Homeless teen advocates charge ahead

WASILLA — Between laying the groundwork for a possible network of homes with room for them, a partnership with an Anchorage shelter and some high-speed paper shuffling, Valley advocates for homeless youth are sprinting forward.

“We’ve got so much going on my head’s about to explode and I’m really excited,” said Michelle Overstreet, one of the people leading the charge with MY House, at a group meeting Thursday to address teen homelessness.

What had her most excited seemed to be a budding partnership between the MY House and Covenant House in Anchorage.

Overstreet said the largest worry she hears from people on the subject of a youth shelter in the Valley is that those operations are hard to make sustainable. But Covenant House’s 20-year track record proves the model can work.

“The prospect of working with Covenant House is really exciting because they are sustainable and they can show us how to do that,” Overstreet said.

Covenant House already comes up in Overstreet’s conversations as one of the only resources the Valley can turn to when a homeless kid needs shelter. Overstreet sees a partnership going deeper than that, with MY House learning how Covenant House works and getting ideas to implement here.

MY House formed out of a committee of the Mat-Su Coalition on Housing and Homelessness. Overstreet said everyone told her if she wanted to do something she needed to form a nonprofit. So she did, but the process isn’t finished yet. In October, MY House filed for nonprofit status with the state. In January, it filed with the federal government. So, if you’re counting, five months from starting the process approval could come any day.

“Usually it takes people a year or two years, they give you a year to get your federal paperwork filed after you get your state paperwork,” Overstreet said. “We’re hoping that they’ll get back to us quickly because we do have kids sleeping in cars.”

Exactly how many young people are homeless is hard to say. The best figures, said MY House member Michael Carson, are probably the Mat-Su Borough School District’s numbers. The district has identified 450 homeless kids, 200 of which are unaccompanied, meaning they’re on their own and not part of a homeless family.

“That means they’re holding a playing hand of zero,” Carson said. “If they get one more bad hand they’re in danger of dropping out.”

Carson said dropping out of school could just be one step on a road to drug abuse and prison.

Also in the pile of exciting things about to make Overstreet’s head explode is the work MY House is doing to put together a host home program. Folks with extra bedrooms would sign up to house a homeless youth.

At Thursday’s meeting, a volunteer brandished a list of names and contact information for people who have already signed up. Overstreet said there are still quite a few really big pieces that need to fall into place. MY House needs to find a way to make sure these willing volunteers have a suitable living arrangement for taking in a homeless kid.

Overstreet said MY House is working to set up some kind of a process for that, but it is many months away.

Dave Rose, who heads up the Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, said he thinks host homes are the way to go.

“The whole idea of host homes is ready to just happen,” he said, before advocating a deliberate approach. “We want it to happen in a good way.”

In the meantime, the group shared ideas for fundraisers and programs it can run to connect kids with resources available to them, or just to other homeless kids that might be positive, rather than negative role models.

For more information about MY House, visit the group’s website at myhousematsu.org.