselves doing the math repeatedly as housing, childcare, groceries and other basic expenses consume more of their income.
Childcare is one of the clearest examples. McCormick noted during the interview that infant care can cost more than college tuition, creating a peculiar economic trap for young parents. Both may need to work in order to afford housing, but working means paying for childcare, and childcare can consume such a large portion of one parent’s salary that the family begins questioning whether it makes financial sense for that parent to work at all.
McCormick illustrated the problem with her own experience of hiring a nanny. The arrangement solved childcare for her family, but the nanny had children and needed someone to watch them. That person, in turn, might also have children. Follow the chain far enough, McCormick joked, and eventually somebody’s grandmother is watching the kids.
The humor masks a serious problem. American families receive public education once children reach school age, but the years between birth and kindergarten are largely left for parents to navigate themselves, precisely when many young families have the least accumulated wealth and are trying to establish careers, pay for housing and absorb the expenses that arrive with having children.
The Policy Project has started working on some of those pressures as part of its broader prevention strategy. McCormick pointed to a $1,000 nonrefundable tax credit for qualifying lower-income young families and legislation extending maternity leave for Utah state employees from six weeks to nine weeks. Neither measure is going to solve Utah’s affordability problem, and McCormick doesn’t present them that way. They are examples of what her organization tries to do: identify a specific pressure point and see whether policy can relieve it before the consequences become larger and more expensive.
The conversation eventually wandered into an area that might seem far removed from public policy: Utah’s pioneer past and the possibility of homesteading.
Markosian told McCormick about Riverbed Ranch, a modern homesteading community near Delta where families have attempted to build a more self-sufficient life on larger parcels of relatively inexpensive land. McCormick was intrigued by the idea, particularly because traveling around Utah makes one thing obvious: outside the Wasatch Front, there is a tremendous amount of open land.
The contradiction is difficult to miss. Utah has vast stretches of largely empty country, yet many young families clustered along the Wasatch Front feel they can no longer afford a piece of it. Of course, inexpensive land alone doesn’t create a viable community. People need water, roads, utilities, schools and jobs, and moving families into the West Desert is hardly a simple solution to housing affordability. Still, the discussion reflected the way McCormick tends to approach problems. Instead of assuming that the existing system is inevitable, she wants to know why it developed that way and whether some part of it can be changed.
“We’re just trying to pick out little things that we can solve for and help with,” she said. “The problems are big and they’re deep.”
That same philosophy led The Policy Project into another issue that is considerably harder to discuss: child sexual abuse. McCormick said the organization examined some of the problems that can appear later in life, including substance abuse, incarceration and homelessness, and began looking for factors that could be addressed much earlier. The organization subsequently worked with legislators, philanthropists and community organizations on prevention education in Utah elementary schools, teaching children how to recognize inappropriate contact and identify adults they can trust.
The connection between a school program addressing sexual abuse, a washing machine in a teen center and a tax credit for young parents isn’t immediately obvious. To McCormick, however, they are variations of the same idea. Social problems don’t begin on the day someone walks into a homeless shelter, enters a treatment program or is arrested. There is a history behind that moment, and somewhere in that history there may have been an opportunity to change what happened next.
McCormick is careful not to present herself as an expert on every aspect of homelessness, and she doesn’t argue that prevention can eliminate the need for shelters, treatment or other emergency services. Utah’s homelessness problem is too complicated for that, involving housing costs, mental illness, addiction, family breakdown and a host of individual circumstances that don’t lend themselves to a single solution.
What she does question is a system that can spend tremendous amounts of money once somebody is in serious trouble while sometimes struggling to pay for comparatively simple interventions earlier.
Near the end of the interview, the conversation turned toward technological progress. Humans have become extraordinarily good at solving certain kinds of problems. Computers that once filled rooms now fit in a pocket, machines travel into space and cars are increasingly capable of driving themselves. Yet poverty, homelessness and many of the social problems that accompanied previous generations remain stubbornly familiar.
“We need more brains in the pool,” McCormick said, arguing that some of the energy devoted to technological innovation should also be directed toward persistent social problems.
A shower and washing machine inside a Utah high school will not solve homelessness, just as a tax credit will not suddenly make Wasatch Front housing affordable to a young family. But that may miss McCormick’s larger point. By the time a problem becomes large enough to dominate newspaper headlines, legislative debates and government budgets, many smaller opportunities to intervene have already passed.
For the 16-year-old girl in Davis County, one of those opportunities appeared when a teacher noticed that something wasn’t right. She was still sleeping in her car and still dealing with circumstances no teenager should have to manage alone, but she had not yet disappeared from school. Someone noticed her while there was still a chance to help her stay connected to it.
McCormick’s argument is that Utah needs to become better at noticing people at that stage—before a difficult situation becomes a crisis and before the only options left are the most difficult and expensive ones.
