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female veterans, homeless vets, New England Center for Homeless Veterans, Poverty, veterans

Are Female Veterans Being Left Out In The Cold?

In Poverty, Social Issues on November 16, 2012 at 9:40 am

This article first was published by Spare Change News on November 16, 2012.

Photo Credit: Richard VanHouten, Veteran’s Support Organization

After leaving the U.S. Air Force, Staff Sergeant Barbara Barnes spent years living in fear of stray shadows and sudden noises that could trigger flashbacks to trauma from her days of military service.

Barnes never served abroad or saw combat. She served as an administrative officer from 1984 to 1990, processing legal documents on military bases in Louisiana and Kansas.

The trauma began in 1985, she says, when a commanding officer sexually assaulted her. She reported the attack to his superiors but felt too embarrassed to seek counseling. She said that the officer was reassigned to another unit, but for her, the trauma remained.

“I thought that I would just never get over that stuff, that it would just haunt me for the rest of my life,” Barnes said.

She turned to alcohol and started to abuse prescription drugs. She struggled with addiction, lost contact with her three children, and landed on the streets of Charleston, S.C. And during her long downward spiral, it never occurred to her to ask for help as a military veteran.

She wasn’t the only vet to descend into this particular nightmare.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that 6,500 female veterans are homeless and that as many as 20 percent of them were sexually assaulted while in the service. The department has declared military sexual trauma “an epidemic” and a major risk factor for post-service homelessness.

Women are four times more likely to become homeless after leaving the service than their male counterparts, according to the VA.

While homelessness among all veterans has declined in recent years, the number of homeless female veterans doubled between 2006 and 2011, according to a report earlier this year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

In 2011, the federal Veteran’s Health Administration responded to the crisis by establishing a National Call Center for Women Veterans.

This year, the VA’s Women Veterans’ Task Force highlighted homelessness as one of the key issues facing female veterans in a draft of its “Strategies for Serving Women Veterans” report, which the VA has submitted for public comment.

Wearing a badge with her rank and service information, Barnes sat in a conference room at the New England Center for Homeless Veterans (NECHV) and recalled trying to drown her traumatic memories in alcohol.

“I hit the bottom. When you get to the bottom of the wine bottle, there’s still a hole left. There’s not enough wine in the world to take care of that,” she said.

Barnes says she had been in her share of rehabilitation programs, but it was not until she connected with the VA that she was able to access comprehensive services that met all of her needs.

She didn’t even think of herself a veteran until 2006, when a woman approached her at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and told her that the VA had programs to help people like her.

As the prevalence of homelessness among female veterans has become apparent over the last few years, state and federal agencies have taken steps to connect veterans with services they need.

“We know that women veterans are at risk for homlessness at a higher rate than their male counterparts. We know that their needs are often diffferent. But at the same time, it’s more common for them to not necessarily identify themselves as veterans,” said Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness (ICHH) director Elizabeth Rogers.

The ICHH and the Women’s Veteran’s Network, a state agency that serves as a central resource for female veterans across the state, are working together to reach out to those who are experiencing or on the verge of homelessness.

“[T]here is a need for finding creative ideas for reaching people in the community before they become homeless,” said Rogers. Outreach efforts could occur at the welfare department, at programs distributing emergency food resources, or even through local school systems, she said.

Another NECHV resident, Buck Sergeant Jane Garrow, never considered herself a veteran either, despite having served three years in the air force. By the time someone suggested she seek veterans’ services—23 years after her honorable discharge—she already had spent two years living on the streets.

“Not a lot of women serve overseas in wartime, so we didn’t think we qualified as veterans,” said Garrow, who served as a jet engine mechanic in California from 1978 to 1981.

Garrow recalls meeting many social service providers over the years as she struggled with alcoholism and homelessness, but she did not recognize that she qualified for veterans’ services.

“It wasn’t just us that didn’t realize that we were vets, it was the people trying to help us,” Garrow said, adding with a hint of frustration, “I would go into detox every once in a while, but nobody told me about the VA.”

Garrow says she joined the air force because she had grown bored with working on an assembly line building missiles for the military contractor Raytheon. She recalls hearing the Village People song “In The Navy” night after night, promising pleasure, treasure, and the opportunity to learn science and technology.

In 1978, she enlisted in the air force with hope of gaining new skills that would translate to a better job when she later returned to civilian life.

During her service, she says, she worked her way up to become a jet engine mechanic, served as the first woman to work in the maintenance hangars in California, and graduated to senior airman.

