One-fourth of New York City foster youth age out immediately into homelessness

A Deal to Help Foster Youths Find Housing

Secret, Mosi. New York Times, October 20, 2011

New York City has reached an agreement on a proposed settlement of a lawsuit that claims the city allows older children to leave foster care only to become immediately homeless.

Each year, roughly 800 to 1,100 people age 18 to 21 are discharged from foster care to fend for themselves, the plaintiffs complained in the class-action suit.

There is no current data on the youths’ housing after foster care, but previously the city’s Department of Homeless Services and the City Council estimated that more than a quarter of youths discharged from foster care because of their age end up homeless almost immediately, according to the complaint, which accuses the city of shirking its responsibilities to those youths.

The city is required by state law to supervise and assist in providing housing for people who have left foster care until they reach age 21.

The accord calls for the city to maintain a unit in the Administration for Children’s Services for those people, initiate training for foster care agencies, revamp its procedures for helping youths find stable housing and improve their access to services.

The agreement is the product of two years of negotiations among the Administration for Children’s Services, the Legal Aid Society and the advocacy group Lawyers for Children. The parties said they had agreed to settle to avoid protracted litigation, and they actually reached the agreement before the lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers filed the suit to provide for court enforcement if problems develop down the road, said Pat Bath, the spokeswoman for Legal Aid. A judge has to approve the settlement before it goes into effect.

The four lead plaintiffs remain anonymous. Three are 21 years old and at risk of being homeless at discharge because they do not have stable housing lined up, according to the complaint. One is 20, has already been discharged and is at risk of becoming homeless, the complaint says.

“An alarming number of young people are being discharged from foster care into homelessness,” Tamara Steckler, the lawyer in charge of the juvenile rights practice at the Legal Aid Society, said in a written statement.

Ronald E. Richter, the commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, said in a written statement, “We are committed to helping young people leaving foster care achieve successful adulthood, which includes appropriate stable housing.”

Under the accord, the children’s services agency will develop permanent housing plans for youths living in foster care. It will work with foster care agencies to create the plans in time to find adequate housing. The city and the agencies will monitor the young adults discharged under the plans until they turn 21.

Children’s Services will also track and monitor data on their housing until they turn 21.

Also, a new unit in Children’s Services will oversee the foster care agencies’ adherence to the new requirements.

New York foster youth "aging out" into homelessness

Deal reached to help older foster care children

Associated Press, October 21, 2011

NEW YORK — New York City has reached an agreement on a proposed settlement of a lawsuit that claimed it allowed foster care children to fall into homelessness after leaving the system at age 18.

The lawsuit said the Administration for Children's Services failed to abide by state laws that mandate children be prepared for independent living when they leave foster care.

The agreement calls on the ACS to maintain a special unit for children who turn 18. It also calls on the ACS to initiate training for foster care agencies, update its procedures for helping youths find stable housing and improve their access to services.

The agreement was reached after two years of negotiations among the ACS, the Legal Aid Society and the advocacy group Lawyers for Children.

Aging out of NY foster care system into homelessness

Many Foster Children End Up Homeless: Report

Flanagan, Jenna. WNCY, September 8, 2011.

New York is not doing a good job preparing its foster children for the workforce, charges a new report.

The report from the Center for an Urban Future found that one in 10 youths in New York City who left foster care in the mid-2000s entered a homeless shelter within a year. Within three years, that number doubled to one in five.

"These young people go from being official wards of the state as part of the foster care system to adult wards of the state," said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the center.

The report showed that as many as half of the roughly 1,000 young people who aged out of the city’s foster care system failed to obtain and hold onto jobs.

Bowles said many foster care agencies are failing foster kids due to their scant connections with employers.

"We're at a time now when skills and higher education are becoming more important than ever and so many of these young people are being further and further behind," Bowles said.

Bowles has called on incoming commissioner Ronald Richter to focus on strengthening workforce readiness for young adults leaving foster care in the city.

Over 1,000 LGBT homeless youth in New York

Budget Beefs of Youth Advocates
Schindler, Paul. Gay City News, April 2, 2009.

With a recent city census finding that more than 1,000 LGBT youth are homeless in New York and often have to spend the night on the streets, advocates for that population are expressing concerns about a number of budget cuts that could reduce services and even the scarce supply of emergency and transitional beds available.

Green Chimneys, which currently provides 20 of the roughly 100 beds available citywide to homeless youth in settings specifically tailored to provide a safe space for queer youth, is at risk of losing half of that total because of funding cuts at the city Department of Youth and Community Development. DYCD informed Green Chimneys its contract funding those ten beds would not be renewed in the fiscal year beginning July 1, leaving the agency with only state money that pays for the other ten beds.

