$1 million grant to catch homeless youth further ‘upstream’

Joaqlin Estus
ICT

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Heidi Huppert shared the story of her becoming homeless at age 12 or 13 with The Striver Project magazine.

“I sat while the police took pictures of my injuries. I was told to pack a backpack and that I was going into foster care that night. I went to my room, climbed out of the second-story window, maneuvered down a gas line and fled into the dark,” she said.

She later turned to Covenant House , a homeless youth services nonprofit in Anchorage whose vision is to make the “experience of youth homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.”

Huppert went to the shelter but lied about her name and circumstances and initially only stayed one night. While giving a tour of the facility for visiting officials, she said now as Covenant’s chief program officer, she sees similarly distrustful youth who sit through the hour-long intake process then also leave after one night.

“They do come back, but I've had them tell me, ‘I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to lock the doors. I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to keep me, the cops weren't going to come, some situation like that.’ And it was a real fear because of that institutional (approach), and a lot of times abuse that they'd suffered somewhere.”

Covenant House serves youth aged 13 to 24. More than half are Alaska Native, and more than half are former foster youth. Covenant keeps an eye out because the youth are vulnerable to labor or sex trafficking due to a lack of familial support, economic hardship, addictions, and mental health and other challenges.

Huppert said her experiences led to college, a master’s degree, and a career dedicated to helping young people. She works to help homeless youth grow a sense of trust in people like her, the teachers, tutors and social workers, the independent living specialists who help them build the skills needed to get a well-paying job, rent their own apartment, and have their own car.

Huppert said ideally Covenant House would intervene with foster youth earlier, to build a relationship with them six months or a year before they reach age 18 and must leave the foster system.

Covenant House was recently awarded a million dollar grant to be spent over three years to do just that.

Jeff Hild is principal deputy assistant secretary for the federal Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, which funds street outreach, emergency shelters, and longer-term transitional living and maternity group home programs for youth who have run away and are experiencing homelessness or housing instability.

During the April 24 facility tour, Hild said the million-dollar grant the administration awarded to Covenant House last fall is one of 11 in the country and part of a demonstration project.

“The goal is to get the intervention upstream before a young person’s in crisis. So part of our effort is to prove the concept here that we know from some of the research that's been done and show this works. And hopefully that gives us some momentum with Congress and others to put more funds in this space and give us increased flexibility to do flexible cash assistance,” Hild said.

The cash assistance is needed because resources that can make a big difference in the lives of foster children are often difficult to access. Cash might come “through some bureaucratic process or only pay for groceries on Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. or there's all sorts of strings attached to a lot of those things. So the stuff that the young person needs, they don't often get,” Huppert said.

“I think this is why direct cash transfer is so key,” she continued. “They get some self-determination and being able to choose what to spend money on…When you let them make the choice, chances are they're going to keep making good choices...it might be ’if I just would've had $400 to fix the alternator in my car, I wouldn't have lost my job.’ So there's tons of those stories,” Huppert said.

With early intervention, “the whole idea is to stop them from having to come here and experiencing that trauma of becoming homeless… it really is a partnership with the state (which manages foster care) and not like anything that we've ever done before. So we're super excited about that,” she said.

Huppert said Covenant House partners with Native for-profit and nonprofit organizations and tribes as well as housing authorities, and would-be employers.

“Every one of these partners is like, ‘we'll hire 'em. You got the workforce, we'll hire 'em.’ And I think that that's the key is that we've got a resource, an untapped resource and their potential,” Huppert said.

To that end, Covenant House offers classes so students can get their GED. They can take leadership and management classes. Some practice cooking in a commercial-style kitchen. They can use simulators to learn the skills needed for a commercial driver’s license or to be a heavy equipment operator, airplane pilot or boat captain.

“They're all jobs that will pay a living wage and help you actually stay in a home, which is huge,” said Covenant House Housing Director Sean Gaither.

Huppert said her long-term goal is to see a decrease in the need for crisis shelters thanks to ample opportunities for housing.

“Let's make shelter the smallest kind of program that we have, where we have so many other options for people to live in a longer transitional space, and have different options for different kinds of housing,” she said.

Covenant House has dorm-style rooms, classrooms, communal kitchens, lounge areas where people can watch TV, as well as a chapel.

The chaplain, Huppert said, unfortunately has to officiate at too many memorial services. Because with too few support services for adult homeless people, “they become that chronic homeless individual that's out there and using those services that are in camps or whatever it might be. So in a place like Alaska, oftentimes that's life or death.”

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