Upon her discharge, however, she learned that her military training did not count toward certification to work on civilian aircraft. She returned to her native Cape Cod where she struggled for years with alcoholism and ended up on the streets.

Today she has secured a housing voucher with the help of the housing program at NECHV and is in the process of looking for an apartment.

The New England Center for Homeless Veterans first started seeing women seeking services in the mid-1990s, said NECHV director of community affairs Stephen Cunniff. In 1996, the shelter added a separate and secure women’s residence with 16 beds, a private TV room, and two showers for women awaiting permanent housing.

“There’s nothing that we need that we can’t get from here,” Garrow said. “They may not offer it here, but they know who to call to get it.”

Any woman with an honorable discharge from any branch of the U.S. military can access a case manager and can participate in shelter programs, including housing assistance, employment training, legal services, medical care, and meals, says Helen Wooten, NECHV director of case management.

Wooten adds that NECHV’s reputation for extensive services and rapid housing placement has prompted many out-of-state organizations to refer veterans to Boston.

Barnes says that a case manager at the VA in New York City suggested that she move to Boston and see if NECHV could help her.

For the past couple months, Barnes has been sleeping at a transitional shelter in Jamaica Plain and commuting to NECHV for additional services. She has entered counseling, which she says has helped her deal with her military sexual trauma. She reconnected with her children with the help of the Boston VA and is currently in the process securing her own subsidized apartment with the help of her case manager.

Barnes credits NECHV with providing her with the tools and resources to help herself.

“I know every time I walk through that front door that I’ll never leave the same again. I’ll be a changed woman. I’ll be an empowered woman.”

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350.org, Bill McKibben

Climate Change: The Latest Tax on the Poor

In Civil Rights, Climate Change, Food Security, Poverty, Social Issues on October 19, 2012 at 9:29 am

This article first was published in print and online by Spare Change News on October 19, 2012.

Photo Credit: 350.org, Nancy Battaglia

“Poor people are not something that we talk about too much or pay much attention to in our world,” Bill McKibben said, sipping a glass of sparkling water to nurse a throat hoarse from a weekend of meetings and rallies.

McKibben knows something about poverty. In the early 1980s he helped to start a 15-bed homeless shelter at The Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He spent several months living in the shelter system himself and wrote about his experiences for The New Yorker in hopes of shocking the public into action.

In recent years he stepped out from behind the reporter’s role as an observer and became a leading participant in what he calls the greatest battle the world has ever seen, the fight to halt climate change.

“There’s nothing we’ve figured out how to do that makes life harder for the poorest people on this planet than climate change, and the great irony is that those people have had nothing to do with creating the problem,” McKibben said, hunched over in a rattan chair before a fundraiser at a private home in Newton.

He draws a contrast between the industrialized countries that produce the greenhouse gasses linked to climate change and the developing countries that suffer the effects.

Rapidly industrializing China contributes more carbon dioxide than any other country, largely because of its population size. With less than a quarter of China’s population, the United States comes in a close second with more carbon emissions than India, Russia, and Japan combined. Americans contribute more carbon dioxide per capita to the atmosphere than most people on the planet, second only to Australians.

The developing world has experienced the first effects of climate change, McKibben said, citing outbreaks of dengue fever linked to increasing flooding in Bangladesh, diminished glacial water supplies in Peru, and territorial loss due to sea level rise in the island nation of Maldives. Those countries rank 55^th, 61^st, and 161^st in carbon emissions.

He adds that this years’ widespread drought in the United States, which he attributes to climate change and has led to a 50 percent increase in the global price of corn, has directly affected poor families around the world.

Later, leaning casually against a wall, with hands thrust deep into his pockets and sneaker-clad feet crossed at the ankles, he addressed a small crowd of about 50 environmental activists, professors, and potential donors.

“All over the world, there are people that right now are scrambling around to find enough coins to buy enough corn meal to make dinner for their families tonight,” he told group crowded into the living room and perched on couches, radiators, and the floor.

While the scientific community debates what role climate change may or may not have played in the recent drought, a consensus among climatologists are clear that climate change certainly will bring more extreme weather conditions such as drought in years to come.

McKibben has been warning of the dangers of climate change since he published his first book, The End of Nature, in 1989. He worries that time is running out. Small changes in lifestyle such installing energy-efficient light bulbs and toting reusable bags to the grocery store will not be sufficient to halt or even slow climate change, he said.

McKibben aims to take on oil and gas giants where they will feel it, by going after their stockholders.

His latest campaign calls on universities, institutions, and churches to sell their stock holdings in fossil fuel companies, in a collaboration among 350.org, 350 Massachusetts, and The Better Future Project, an environmental advocacy group that seeks a transition to renewable energy.

