The transition from adolescence to adulthood plays a crucial role in shaping young adults’ financial security, influencing their future well into adulthood. With the pressures of newfound independence, career and educational pursuits, and increased responsibilities, the financial challenges that arise at this formative stage can have an outsized impact on young adults’ ability to stay afloat and meet their goals.
Nearly one in five young adults experience poverty, and while some young adults have family resources that provide a foundation of financial stability, young people without those resources risk falling behind in pursuit of economic mobility. Public benefits, such as housing, food, health care, or child care assistance, can fill these gaps by supplementing income and reducing basic expenses.
For young adults, public benefits can help them afford daily life and create the space needed to complete their education, training, and other personal development activities as they establish themselves. To better understand the experiences of young adults and their ability to access public benefits, we conducted a literature review and interviews with public benefits experts and young adult leaders.
Based on our interviews with public benefits experts and young adult leaders, we developed five illustrative examples to depict some of the experiences and challenges young adults face when interacting with the public benefits system. These personas track a young adult’s journey through public benefits systems, offering critical intervention points and opportunities to improve benefits access and use with best practices and examples from efforts across the country.