However, according to Theresa Nolan, a senior staffer at Green Chimneys, the agency has now learned that additional state money going to DYCD might enable it to retain funding for as many as seven of the beds it risked losing.

In the Bronx, the lack of a contract renewal is likely to prove more problematic. For the past three years, the Bronx Community Pride Center, an LGBT-focused facility on East 149th Street, has been the designated borough drop-in center for homeless youth of all backgrounds, receiving funding of $300,000 annually.

According to Lisa Winters, during that period, the Pride Center has experienced about 16,000 youth visits, provided crisis referral and intensive case management to more than 700 youth, LGBT and straight from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, served more than 5,000 meals, and tested more than 500 for HIV, identifying 29 positive clients.

The loss of the city contract eliminates a quarter of the Pride Center's $1.2 million budget and eliminates its entire youth-specific programming.

Though the Pride Center had received Very Good ratings in each of three annual city audits, it lost out in this year's competitive bidding to Cardinal McCloskey Services, a large social services agency that works in the Bronx, Westchester, and Rockland.

Though it is ostensibly non-sectarian, Cardinal McCloskey obviously has a Catholic background, and its website describes its mission in "support[ing] the sanctity of the family." Winters noted that statement, and said that the Catholic Church's historic hostility to LGBT people would disenfranchise many Pride Center clients.

"My kids won't go to Cardinal McCloskey," she warned.

Ryan Dodge, a spokesman for DYCD, noted that Cardinal McCloskey specifically wrote about serving LGBT youth in its proposal, and added that the Pride Center's loss of the contract was no reflection of the quality of the program it has run.

In Manhattan, Sylvia's Place, the homeless LGBT youth program of the Metropolitan Community Church in Midtown, lost out in its effort to be designated as the Manhattan homeless youth drop-in center.

That contract, which has been held by the Streetwork program run by Safe Horizon, will now go to the Door. Arguing that the Door is not specifically geared to LGBT youth, Lucky Michaels, who directs MCC's Homeless Youth Services, said the Soho agency offered a "warehousing approach" to meeting youth needs.

Other advocates, however, note that the Door has long worked effectively with queer youth among its population.

Michaels said that without the drop-in center contract, Sylvia's Place might not be able to continue providing all 26 overnight spots that it currently offers.

MCC staged a protest in City Hall Park on March 31, where it was joined by homeless youth advocates including Carmen Quinones from Green Chimneys, Nancy Downing from Covenant House, and Margo Hirsch from the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services.

The largest provider of housing for homeless LGBT youth, the Ali Forney Center, meanwhile, announced this week that it is receiving new DYCD and state Department of Health funding of $400,000 in 2009, bringing its total annual budget to $4.3 million. The group added 18 beds this year, and now provides 48 slots - 24 for emergency housing, and the other half for transitional living aimed at preparing youth to find permanent housing on their own

NY youth aging out of foster care at risk of homelessness

Study Reveals Harsh Life for Homeless Youth in New York
Bosman, Julie. NY Times, March 9, 2009.

Many homeless youths in New York City are victims of abuse who grew up in foster care or other institutions and now lack jobs, a high school education, birth certificates and adequate health care, according to a study to be released on Tuesday.

And the study, one of the largest-ever examinations of young homeless people in New York, found that their future did not look much better — because they are dangerously isolated from mainstream channels of work, family life and basic schooling.

The study, conducted by Covenant House, which operates shelters for young people, examined 444 people between the ages of 18 and 21 who entered the Covenant House Crisis Center between October 2007 and February 2008.

Forty-seven percent of the group said they had been disciplined physically before entering the shelter, 37 percent said they had been victims of physical abuse, and 19 percent had endured sexual abuse. Forty-one percent said they had witnessed violence in their homes.

The vast majority said they found it difficult or impossible to find a good job. Seventy-eight percent said they were unemployed when they entered the shelter. Among those who had jobs, 41 percent said those jobs were “off the books.”

Kevin M. Ryan, the president of Covenant House, a privately financed agency with facilities in 20 cities nationwide, including Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark and St. Louis, said he hoped the study alerted the public “to the growing crisis of homeless youth in New York City.”

“It is a wake-up call to all of us that we have to be incredibly vigilant on behalf of our kids,” Mr. Ryan said. “Especially in a time of economic crisis, when families are feeling stress and strain that, in many instances, can cause kids to become even more disconnected from school and work and family.”

Adding to the urgency, Mr. Ryan said, was the recent discovery that the number of young homeless people seeking shelter at Covenant House had increased by one-third in the past year.

In 2007, a study by the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services, an advocacy group in New York, found that on any given night, roughly 3,800 homeless young people were on the street in New York.