McKibben scoffs at the idea that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels and suggests that the average American would be just as happy to use energy derived from the sun and the wind as from oil, gas, and coal.

Instead, he charges that the fossil fuel industry is addicted to huge profits, which it has invested in lobbying against policies favoring a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

“They intimidate everybody in Washington. The fossil fuel industry is spending more money on this election than anybody else. Nobody dares offend them and as a result the planet is silently melting,” he said quietly as guests fist started to arrive.

Trying to get politicians to listen to concerns about climate change is like waiting on hold for customer service, he later half-joked with the crowd. Listening to the music for 20 minutes is one thing, he said, but after 20 years, it is time to hang up the phone.

McKibben and 350.org earned a temporary victory in Washington last year after staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in the nation’s history. Police arrested more than 1,200 people surrounding the White House during a 15-day-long protest of Keystone XL, an oil pipeline designed to carry oil drained from the Canadian Tar Sands in Alberta to Texas refineries.

President Barack Obama backed off of the project soon after, and The Boston Globe declared McKibben “the man who crushed Keystone XL.” However, both before the event and while addressing the crowd, McKibben voiced suspicion that once the election is out of the way, the President, either Obama or Romney, will push forward with the project.

“We are not going to stop global warming one pipeline at a time. There’s just too many oil wells and coal mines and pipelines.” Later he added, “We’re going to have to [attack] more at the center of the whole problem, which is the fossil fuel industry.”

This November, starting the day after the election, McKibben and his supporters will board a bus in Seattle and begin a nationwide tour of 25 cities in 25 days, designed to bring public attention and pressure to his call to universities, churches, and institutions to unload their holdings in fossil fuel companies.

McKibben modeled his new campaign after the campaigns of the 1980s that called on organizations to divest from corporations supporting the apartheid government in South Africa. The movement was not widely successful in getting organizations to participate in divestiture, he noted. “But it was everywhere successful in bringing the issue straight to the heart of the discussion,” he added, pointing out that more than 200 colleges and churches around the country did change their investment practices.

McKibben reminded the group that the first calls for divestment from the apartheid regime came from the United Nations in the 1960s. It took more than 20 years for that action to gain sustained momentum. He worries that this time, the world might not have that long.

“If we don’t do this relatively quickly, in fact quite quickly, then it’s not worth doing, because there won’t be the intact planet to deal with,” he said.

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Daryl Mark, John Cech, Maurice Sendak, We Are All in the Dumps

We Are All In The Dumps: Remembering Maurice Sendak’s Fiction on Homelessness

In Poverty, Social Issues on May 25, 2012 at 3:02 pm

This article first was published by Spare Change News on May 18, 2012.

Maurice Sendak was being driven through Los Angeles in the early 1990s. It was the kind of journey into darkness found in his children’s books, only more real and scarier.

The nation was struggling to emerge from the recession that had followed a worldwide stock market crash in 1987. Big banks reported record profits while major corporations announced massive layoffs.

As Sendak’s car pulled up to a stop sign, he looked out the window and noticed a cardboard box on the sidewalk. Soon, he saw wiggling feet sticking out from under the box. Looking closer, he noticed the face of a child.

Arrested by the stark contrast of invisible children living in boxes at the feet of excessive wealth, Sendak suddenly found meaning in the line of a nursery rhyme that he had been grappling with for years. “And the houses are built without walls.”

The rest of that verse, coupled with another obscure rhyme from Mother Goose, became the cryptic scaffolding for one of the first picture books addressing child homelessness. Thus was born perhaps his darkest and most strangely hopeful book, “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy.”

Famous for his depiction of a journey through the rage, fear, and loneliness of a child’s tantrum in “Where the Wild Things Are,” Sendak was acutely aware that not all children had such a cozy home in which to tangle with the often overwhelming emotions of childhood.

The dark and surreal plot of the book follows two street-tough kids, Jack and Guy, through a cardboard shantytown filled with children in rags. The pair of ruffians loses a litter of kittens and a bald “little kid” to giant, sinister rats in a card game. The rats haul the kittens and the little kid off to St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage.

The moon takes pity and carries Jack and Guy to the fields of rye outside St. Paul’s where they find the little boy. Guy stops Jack from hitting the little kid and suggests they feed him instead. The moon transforms into a cat and leads Jack and Guy into St. Paul’s to rescue the kittens.

Jack and Guy return to their cardboard village where they vow to raise the little boy, “as other folk do.”

