In early 2025, United Way of King County launched the Youth Diversion Infrastructure Project (YDIP) to help prevent homelessness among young people exiting foster care, juvenile detention, and other systems of care.
The program provides emergency financial assistance for housing, utilities, and transportation — giving young people under the age of 24 the stability they need to build independent lives.
Running YDIP required infrastructure that could keep up with the program’s urgency, complexity, and scale. That meant they needed a tool with:
United Way had the vision. They just needed the right tool to bring it to life.
United Way began working with Beam in late 2024, several months ahead of YDIP’s February 2025 launch. From day one, Beam was more than just a platform provider. They were an invested partner in the program’s mission.
YDIP's success depended on frontline partner organizations like YouthCare, New Horizons, and Africatown. United Way wanted its platform to support its partners' work, not add more administrative burden.
Partnership Manager Danie Radic and Program Coordinator Asha Nuh worked closely with Beam to customize the platform from the ground up, drawing on real use cases and fine-tuning every field to match how their partners actually work.
“Even after the launch, Beam made it easy to keep refining things,” said Asha. “We realized we needed some additional fields in our application after we launched, and Beam added them without any disruption.”
The result was a platform that frontline providers could use without a steep learning curve.
“I use this program frequently, and it’s one of the best applications I’ve used,” said Mikayla Herz, Housing Triage Specialist at YouthCare, one of YDIP’s partner organizations. “I never feel like throwing my computer across the room, which is rare!”
YDIP was designed to promote financial autonomy, so the ability to send funds directly to youth was critical. But many cases also required paying landlords, utility providers, or transportation vendors. Beam makes it easy to navigate payment processing for all of YDIP’s use cases.
“Young people tend to do more direct deposit so that their funding goes directly to them very quickly. Whereas a formal vendor like a landlord or a utility company requests that we mail the check, which can take I believe about five days… [but] it’s very easy to kind of track a payment and see like when it's been sent and when that payment is completed,” Danie shared.
Payments to applicants and vendors can be initiated from the same application, with built-in W9 collection and tracking for each. Plus, multi-payment support means youth can submit a single application for multiple needs like rent, utilities, and transportation.
"Beam's platform lets us respond to what the client actually needs,” Danie said. “Before, we had to submit separate applications for each type of assistance. Now, it’s all in one place; it saves time and makes the process so much smoother.”
In programs like YDIP, transparency is essential. United Way reports to Building Changes, HMIS, and other funding bodies, all while tracking internal performance and staying audit-ready. Without clean, timely data, even the best programs can stall.
Beam’s next generation analytics and reporting automatically feeds export-ready data into United Way’s internal tools, providing staff with:
This means less time spent chasing data and more time delivering support where it's needed most.
Since launching in February 2025, the Youth Diversion Infrastructure Project has helped young people across King County stabilize their lives and step away from the brink of homelessness. Beam has enabled United Way and their partner vendors to respond quickly, spend transparently, and support youth with empathy and care.
“The biggest result is that we’re preventing people from re-entering homelessness,” Mikayla shared. “And with Beam’s support, they're finally experiencing a system that supports them in a world where so many systems feel like they’re working against them."
With Beam’s support, YDIP has been able to achieve incredible results in only a few months, including:
With Beam, United Way built the operational backbone YDIP needed to function at scale quickly, compliantly, and without overwhelming staff or partners. The result? A responsive, low-friction program that has changed the lives of dozens of young people in King County.
To see how Beam can support your work, check out our free product demo.
