Homeless Youth Summit - Part Four

NOTE: This is Part Four of a continuing entry. See Monday 4/16, Thursday 4/19, and Friday 4/20 for Part’s One, Two, and Three.

The final point of my three point plan has to do with greater agency transparency and a higher level of community involvement. I don’t want to place blame, and I’m not sure who is at fault if I wanted to place blame, but the reality is that most runaway and homeless youth (RHY) agencies operate in relative isolation, and there is often an adversarial relationship between agencies and the community. It is not uncommon for community leaders to be suspicious of the work that RHY agencies do, if not to outright accuse them of enabling behaviors that contribute to the problem. Conversely, it is not unusual for agencies to develop somewhat of a siege mentality, viewing elements of the community as reactionary forces who just don’t understand, or care.

But this is a community problem, and it will only be properly addressed by community solutions. Agencies and their communities need to communicate and work together, and anything less is a disservice to the young people on our streets. When we fail to work together and instead develop adversarial relationships, we simply re-create the dysfunctional dynamics that contributed to young people being on the streets in the first place. The truly dangerous aspect of agency isolation is that we can develop tunnel vision and lose perspective on the effects of the work that we do. In my experience, the saddest thing about accusations that agencies “enable” is that sometimes these accusations are true. This is what results when we examine our practice only through our own eyes – we need community perspective in order to reflect critically on the work we do.

In order to seek lasting solutions to the issues faced by runaway and homeless youth we need to begin to view our communities as partners. We should make as great an effort to outreach to, build trust with, and involve the dominant culture as we do the street culture. When we fail to do that, we are failing to make every effort and motivate every resource for the benefit of the young people we are seeking to assist, and the last thing we want to become is another group of adults that has failed them.