The rich two-page illustrations are layered with social commentary. Many of the street children are clad in newspapers, others uses them as blankets. On one page of the book the papers advertise expensive real estate, and on the next, headlines read, “Chaos in Shelters,” “Famine in the World,” and “Leaner Times, Meaner Times.”

“While most of his books weren’t overtly political, I think by the time he arrived at ‘We Are All in the Dumps’ he just let it go and said whatever he wanted to say,” says longtime friend John Cech, an English professor at the University of Florida and the director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and Culture.

Cech first met Sendak while studying children’s literature at the University of Connecticut when Sendak came to speak to one of his masters’ classes. The two became friends, keeping in touch over 40 years.

Cech says that Sendak spoke of the period when he wrote “We Are All in the Dumps” as a difficult time. “Friends of his were dying all over the place.”

As a gay man active in the homosexual community, Sendak had many friends touched by the AIDS epidemic. One of the newspaper headlines featured in the book reads, “Jim Goes Home,” referring to the AIDS-related death of his good friend James Marshall, author of the award-winning “George and Martha” books.

Some, including Cech, have speculated that the bald little boy in “We Are All in the Dumps” is a child suffering from AIDS-related complications.

While some may be uncomfortable introducing such themes to young children, Sendak never shirked an opportunity to show the grittier side of life.

“Tell them anything you want, but tell them the truth,” Sendak once told an HBO film crew.

As a child, Sendak was confronted with many harsh truths. A gay, Jewish kid growing up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression is bound to hit some bumps in the road.

Cech recalls Sendak telling him of tragic childhood memories that went beyond the typical struggles for pecking order and penny candy.

A young Sendak was playing ball with a friend, when he bounced the ball out of the friend’s reach. His friend chased after the ball and into the street where he was struck by a car and killed.

Many of Sendak’s family members were killed in the Holocaust while he was a young child. Tragedy was just as much a facet of life for young Sendak as any adult.

Cech says that children see tragedy every day.

“Kids know that their classmates are abused; they see the bruises. They know who is on food stamps. Kids know what happens to other kids. Kids see those things, they endure those things, but they don’t talk about them because they are simply a part of life.”

Books such as “We Are All in the Dumps” give children the space and permission to talk about such issues.

“[We Are All in the Dumps] is a call to look around, to care, and to see,” says Daryl Mark, coordinator of children’s services at the Cambridge Public Library.

Despite the disturbing imagery depicting hunger, poverty, and homelessness throughout the book, Mark sees hope and kindness in the story.

In the end of the tale, Jack and Guy take in the little kid and care for him. The final image of the three children sleeping on the street, the little kid curled up in Jack’s arms, is at once heartwarming and heartbreaking.

“To me, what’s hopeful is the sense of kindness even though there’s not a resolution to the poverty, the hunger, the homelessness, or the vulnerability,” Mark says.

While “We Are All in the Dumps” is nearly twenty years old, the issues raised in the book persist today.

In Massachusetts, 20,000 children live in homeless shelters or state-subsidized motel rooms, a number that fails to include families living in cars or teens living on the street.

Perhaps we are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy, after all.

NOELLE SWAN is a freelance reporter.

“All in the Dumps”
“We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” is Maurice Sendak’s interpretation of two Mother Goose nursery rhymes. He first came across the verses while helping folklorist Iona Opie select verses to convert into children’s books. These two rhymes lingered in his mind for years before he decided to put them together into a picture book.

We Are All in the Dumps

We are all in the dumps, for diamonds are trumps,
And the kittens are gone to St. Paul’s!
The baby is bit, the moon’s in a fit,
And the houses are built without walls.

Jack and Guy

Jack and Guy went out in the rye,
And they found a little boy with one black eye.
Come, says Jack, let’s knock him on the head,
No, says Guy, let’s buy him some bread.
You buy one loaf and I’ll buy two,
And we’ll bring him up as other folk do.

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cost of living, economic recovery, labor, living wage, low income, Massachusetts, minimum wage

Minimum Wage Buys Less Than it Used To

In Poverty, Social Issues on May 18, 2012 at 9:00 am

This article was first printed in Spare Change News on May 4, 2012.

At 24 years old, Michaud, is not backpacking abroad, sharing an apartment with friends, or beginning to build a professional resume.

He is working 30 hours a week selling stuffed animals for $9 per hour in order to help his mother, a certified nursing assistant, support his three younger siblings. As it is, he says that his family lives from paycheck to paycheck. College has been out of reach for him and likely will be for his siblings.

And Michaud makes more than minimum wage.

