Who We Serve

StreetWorks serves homeless, runaway, and at-risk youth who are 12- to 21-years-old. A homeless youth is generally defined as any youth aged 12- to 21-years-old who is unaccompanied by parents, family, or guardians and is homeless and without a regular night-time residence. Most of the youth we serve come from poor families, a disproportionate number are youth of color or are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and most have experienced either abuse or neglect in their lifetimes.

Each year in America, as many as several hundred thousand youth fall under this definition. Most do not receive assistance from community nonprofit programs due to a lack of capacity and resources. In 2003, 82,000 homeless youth were provided shelter, street outreach, and transitional housing by community-based programs receiving federal funding through the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act. (This number may be duplicated since some youth may access multiple programs in a particular city and be counted several times.)

What follows is information obtained from federal studies and the Wilder Research Center’s survey. Together, these reports tell us a lot about the youth StreetWorks serves and the experiences they encounter.

This data does not speak to the survival skills held by our youth participants or the fact that a majority want to succeed even given their histories of abuse, exploitation, neglect, or abandonment. Every day Outreach Workers work with resilient youth who are full of hope, dreams, and potential!

Homeless Youth Demographics

In October of 2003 the Wilder Research Center conducted a statewide survey of homeless youth in Minnesota. The survey interviewed 129 youth 17-years old and younger.

The Wilder Research Center’s survey in 2003 determined the following:

• Between 500 and 600 youth are homeless and without shelter on any given night in Minnesota.
• Homeless youth are disproportionately youth of color (65% were African American, American Indian, or bicultural).
• The average age at which youth first began living on their own was 16.
• There seems to be some gender disparity with more than six out of ten homeless youth being girls.
• Nearly one out of two homeless youth has been physically or sexually mistreated (46%).
• Seven out of ten homeless youth had experienced a placement in a foster home, group home, or corrections facility (71%).
• Most homeless youth leave due to conflict with parents (63%); however, a high percentage report that at least one adult in the home will not tolerate their presence (39%), a quarter (24%) report alcohol or drug use by parents, and one in five (19%) reported that adults in the household do not attend to the youth’s basic needs.
• Half of the youth felt that there was a chance they would live with their family again (52%).

http://eservice.dpd-info.com/epace/object/Job/E10960/detailomlessnessinMinnesota

Greater Minnesota

The crisis of homeless and runaway youth is not just an urban issue. Greater Minnesota also reports an alarming number of troubled teenagers:

• In Moorhead, Minnesota the Title I program in the public schools served over 599 homeless children and youth in 2001
• In Duluth, the Lutheran Social Services shelter assisted 554 youth in 2001 with street-based outreach, reporting an additional 250 youth needing services each day
• Youth typically become homeless due to a complex series of circumstances, often starting with family conflict and poverty and many times ultimately ending in abuse, abandonment, or neglect. A federally-funded study of homeless youth programs reported that 47% of youth indicated intense conflict with their parents and guardians resulting in temporary stays at shelters. Forty two percent reported physical abuse, and 17% reported unwanted sexual behavior forced by a family or household member. As the report noted, “Youth are not just arguing with their parents or guardians but they were beaten, sexually violated, and thrown out of the house.”
• Our nation’s child welfare programs are also failing to prevent youth under their care and protection from experiencing homelessness. It is common knowledge among homeless youth advocates that most states’ child welfare systems are ill-equipped to provide relief to older adolescents experiencing abandonment, neglect, and homelessness.
• The Minnesota Wilder Research Center Study also found that 70% of the youth have experienced some form of state intervention through an ‘out-of-home placement’ (either through child protection, foster care, children’s mental health, or juvenile corrections) and still ended up homeless before their 18th birthday.
• The most recent study of post-foster care homelessness found that, within a year of leaving foster care, 22.2% of former foster youth experienced homelessness for one day or more.9 Within two to four years of exiting foster care, 25% of foster children had experienced homelessness.
  

National Statistics

1. The federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act defines homeless youth as a person “not more than 21 years of age… for whom it is not possible to live in a safe environment with a relative and who has no other safe alternative living arrangements.” 42 U.S.C. § 5732a.

2. A United State Department of Justice study estimated that in 1999 nearly 1.7 million youth had a runaway or ‘throwaway’ episode each year. 58 Hammer, H., Finkelhor, D., & A. Sedlak. “Runaway/Throwaway children: National estimates and characteristics.” National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Throwaway Children. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. (2002). However, a 1995 study conducted for the federal government by the Research Triangle Institute reported an estimated 2.8 million youth. Green, J., Ringwalt, C., Kelly, J., Iachan, R., & Z. Cohen. “Youth with Runaway, Throwaway and Homeless Experiences: Prevalence, Drug Use, and Other At-Risk Behaviors.” Volume 1: Final Report. Research Triangle Park, NC: Research Triangle Institute. (1995).

3. United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Fiscal Year 2003 Annual Performance Report.

4. See, Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

5. Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1998). (In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell persuasively argues through historical records that child abandonment was common and morally acceptable in antiquity until the European Renaissance.)