Homeless shelter demand rises as temperatures drop (NECN: Anya Huneke, Burlington, VT) - Homeless shelters across our region have seen a surge in demand this past year, and in Vermont. That goes for youth shelters as well. Play video

Spectrum’s 13-bed emergency youth shelter has filled up before, but not like this, say staff; not like in this long, hard year. In the past year, the organization has housed 119 16- to 22-year olds in its temporary shelter on Pearl Street in Burlington. In that same time, staff turned away 120 more — almost twice as many as the year before. Mark Redmond, director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services, attributes the bump in homeless youth seeking….click here to read full article

Nov 2 05:01 PM US/Eastern

By LINDSEY TANNER
AP Medical Writer

CHICAGO (AP) – Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Your neighbor may be using some of these programs but it’s not the kind of thing people want to talk about,” Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it’s a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

“This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children,” Rank said.

Food stamps are a Department of Agriculture program for low-income individuals and families, covering most foods although not prepared hot foods or alcohol. For a family of four to be eligible, their annual take-home pay can’t exceed about $22,000.

According to a USDA report released last month, 28.4 million Americans received food stamps in an average month in 2008, and about half were younger than age 18. The average monthly benefit per household totaled $222.

Rank and Cornell University sociologist Thomas Hirschl studied data from a nationally representative survey of 4,800 American households interviewed annually from 1968 through 1997 by the University of Michigan. About 18,000 adults and children were involved.

Overall, about 49 percent of all children were on food stamps at some point by the age of 20, the analysis found. That includes 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of whites. The analysis didn’t include other ethnic groups.

The time span included typical economic ups and downs, including the early 1980s recession. That means similar portions of children now and in the future will live in families receiving food stamps, although ongoing economic turmoil may increase the numbers, Rank said.

An editorial in the medical journal agreed.

“The current recession is likely to generate for children in the United States the greatest level of material deprivation that we will see in our professional lifetimes,” Stanford pediatrician Dr. Paul Wise wrote.

Wise said the Archives study estimate is believable.

“I find it terribly sad, but not surprising,” Wise said.

James Weill, president of Food Research and Action Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the analysis underscores that “there are just very large numbers of people who rely on this program for a month, six months, a year.”

“What I hope comes out of this study is an understanding that food stamp beneficiaries aren’t them—they’re us,” Weill said.

The analysis is in line with other recent research suggesting that more than 40 percent of U.S. children will live in poverty or near-poverty by age 17; and that half will live at some point in a single-parent family. Also, other researchers have estimated that slightly more than half of adults will use food stamps at some point by age 65.

___

On the Net:

Archives: http://www.archpediatrics.com

USDA: http://www.fns.usda.gov

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The author of the article did not report on Vermont, but I can tell you that this article absolutely rang true for those of us at Spectrum.  For years we would go through periods of time when our shelter was full, but within a few weeks the numbers would go back down.  Our transitional living residence, the SRO, has never had all 9 apartment units full.

But for the last 12 months, our shelter has been full virtually every day, particularly on the male side.  And the SRO, which always had an occupancy of 7 or 8 youth at a time, now runs full regularly.  The result?  We have to turn homeless kids away due to lack of beds – something I absolutely hate to do. 

The two articles are linked below, please read them and also watch the videos associated with each.  The reporter did a great job on this very sad spectacle, and remember that what is true for Oregon and New York is absolutely true for Vermont as well.

 Part I of the article http://bit.ly/PartOne

Part II of the article: http://bit.ly/PartTwo

The Spectrum Ride was a terrific event, held at Dorset Park yesterday. We lucked out and had perfect weather. More than 100 riders participated in helping make our first annual Spectrum Ride a success. Thank you to all the sponsors, riders, and volunteers. A big thank you Sam Quinn who coordinated this event!!

For more photos, check out photographer Emily Nelson from the Burlington Free Press: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=BT&Dato=20090628&Kategori=SPECTRUM&Lopenr=906280802&Ref=PH

All of us at Spectrum are proud of Erin for being awarded the annual Ernest A. Pomerleau Scholarship and receiving the Outstanding Young Vermonter Award! Please read article for full story.

This is an article I wrote that appeared in Youth Today.

