Key Takeaways
- • The Duke Endowment invested more than $3.2 million from 2017 to 2025 across eight organizations serving transition-aged youth in North Carolina and South Carolina, according to a Child Trends retrospective evaluation.
- • Child Trends identified only 11 programs serving youth ages 14 and older that had been evaluated with a comparison group design and rated at least promising by one or both clearinghouses, underscoring a limited evidence base.
- • The evaluation recommends services spanning ages 14 to 23, with early engagement around age 14 and support extending past 21, when formal foster care ends.
- • Mental health, housing, and supportive relationships were identified as the most pressing needs, with providers citing workforce shortages, staff turnover, and limited flexible funding as major barriers.
- • All but one TDE-funded grantee was still operating its program, which the evaluators cite as a sign of sustainability for promising practices.
Summary
The Duke Endowment (TDE) invested more than $3.2 million from 2017 to 2025 across eight organizations serving transition-aged youth in North Carolina and South Carolina, using evidence-based, evidence-informed, innovative, and advocacy-focused approaches. Child Trends conducted a retrospective evaluation of the portfolio to assess outcomes, sustainability, evidence-building efforts, and future funding opportunities. The review drew on grantee documents, a literature review, and interviews with 24 experts, including grantees, service providers, public agency leaders, national experts, funders, and young people with lived foster care experience.
The evaluation found that the evidence base for programs designed specifically for transition-aged youth remains limited. Through a review of two clearinghouses and recent literature, Child Trends identified 11 programs serving youth ages 14 and older that had been evaluated using a comparison group design and rated at least promising. Research points to supportive adult relationships, meaningful youth engagement, trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate services, coordinated cross-system supports, and extended foster care as factors associated with positive outcomes.
On timing, the evaluators found no single best age to begin or end services but strongly support engagement around age 14 and provision of services into the mid-20s, up to age 23. Longer service duration is associated with improved housing, education, and relationship outcomes, and youth consistently report that transition services often end too soon or feel rushed. The most pressing needs in the two states are mental health, housing, and supportive relationships, which the report describes as interconnected and foundational to employment and education success.
Providers cited significant capacity challenges, including workforce shortages, staff turnover, limited funding, and uneven service availability, and called for more flexible funding for staffing, infrastructure, long-term operations, and evaluation. Grantees reported positive outcomes in housing stability, educational attainment, employment, health, and community connectedness, and all but one were still operating their funded programs. Grantees highlighted youth-centered, relationship-based approaches and strong public-private partnerships as critical to success.
The report recommends that TDE and other philanthropic funders expand services to ages 14 to 23, invest in building evidence for a continuum of services, reconsider the demonstrated-effectiveness threshold used for the "Implementation Support" portfolio, prioritize mental health, housing, and relationship-based supports, elevate youth voice, provide flexible capacity funding, support cross-system advocacy, and convene providers, state officials, and other funders to build coalitions.
The evaluation found that the evidence base for programs designed specifically for transition-aged youth remains limited. Through a review of two clearinghouses and recent literature, Child Trends identified 11 programs serving youth ages 14 and older that had been evaluated using a comparison group design and rated at least promising. Research points to supportive adult relationships, meaningful youth engagement, trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate services, coordinated cross-system supports, and extended foster care as factors associated with positive outcomes.
On timing, the evaluators found no single best age to begin or end services but strongly support engagement around age 14 and provision of services into the mid-20s, up to age 23. Longer service duration is associated with improved housing, education, and relationship outcomes, and youth consistently report that transition services often end too soon or feel rushed. The most pressing needs in the two states are mental health, housing, and supportive relationships, which the report describes as interconnected and foundational to employment and education success.
Providers cited significant capacity challenges, including workforce shortages, staff turnover, limited funding, and uneven service availability, and called for more flexible funding for staffing, infrastructure, long-term operations, and evaluation. Grantees reported positive outcomes in housing stability, educational attainment, employment, health, and community connectedness, and all but one were still operating their funded programs. Grantees highlighted youth-centered, relationship-based approaches and strong public-private partnerships as critical to success.
The report recommends that TDE and other philanthropic funders expand services to ages 14 to 23, invest in building evidence for a continuum of services, reconsider the demonstrated-effectiveness threshold used for the "Implementation Support" portfolio, prioritize mental health, housing, and relationship-based supports, elevate youth voice, provide flexible capacity funding, support cross-system advocacy, and convene providers, state officials, and other funders to build coalitions.
Go deeper than the headline
Research every firm in this story, track the ones that matter and get the daily briefing — free for 7 days.