Minimum wage in Massachusetts is currently set at $8 per hour. According to labor groups and several legislators, this rate, set back in 2008, is a far cry from a fair wage. Proposed legislation sponsored by Senator Marc R. Pacheco (D) of Taunton and Representative Antonio F.D. Cabral (D) of New Bedford would change that by incrementally increasing the minimum wage first to $9.50 per hour this July and then to $10 by July 2013.

Such an increase would be welcome news to not only the 127,000 Massachusetts wage earners currently earning the bare minimum wage, but also to nearly 200,000 additional low wage workers, like Michaud, earning less that $10 per hour.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to survive even with a decent middle class wage, forget about minimum wage,” says Senator Pacheco who first introduced the bill to the Senate in January 2011. “We live in one of the highest cost states in the country. We are seeing an increase in the wage gap in the state and this is an attempt to control that gap.”

The cost of living in Massachusetts is in fact higher than many other states. CNBC’s annual analysis of America’s Top States for Doing Business reported Massachusetts as having the tenth highest cost of living.

However, the cost of doing business is equally high.

Raising the minimum wage could increase that burden, says Jon Hurst, long-time president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. “We need to think carefully in order not to put local employers and therefore local employment at a disadvantage in Massachusetts.”

Mandatory health care coverage and required overtime pay for Sundays already add state specific costs to doing business in Massachusetts.

Hurst worries an increase in minimum wage will either force small business owners to reduce the hours of their employees or increase costs at a time when local businesses are struggling to figure out how to compete with low-cost online shopping alternatives.

Michael Kanter owns Cambridge Naturals, a natural product retailer in Cambridge’s Porter Square. He says he already pays all of his 15 employees at or above $10 an hour and attributes his low staff turnover to offering what he considers a respectable wage.

His business can support that rate of pay, though he recognizes there may be some that cannot without cuts in staffing or increasing prices.

Kanter sees a valid struggle on both sides. On the one hand, “people can’t afford to live at that rate of pay” ($8 an hour). On the other hand, “on a small business level you sometimes feel like you are getting beat up.”

Still, Kanter advocates for an increase in the minimum wage. “We have to figure out how to bring retailers along because we have to make it so that people can afford to live in society.”

Some argue that raising the minimum wage could be mutually beneficial to both employer and employee.

When low-income workers’ wages increase, so does their spending, which in turn boosts the local economy, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank examining economic policy that impacts low and middle income workers.

Representative Cabral—who co-sponsors the version of the bill currently being weighed in the House of Representatives—believes increasing the minimum wage could improve the economy in other ways as well.

Many earning minimum wage, especially single parents with two or more children, need supplemental assistance from the state many social service programs. In recent years, the state has been struggling to provide needed support to the increasing number of residents that qualify for assistive services.

“If someone works, they should be paid a wage that enables them to afford putting food on their table without having to apply for public assistance,” said Cabral.

For many single parents and dual earner families, that is not the case. Teetering on the poverty line makes it difficult to take steps to secure a better future for their children.

“When we talk about people making $8-10 per hour, higher education is not on the horizon because they don’t have the ability to make ends meet just with the basic needs of groceries, gas, getting to and from work, putting food on the table, and taking care of their children,” says Jason Stephany, spokesperson for MASSUniting, a local community and labor advocacy organization.

Stephany advocates for any increase in minimum wage, calling it long overdue. He adds that he hopes the legislature will also pass a second component of the legislation, which would require continued and automatic adjustments of minimum wage based on the Consumer Price Index, a measurement of cost of living increase issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Senator Pacheco says that he pushed for an automatic increase during legislative discussions leading up to the past three minimum wage increases, but each time, that portion of the bill is weeded out before being signed into law.

A failure to adjust minimum wage with inflation has been a consistent problem since the late 1960s, says Noah Berger, director of the Mass Budget and Policy Center, a non-partisan organization that produces policy research, analysis, and recommendations as they relate to low and middle income workers.

“Over the last couple decades, incomes at the high end of the spectrum have gone up pretty dramatically and middle incomes have gone up a little bit. Minimum wage has actually gone down,” Berger says.

MassBudget published a report earlier this month indicating in today’s dollars, a minimum wage earner in 1968 actually earned $5000 a year more than a minimum wage earner today.

Both Senator Pacheco and Representative Cabral say that they will continue to strive to bring the minimum wage back in line with inflation. If the legislature fails to pass the bill this session, they say they will reintroduce it first thing next session.

