Handbook for homeless youth debuts
Tome offers tips on legal rights, housing and health services
Columbia Legal Services in Seattle was getting inundated with calls in 2013 from homeless youth asking questions about what laws protected them.
Angela Vigil, a pro bono partner at Baker & McKenzie, set out to help. The homeless youth and the multinational law firm — which has a major Houston office — were looking for someone to develop a pamphlet that could help young adults living on the streets understand their legal rights.
The idea of a small pamphlet eventually expanded into a handbook with more than 200 pages.
“There’s no one place on the internet where you can go if you’re a youth, you can have something spoken in your language at a level that you can understand, [providing] some practical tips about what you need to do to realize the rights you already have,” Vigil said during a news conference Thursday at the Covenant House, a homeless youth shelter in Houston.
The handbook first created in Washington state is now available in two other states — Illinois and Minnesota. On Thursday, the Homeless Youth handbook for Texas debuted at a homeless shelter that’s served young adults in Houston since the 1980s.
Q&A format
The handbook is 18 chapters and is written for those ages 14 to 24. It’s written in a question-and-answer format, providing answers to basic questions like: What is public housing or what is foster care?
It also provides answers to more in-depth questions about Medicaid coverage and how to find a doctor. The book also covers a range of topics including education, housing, parenting, consumer-credit issues and beyond.
More than 50 attorneys and staff members at Baker & McKenzie, the advocacy group Texas Appleseed and Houston-based Weatherford International spent hundreds of hours researching, writing and editing the handbook. Advocates hope it will become a much-needed resource for the large number of homeless teens and young adults in Texas. More than 100,000 students were identified as homeless during the 20142015 school year throughout Texas school districts.
Gabriella McDonald, with Texas Appleseed, described how homeless youth also can pull up the handbook online if they can’t access it another way.
“A lot of youth, if they have nothing else, they have a smartphone,” McDonald said.
She said the partners hope to distribute the book to every school district’s homeless liaison, to put them in libraries and to market the book on social media.
Ronda Robinson, the executive director of Covenant House, has watched firsthand how youth may be unaware of their own rights. She’s also seen how adults can try to take advantage of that.
“You wouldn’t believe how many times I have to go to bat with folks about children’s rights,” Robinson said.
At Covenant House, the center provides about 40 beds to young adults ages 18 to 21 who are homeless. They also provide programs to help them re-enter society such as job development, psychiatry and medical services.
Jackalynn, 21, used the program to get off the streets and to find a job as a kitchen manager at a restaurant. She was kicked out of her home after she got pregnant at 17, when her parents told her to have an abortion or leave. Six months pregnant, she realized she wasn’t able to raise a child and gave up her son for adoption. The teen continued to live on the streets but eventually attempted suicide and landed in the hospital. She was discharged to Covenant House.
‘Like a family’
“They’re like a family,” she said of the program. “Ms. Robinson is like my mom.”
Vigil hopes the handbook can help homeless youth who didn’t have someone guiding them.
“This is a combination of trying to access resources, and trying to help youth fight for themselves,” Vigil said. “Unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of other people there with them.”