It’s 10 p.m. on Tuesday night at the Streetwork Project overnight shelter in New York City, and many of the young residents are just settling in. The shelter, a renovated brownstone with brightly painted walls, houses 24 homeless youth aged 16 to 20, a fraction of the estimated 3,800 who are homeless in the city on any given night.
Nineteen-year-old Brie walks in from a smoke break and launches into a story about taking a bus to see a taping of “The Steve Wikos Show” that gets everyone laughing. But a short while later, in a more intimate setting, the heavily tattooed young woman tells me how she ended up here.
“My mom had me when she was really young. My dad was a kid too,” she says. “I ended up running away from my dad’s house because one day my stepmother punched me in the face, and then my dad said he wished I’d never been born.”
Neglected by her parents, Brie grew up in residential homes and foster care in Bridgeport, Conn. Eventually she went to live with her grandmother at age 17 but she became homeless again after her grandmother lost her apartment. For the past two years she’s been in limbo, trying to go to college, find a job and a place to live and, on some days, to just be a regular teen.
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article courtesy of colorlines.com/Von Diaz
Discussion: Homeless Youth In Focus was originally published on praisecleveland.com