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City Life, foreclosure, Greater Boston Legal Services, Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, housing, legal aid, post-foreclosure assistance, Project No One Leaves, tenant rights

Keeping House: Local Organizations Collaborate to Help Boston Residents Stay in Their Homes Post-Foreclosure

In Poverty, Social Issues on April 20, 2012 at 4:37 pm

This article was first published in Spare Change News on April 20, 2012.

Photo Credit: Noah Fournier

When Jeril Richardson checked out of the hospital after he was hit by a car in 2009, he returned home to find that his landlord had not been keeping up with mortgage payments and the bank was foreclosing on his Hyde Park home.

Canvassers knocking on his door told him about City Life Vida Urbana, a community organization that would help him to fight to stay in his home. Nearly three years later, Richardson still lives in the house, pays rent to the bank, and is saving to purchase the property.

Every weekend, students and community volunteers from Project No One Leaves hit the streets in an effort to reach tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure to inform them of their rights during and after the foreclosure.

“We try to get there before eviction agents come knocking and telling them to leave immediately,” said Chris Larson, senior at Tufts University who helped to coordinate a chapter of No One Leaves at Tufts.

In recent years, keeping up with new foreclosures has become a daunting task, said Chas Hamilton, a third-year law student and current president of the board for Project No One Leaves at Harvard Law School. “In a given week, there might be 30 new foreclosures listed in Boston proper.”

Click here to read the full story.

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family shelter, homeless shelter, literacy program, Northeastern University, Therese O'Neil-Pirozzi

Northeastern Students Promote Literacy in Family Shelter

In Poverty, Social Issues on April 13, 2012 at 12:25 pm

This article was first printed in Spare Change News on March 23, 2012 and posted online the same day.

Photo courtesy of Noah Fournier.

Nine college girls, one professor, one photographer, and a Spare Change reporter spill out of a tiny elevator and into the lobby of Families in Transition, a temporary shelter for families awaiting housing at the Huntington Avenue YMCA in Boston.

“Why don’t you go get Sebastian?” Professor Therese O’Neil-Pirozzi asks Ella Besas, one of her volunteers.

Besas grins. “Sebastian?” Her voice betrays her excitement. “Oh my God! He’s so cute,” she squeals before dashing down the hall to return with a toddler gripping her hand.

Besas and her peers have come to work with Sebastian and other children in the shelter as part of Northeastern University’s Homeless Shelter Story Telling Group. For fourteen years, O’Neil-Pirozzi has brought speech and language pathology majors into family shelters to help instill a love of reading, expose the children to stimulating language and literature opportunities, and model strategies for parents and shelter staff to further promote language and literacy.

Having previously worked with people experiencing homelessness through her church, O’Neil-Pirozzi felt strongly about continuing that tradition when she joined the faculty of Northeastern University. “I wanted to continue doing something that was important to me personally and that would be helpful professionally to my students.” She came up with a weekly storytelling group for children living in shelter.

For Besas, participation in the program has given her a valuable opportunity to practice skills taught in the classroom. She says that her first time volunteering, she found herself in a little over her head. Assigned to a child with a severe speech impediment, she had difficulty understanding him. She says that O’Neil-Pirozzi stood by her and supported her throughout the entire session. Later she learned that the child has cerebral palsy.

O’Neil-Pirozzi and her volunteers rarely know much about the children participating in the program. She checks in with shelter director David Tavares each week to get an idea of how many children in each age group might be attending that week. Participation is voluntary, so there is no guarantee how many of those children will actually join the group. Tavares may provide ages and first names, but no information about skills. Any information O’Neil-Pirozzi gets has been gathered during previous sessions.

Tonight is Besas’ third night visiting the shelter. She and two of her classmates are working with Sebastian, a verbal 2-year-old boy. Besas’ team met in O’Neil-Pirozzi’s lab before the session and designed a lesson plan around a picture book about rain to go along with the gloomy weather. Each of the three college students took turns reading the book to Sebastian, stopping frequently to ask him questions and encourage him to express his growing vocabulary. Sebastian calls out details from the illustrations—he especially likes the police officer.

In a separate room, three more college students sit around a kidney- shaped table with a slender 6-year-old boy with a buzz cut and paper- white skin. His mother has asked that he not be identified so we’ll call him Armend. The group has just finished reading “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss, and one of the volunteers is trying to explain the definition of the word rhyme. After giving a few examples of words that do rhyme, she asks him, “What about plane and pie, do they rhyme?”

Armend pauses a moment. “Puh, puh, puh,” he says under his breath, then answers more clearly, “Yes.”

“They do both start with P,” one volunteer offers, “but they don’t really rhyme.” She continues to repeat that rhymes sound alike.

