By Elizabeth Harper

one in ten young adults ages eighteen to twenty-five had experienced some form of homelessness for a period of twelve months or more…one in thirty youth ages thirteen to seventeen had been homeless for at least a twelve-month period, with three-quarters of those individuals admitting to explicit homelessness, whether because they ran away or were kicked out of their homes, and the remaining quarter reporting that they, like their young-adult counterparts, survived by staying with acquaintances, hopping from couch to couch…That all boils down to an estimated 3.5 million young adults and 700,000 youth who have experienced prolonged homelessness at some point in their lives … And each one of those lives contains an unknown history of trauma and pain, be it what drove them to the streets or what they found waiting for them when they got there—emotional baggage that will drive a good number of them to a life of hard drugs and mental instability, until, bit by bit, they fade from the burgeoning human beings they once were into just another statistic to rattle off in a book…for the majority of these kids, the choice is between homelessness and, for example, “Do I want to stay at home and get raped every night by my uncle?…Or…Do I want to stay home and get my bones continually broken by my mother?”…They run away to escape a life in which it was beaten into them that they were nothing, less than nothing, and then they are taken in by the streets, where the last of their humanity is ripped from them. Because on the streets, there is no black and white. There is no good and evil. There is only survival…You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. You can’t persevere if the trauma you suffered as a child makes it impossible for you to look a person in the eye, if the only way of life you know is a needle in your arm to numb the pain…millions of hurt kids, abandoned on the streets, knowing little more than doing whatever it takes to survive…African American youth had an 83 percent increased risk of having experienced homelessness…the Chapin Hall study found that LGBTQ youth had a 120 percent greater risk of experiencing homelessness than their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts…All of them have trauma…these kids are just trying to find their place in this world, a world that has told them time and time again that they are not welcome…searching for something better, searching for somewhere to belong.

This is a sort of cento prose poem composed of passages I highlighted while reading Those Who Wander: America’s Lost Street Kids , by Vivian Ho. At the time I was reading this book, I was also preparing for the singer-songwriter night and fundraising event I put together for Windy City Empire. One of the organizations we’ve been raising money for this year is Project Fierce Chicago. Even though Ho’s book focuses on homeless youth in California, homelessness affects youth throughout the country, including Chicago. (Chicago public school teachers are very much aware of how homelessness affects their students, thus their insistence on more social workers, nurses, etc.)