May 14th, 2025

For Bridge Over Troubled Waters, in-house research is the key to new programs for homeless youth

Avery Bleichfeld

If there’s any question about whether Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a local nonprofit that works with homeless youth, is a Boston organization, look no further than the fact that they have a research arm.

That effort from the nonprofit, the offerings of which also include a mobile medical van, counseling and support services, education and career development, and short-term and transitional housing, has resulted in five research papers published in peer-reviewed journals since 2023.

All that research has allowed the organization to hone its programming and understand what works, said Peter Ducharme, clinical director at Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

“One thing that it does for Bridge is it gives us an opportunity to more formally study the programs and interventions that we have here, and that helps us disseminate it to the larger community,” he said.

The group’s most recent paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adult Psychiatry in February, examined the role of social connectedness on the resilience of the youth the organization serves.

That study, which included psychiatric interviews with 140 participants from Bridge Over Troubled Waters, assessed internal resilience — skills and attitudes held by the youth — and external resilience — outside sources of support — in comparison with factors like social connectedness, psychiatric illness, substance use, and self-injury.

The research found that among youth who participated, there was a high rate of cannabis use. That was correlated with high rates of social isolation — a landscape that could impact the long-term success of participants.

“We found, of course, having a higher social network really served as protective factors and reduced the length of homelessness in terms of being able to find other, more safe places to go,” Ducharme said.

The research currently informs how Bridge Over Troubled Waters provides services to the youth it works with.

Drawing from the report’s findings, in recognition of the importance of social connection, the organization has taken steps to try to help its youth build some of those networks.

“We know that social connectedness is such an important protective factor for young people, so what we’re really trying to figure out, is how can we now build those social connections for people?” Ducharme said.

The group has created a peer recovery intervention model, talking with youth about substance use programs and recovery, and working to connect them to external organizations. That has included linking participants with a network of local recovery clubs, as well as taking them to The Phoenix, a Newmarket Square nonprofit gym that looks to help people get and stay sober through exercise.

That effort is making up the next round of research the group is doing, as they track the results and aim to publish a new paper by the summer of 2026.

“We’re really trying to look at how can we expose people to different communities of recovery and then really try to track their involvement with those organizations and do they continue to go after the program is over,” Ducharme said.

The research work that Bridge Over Troubled Waters does is relatively rare for an organization of its scope, he said, and largely comes out of support from a partnership with Mass General Hospital.

Beyond affecting how the group can provide services to the youth it works with, Ducharme said he hopes that by publishing the research in peer-reviewed journals, other organizations can see the actual research on what works.

“Although Bridge is Boston-based and it’s always going to be kind of locally focused, this gives us an opportunity to reach out at a much larger than just local level, but regionally and even nationally to share some of the work that we’re doing, the results that we’re having,” he said. “Hopefully, other people will be able to replicate some of the same services and programs.”

Bridge Over Troubled Waters has presented its findings locally, he said, and will attend an upcoming conference in New Orleans to share them more broadly. Part of that outreach has included sharing manuals that the organization has created out of the findings.

Continuing to produce and expand those manuals is a goal, he said.

The research also fills existing gaps in the academic space. According to the study, there is limited scholarly literature around external resilience factors — those outside supports youth can rely on. And the demographics of the participants the study looked at also don’t appear as frequently in academic research.

Ducharme said that he sees both youth of color and homeless youth as groups often underrepresented in research. The intersection of those two is at the core of who Bridge Over Troubled Waters works with, and who was included in the study.

That gap is glaring, as Black youth faced an 83% higher risk of homelessness and Latinx youth faced a 33% higher risk compared to their white counterparts, according to a 2023 report from Chapin Hall, an independent policy research group from the University of Chicago.

According to the Bridge Over Troubled Waters study, over half of the participants in the research were Black.

Having a group of young people in the program that Ducharme said are not only willing but excited to participate has been a good support for the field.

“I think that’s a benefit of the work that we’re doing, is that we’re able to get more data on a lot of common issues that young adults experience here that, again, I think will really translate nicely to other organizations working with homeless youth,” he said. “We know that young adults, the BIPOC community, are overrepresented in shelter systems. To not have them always included in research is, I think, a real disservice.”