Armend’s brow knits tighter causing a thin blue vein across his right temple to throb slightly.

O’Neil-Pirozzi quietly slips into a chair between two of the volunteers. “Can I play?” she asks before coming up with a game to illustrate rhyming sounds. She and her volunteers play with new ways to demonstrate the concept. In the end, Armend never quite gets it, despite seemingly endless attempts to frame it differently for him—Pirozzi even solicits the help of this reporter and former teacher for some fresh ideas. By the time O’Neil-Pirozzi announces the session’s end, he has struggled for over half an hour trying to grasp the concept. Rather than showing relief at the break, he groans, “Awww!”

Later, one of the students working with Armend, Lynne Crispo, a third-year speech language and pathology student reflects on working with him. She says that she has been impressed by just how much Armend wants to learn. “He’s so excited and interested in everything that you are doing.” After the session, Crispo brainstormed with her peers and O’Neil-Pirozzi about different approaches they might try with Armend next time they visit. That is, if he is still there.

O’Neil-Pirozzi’s experiences working with children living in shelter led her to suspect that homelessness itself might put children at risk for language development delays and literacy delays, but she was unable to find much research on the subject. Following up on her hunch with her own research, she has found preliminary evidence that she says confirms her suspicions. She says early language and literacy delays can lead to educational challenges and failures later in school. She is currently seeking additional participants to include in her study.

Additionally, O’Neil-Pirozzi believes that parents living in shelters also have a higher risk for language disorders than the general population. “We know that there is a higher incidence of depression amongst adults living in shelter and depression can effect cognitive and language abilities. Some of the parents are victims of domestic violence and we know that traumatic brain injury can impact language literacy cognition. Further, they may have had their own language and literacy difficulties as children which could have continued into adulthood.” O’Neil-Pirozzi says she encourages parents to participate in the program with their child and may offer to help connect the family to external services through the shelter case managers.

Armend’s mother, we’ll call her Nora Bizi to protect her privacy, says she is grateful for O’Neil-Pirozzi and her volunteers’ work with Armend. An Albanian national, Bizi says she learned English from watching television. She says that watching O’Neil-Pirozzi with the children has helped her learn to be patient when working with Armend. “This is a beautiful teacher,” she says.

Pirozzi believes that for many families for whom English is a second language, the storytelling groups can be just as helpful for the parents as the children. “There are some parents who I think are actually learning English themselves from our storytelling groups,” she says while walking back to her lab.

For other parents the storytelling group represents a precious hour of supervised care. The shelter has rules about parents remaining with children at all times unless they are participating in a structured program. Sebastian’s mother, Catherine Green, says that she takes advantage of that time to catch up on some homework for her criminal justice classes at Bunker Hill Community College.

As for the student volunteers, they gain more than professional experience. O’Neil-Pirozzi says that many volunteers come to the program with misconceptions about people experiencing homelessness and the circumstances that might have led them to that situation. She says that she teaches her students that the leading causes of homelessness among single men and women is very different from the factors at play in family homelessness.

“I love seeing them reconfigure or reboot.” O’Neil-Pirozzi says. “That’s been an awesome experience for them and for me.”

▶ Comment

homeless, homeless teens, LGBT, social services, unaccompanied youth act

No Direction Home: When Coming Out Means Kicked Out

In Civil Rights, Poverty, Social Issues on March 21, 2012 at 9:05 am

This article first appeared in print in Spare Change News on Friday, March 9, 2012 and online at SpareChangeNews.net on the same day.

Diamond McMillion mugs for the camera at a Harvard Square cafe before heading to work in the kitchen at
Youth on Fire.

At 16 years old, Diamond McMillion was too young to check into a shelter. As a lesbian, she felt unwelcome at home and frequently slept in an elevator shaft with three friends.

“We would ring every buzzer in the building until somebody got tired of listening to it ringing and would let us in. We’d disconnect the elevator for the night and reconnect it before we left in the morning,” said McMillion.

Echoes of McMillion’s story can be heard across the country. Kids rejected by their family for their sexual orientation and turned out into the street are left to fend for themselves.

Sassafras Lowrey was kicked out of her home at 17 while she was in her senior year of high school in rural Oregon. Her mother pled guilty to assaulting her for coming out of the closet. At the time, she says that she felt isolated and alone. Ten years later, she published Kicked Out—a compilation of stories told by current and past lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) homeless youth. She believes this is a national epidemic.

“It’s happening in every community, every urban center, every suburban neighborhood, every small town,” said Lowrey.