Severe cuts in the state budget are threatening the financing for many programs for runaways and homeless youths across the state, said Margo Hirsch, the executive director of the Empire State Coalition. “Every single one of these programs is going to be affected,” Ms. Hirsch said.

Carol L. M. Caton, a professor of clinical public health at Columbia University and the director of the Columbia Center for Homelessness Prevention Studies, which helped sponsor the 2009 study, said the report exposed at least three major areas that were ripe for further research. They are family relationships, and the events within families that might force a young person out; the impact of institutional experiences like foster care placement; and the challenge of connecting youths to the work force, she said.

“They’re just on the cusp of adulthood,” Dr. Caton said. “And we want to help them transition to adulthood in a way that is positive, so that they won’t go on and continue to have some of these bruising experiences.”

Nearly half of the youths who participated in the 2009 study said they had been arrested, 15 percent had been convicted, and 4 percent were on probation or parole. Twenty-nine percent said they drank alcohol, 20 percent reported using marijuana on a regular basis, and 36 percent said someone in their family used drugs regularly.

Mr. Ryan said he was concerned that after leaving the shelter, where youths typically stay for just under three months, they would enter the adult homeless system, which can be harsh for teenagers — or even worse, they could “slide into gang affiliation, drugs and despair.”

Times Square Vigil Focusing on Homeless Youth

Press Release: Plight of Homeless Youth Will be Focus of Nov. 20 Times Square Vigil
Nov. 12, 2008

NEW YORK-- Covenant House International is releasing its First Annual Report Card on the US Homeless Youth Crisis, and gives a bleak outlook for their future. America's kids in crisis will be the focus of the 18th Annual Candlelight Vigil for Homeless Youth on Thursday, November, 20, 5:30 pm, in Times Square.

"Over 750,000 young people in the US are living and dying on our streets every year. We were able to help 70,387 homeless youth last year, 7% more than the year before, but this is still not enough, more needs to be done by all of us," explains James White, interim president and chief operating officer for Covenant House International, the largest privately funded agency in the Americas helping homeless kids.

"Our First Annual Report Card on the US Homeless Youth Crisis finds that the number of homeless and impoverished youth is growing and their outlook is bleak," says White. The report card examines 11 key indicators affecting children, including: population growth, poverty rates, employment opportunities, high school drop-out rates, health coverage, dental health, the foster care system, juvenile justice, arrests, substance use and death rates.

"18- to 24-year-olds make up the highest percentage of individuals living in poverty and they are twice as likely to be unemployed. Many of these kids are aging out of foster care at rates 30% higher than we typically see," says White adding, "One-third of the homeless kids helped by Covenant House come directly from foster care. The rest come from environments of abuse, neglect and other at-risk situations."

According to information gathered by Covenant House, once a kid becomes homeless, that youth is at a much greater risk for becoming incarcerated. The number of recent arrests of 18- to 24-year-olds has increased for prostitution (17%), drug violations (19%), weapons charges (25%) and vagrancy (28%). These kids also are at much greater risk for premature death by homicide or suicide. 5,000 homeless youth die from assault, illness and suicide each year.

"We want people to be outraged by this bleak situation. We want them and our nation's leaders to change this situation. It can be done. At Covenant House we've been changing the lives of homeless kids for 35 years by giving them guidance, transitional housing, healthcare, education and job training. Many of our kids go from the streets to college. They are good kids who have had some rough breaks in life and now just need a chance to help themselves," says White.

Homeless youth being helped by Covenant House will be telling their stories and performing with Broadway stars at the 18th Annual Candlelight Vigil for Homeless Youth on Thursday, November, 20, 5:30 pm, in Times Square.

Additional vigils will be held at other Covenant House sites, churches, colleges and via the Virtual Candlelight Vigil Web site: www.igniteadream.org

The Times Square Vigil will be hosted by Sunny Cummings Hostin, CNN Legal Analyst & Managing Director at Kroll Inc., a private investigation and security firm. The vigil also will feature: Jim White, Bruce Henry, executive director of Covenant House Institute, and Broadway stars Lawrence Clayton (Bells Are Ringing, It Ain't Nothin but the Blues, The Civil War, Once upon a Mattress, High Rollers Social Pleasure Club, and Dreamgirls) and Capathia Jenkins (Fame Becomes Me, Look of Love, Caroline or Change, and Civil War).

Nasdaq and Reuters will air vigil graphics while ABC will air the vigil live on their Times Square jumbotrons during the event. MTV and Invision will create a live Internet feed for the vigil.

Founded in 1972, Covenant House International is the largest privately funded agency in the Americas helping homeless kids, providing 24/7 crisis care and ongoing support at 21 facilities, NINELINE (1-800-999-9999) and www.covenanthouse.org.