The business section of The New York Times ran a feature story in August titled, “A Business Built on the Troubles of Teenagers.” The opening paragraph described the travails of a parent,

Mary Ann Davies, whose 16-year-old daughter had a drug problem. The article said Davies had spent more than $100,000 in the past year to send her daughter to one privately run residential program after another. She had committed herself to spend another $100,000 over the next two years for a boarding school in New York.

The Times went on to state that an increasing number of desperate parents are doing the same, forking over an average of $5,000 per month for residential care for their troubled children. “Those numbers,” the writer notes, “have drawn the attention of some big money investors” in the companies that run the programs.

Yes, the suffering of parents and their children has become a growth industry in America. I guess it was inevitable. After all, the prison industry has gone corporate in some states. So has education. Then there is the all-time money-making machine: health care.

However inevitable it may be, it is still disgusting. Here are some samples from the article:

•    Joseph Kenary, the president of the corporate finance business at CapitalSource Finance, says that if the programs are “run well, if they’re full, they generate pretty attractive return on a cash-on-cash basis.”
•    Venture capital firms like Warburg Pincus and the Sprout Group, a division of Credit Suisse First Boston, have found this a promising business opportunity. 
•    “All indications are that the market is still growing. The consensus is that increasing numbers of children are in trouble and are not growing up very well,” said Lon Woodbury, an educational consultant
•    Industry analysts estimate that the companies typically generate profit margins of 10 to 20 percent. Kirsten  Edwards, an equity research analyst at ThinkEquity Partners, a research and investment banking firm, said larger companies were more efficient because they could spread out the cost of their curricula, marketing and overhead as they expand.

Much of the article dealt with the incredible growth in both the number of parents seeking help for their troubled kids and the corresponding increase in the number of programs offering assistance. Woodbury reports a 20 to 30 percent increase in the number of such programs since 1990, adding that “there is still plenty of room” for new ones.

One corporate provider, Aspen Education Group, grew from six programs in 1998 to 31 this year. Another, Three Springs, “has seized on the market growth in the last five years, adding six new programs,” bringing its total to 25, and plans to keep expanding.

I wonder if this is what Dr. Janusz Korchak had in mind when he started his first residence for troubled children in 1912. Do you think he would have accompanied those children to Poland’s Treblinka death camps for the sake of his profit margin? How about Fritz Redl and David Wineman? Do you think they focused on spreading the costs of their marketing and overhead when they began their groundbreaking work in the mid-1940s with delinquent youth in Detroit? I wonder if Father Edward Flanagan began his Boys Town mission in 1917 with an eye toward its cash-on-cash basis.

It is a sad day when the field of youth services has come to this. Remember, every dollar contributing to that 10- to 20-percent profit margin is a dollar taken from the pocket of some youth worker who is probably making at or below a livable wage. Or it is a dollar less that could have been charged to some discouraged and terrified parent who wonders every day whether the next phone call will be from a morgue.

Which brings us back to Mary Ann Davies, profiled in The Times. Just how is she going to pay for her daughter’s care? “She said she was also wondering how she and her husband would meet all the bills,” the story says. “Already, they have dipped into their home equity. ‘We’re going to have to reconcile this at some point, and it’s going to be tough,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we have a choice.’ ”

I don’t know if the producer will follow up with us or not, but it was sad and fascinating to listen to these women, all around age 18 or 19, talk about how much worse things have become in the last few months.  They talked about the increasing number of teenagers who are homeless, how it is difficult to find an open shelter bed, and then our own backlog at Spectrum at the SRO.  (Today it is 100% full, I have never seen that in the six years I have been here.)  They talked about the stress that unemployment puts on families, and how that translates into teens hitting the streets.  They talked about their own frustration finding employment.  (“The UVM graduates are taking the jobs we used to get because they can’t find the jobs they used to get after graduating.”) 

The National Catholic Reporter has an article in its present issue, ”Sluggish Economy Brings Rise in Homeless Youth.”  It is mostly about Covenant House (where I started in this work 28 years ago) and their shelters across the country, but it could just as easily be about Spectrum and Vermont.   The situation is the same.   It supports my long-held belief that poverty is what drives youth homelessness.