A recent study from Children’s Hospital Boston published online by the American Journal of Public Health reports that 1 in 4 gay and lesbian and high school students are homeless, compared with just 3 percent of heterosexual teens.

In general, young people have few options if they are unable to stay at home. Other than going through a lengthy emancipation process in the courts, young people under the age of 18 are expected to be in the care of adult family members or the foster care system.

“At the age of 16 in Massachusetts, you can consent to sex, you can emancipate yourself, you can drop out of high school, but you can’t check into a shelter,” McMillion said. “The only thing you can do is latch onto an older person, who may or may not take advantage of you.”

For McMillion and many others in similar situations, her 18th birthday did not come with a place to belong.

Ayala Livny, director of Youth on Fire, a drop-in center in Cambridge for young people experiencing homelessness, stated that although anyone over 18 can stay in a shelter, young people are not safe in this environment and become easy targets. “Young people in general don’t really go into the shelters,” Livny. “They stay outside. They couch surf. They try to blend in and find creative ways of housing themselves. That’s even more true for our queer identified youth.”

Quianna Sarjeant, a member of Youth on Fire, addressed a gathering of advocates at the Massachusetts State House for the Leap into Action to End Homelessness, Legislative Action Day on February 29. She explained some of the reasons that general population shelters are inappropriate for young people. “When I was 18 staying at the shelters, I found myself witnessing things that an 18-year-old should not have to witness,” said Sarjeant. “I saw men masturbating and people being rushed away in ambulances after overdosing on drugs.”

Following Sarjeant’s speech, she, McMillion, Livny and others from Youth on Fire walked the halls of the State House making the case for the Unaccompanied Homeless Youth Act currently being considered by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Donna LoConte, budget director and scheduler for Senator Anthony Petruccelli (D), listened intently as the group shared snippets of their lives on the streets.

“So how long can one stay at Youth on Fire?” LoConte asked.

Livny has been asked this question before. Quietly she explained that Youth on Fire is a drop-in space, open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. “When we close, folks go wherever it is they are going to go,” said Livny.

Slowly, the point that Livny, McMillion, and Sarjeant have come to make began to sink in. “I would have thought that folks at Youth on Fire could connect them to the services that they need,” LoConte said.

“Currently in Boston there is only one emergency shelter dedicated for young people,” said Livny. “It has twelve beds.”

LoConte’s face fell as she realized the implications of Livny’s words. She looked at the paperwork that Livny passed her, a fact sheet detailing several bills currently being weighed by the state Senate regarding housing and homelessness. She said Petruccelli was familiar with (and in support of) all of them she said, except the Unaccompanied Homeless Youth Act, the one that Livny, Sarjeant, and McMillion came to highlight. She looked around the room at the faces of Youth on Fire, and said: “But now. Definitely. We’ll be talking about this one.”

The bill holds potential to improve services for all homeless young people, but there are still special challenges facing homeless LGBT youth.

Grace Sterling Stowell, executive director of Boston Alliance of Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth (BAGLY) says that she has heard numerous reports of LGBT youth becoming targets for violence inside shelters. “We have heard stories of young men who become victims to adults in the shelter. Either they are found out to be gay and become targets of violence and harassment, and/or they become set up for sexual violence.” She says that she also heard significant reports of young people being victimized by staff.

McMillion says that she and her partner experienced discrimination from staff members at some area shelters. She says that she and her partner were forbidden from hugging, sitting too close together, or using the multi-stall bathroom at the same time. She recalls attempting to study with her partner for a course they both were taking at Bunker Hill Community College. The two could only afford one copy of the textbook and read together. A staff member at the shelter approached them and told them they had to take turns reading the book because they were sitting to close together. McMillion said that upon refusing, she and her partner were barred from the shelter for three days.

Stowell says that BAGLY and other organizations have been focusing on trying to connect shelter staff with cultural competency trainings, but has found it to be an uphill battle.

“Training’s not going to do anything. There needs to be more homosexual and transgender staff. There need to be workshops with clients on how to report mistreatment without fearing repercussions from other staff members,” said McMillion.

Today, McMillion has her own apartment in Quincy. Out of those four kids that slept in the elevator shafts of apartment buildings, she is the only one still alive. One of them, her girlfriend at the time, died in her arms of an asthma attack. McMillion said that she counts herself lucky. She says she feels compelled to become a leader and a voice of change. Right now, that looks like that might be through social work, but she’s open to possibilities. For now, she says, she can take a deep breath, let it out, and say, “I’m okay.”

Noelle Swan

• writer • reporter • editor •

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