Whenever I think of homeless teens, I think of gang bangers and druggies. People like that wear baggy jeans, bandanas and big shirts. They walk and talk like people who just came out of jail.
These thoughts were in my head when I went to Covenant House, a shelter for homeless people ages 18-21 in a sketchy Hollywood neighborhood. The place is surrounded by old abandoned buildings on a junky street.
But Covenant House seems like a beam of hope on a hopeless street. It's painted with bright red and yellow colors. A sign on top of the building shows a hand holding a bird. It reminded me of Noah's Ark at first and how Noah saved the creatures from the flood. I think Covenant House is a modern Noah's Ark that saves teens from their pasts.
When I first entered Covenant House, I went through an electronically locked door plus a metal detector. A security guard sat at the front desk and checked out TV screens, which were actually views from security cameras surrounding the shelter. It seemed more like a jail than a home.
I tried not to be distracted with thoughts like that, because I was there to cover a story about a candlelight vigil held in honor of all teens who have died on the streets. So I headed to the courtyard, where the vigil took place. White folding chairs lined the concrete ground. Balloons decorated a stage. A handwritten sign hung under the balloons and read "There is still hope." It all looked so cheerful, like a rally inside a school gymnasium.
People started milling around. Many were adults, but I wanted to see people my own age and do my first interview.
That’s when I met Tieshi Thompson, 20. She was easy to talk to and had a lot to say. When she was a little girl, her parents were into drugs so much that they stopped taking care of their family. Tieshi and her three siblings tried to live by themselves and acted like their own family. Tieshi played the mother role. She stayed out of school until she was 7, because she was raising her younger siblings. Soon though, that secret was out and Tieshi and her siblings entered the foster care system. She was bounced around from home to home. Later, she just tried to live by herself. That led her to live on the streets. She said she stole cars and sold drugs.
But one day at school, Tieshi broke down and cried. She was at the end of her rope. She was tired of not having a home and always having to fend for herself. She really needed her parents, but who knew where they were. Luckily, teachers at her school helped her find Covenant House. She moved in that day.
"I know how it feels to not be loved, even by yourself. Stabilize your life and never think to go the wrong way like prostitution or drug selling. Trust me, everyone has a future. And you are the one who decides how it’s going to be," Tieshi said.
Tieshi was cool. "Maybe," I thought to myself, "this place wasn’t filled with just gang bangers after all."
Tari Skye, 18, sat in front of me. She turned around and we started talking.
"I’ve been in the system since I was 2. Now I’m 18 and still in it," Tari said. Her mom is the only person she has in this world, but her mom was an alcoholic and is now dying from liver problems. She’s 37. Tari said her mom's liver looks all puffed out.
Tari also battled problems with alcohol and drugs before she came to Covenant House. She looks back on those days and says it's all in the past.
"I’ve become a better person since then," Tari said. "I don’t want to go through any of that again."
But there's more to Tari besides her problems. She likes to dance, rap and write. She has so many talents and I hope her past doesn't get in the way of all that.
How could their parents abandon them?
I sat down and looked at my notes. It was hard to believe what I was hearing. I don’t know anyone who has parents on drugs or who abandon their families. Parents are supposed to take care of their kids. That’s their job. These teens, all of them, had such rough starts. It doesn’t seem fair. Some never had a place to call home. Others didn’t even have parents. It made me think a lot about my home life. I've never had to worry about having food or a place to sleep.
One time I did run away—for three hours. I was mad at my mom and hung out at the arcade the whole time. But I only had $3 in my pocket and blew through that really fast. So I went home.
It blows my mind that parents can throw their children out. I wonder if their parents miss them.
All these thoughts ran through my head when the candlelight vigil headed for the streets. We marched up and down Western Avenue to make others aware of homeless teens living on the streets. I looked up again at the sign of the hand holding the bird and thought more about it. I think it represents trust, because a wild bird would never sit in someone's hand without feeling safe.
Covenant House isn’t filled with gang bangers and druggies. They're people like me. But they're also people who are learning to trust. People who are trying to fix their pasts. The teens here just need help becoming adults—they got lost along the way.
This story was provided by LA Youth, a teen-written newspaper dedicated to providing a forum for young people to communicate and participate in civic life.
Last summer I worked at The Food Project as a Pollution Prevention intern. The five of us, Adam, Vanusa, Reggie, and I, along with Food Project staff member Colleen, navigated through the narrow streets of Roxbury, Massachusetts on our way to do research on Ortho or pesticide products. Passing by a house neighboring our 1.5 acre urban food lot, we paused to see if we could get a glimpse of the enclosed garden. The owner, Joe, famous among his fellow Roxbury gardeners, called us over with questions of how to prevent skunks from feasting on his crops. After a quick garden tour of what is actually a mini-farm, he brought out his Bug-B-Gone and splashed it around, emphatically describing how it had killed some skunks but that he was still interested in an alternative method. We listened and promised to look up some organic solutions while we tried hard not to overreact to the white dust covering his hands and clothes. It was with those same hands he would apply pounds more of the pesticide to his land and then hug his small grandson without a second thought.
The Food Project is a Boston-based organization that hires urban and suburban youth of all backgrounds to grow organic food on 23 acres of land in Lincoln (Boston suburb) and Roxbury (Boston neighborhood). The produce is then donated to area homeless shelters and food pantries and sold at The Food Project's urban farmers' markets. Colleen, Adam, Reggie, Vanusa, and I were involved in a pilot program, funded by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant, through which we would develop integral relationships with Roxbury gardeners. Many of them are Cape Verdean immigrants who possess a wealth of culture-specific farming knowledge. Through research and hands-on learning, our crew continuously gained knowledge about pesticides and organic farming and conveyed that knowledge to any gardener with open ears. We made many neighborhood and community garden visits and developed and led public workshops on the dangers of and alternatives to conventional pesticides.
By August, we had developed many invaluable and lasting community relationships. Gardeners had started to take the initiative and would come to us with organic farming questions. On a larger scale, we conducted surveys, mapped out neighborhood garden sites, and then compiled the findings in a comprehensive report. This was presented to local garden stores and many, including Home Depot, began a process of improving or creating a display of organic pesticides and information concerning their use over conventional products. Even though at times the pesticide issue seemed overwhelming because everyone wanted a "quick fix," these successes, these small dents, and the realization they could grow into cracks and then craters, provided constant motivation. Whatever result comes out of this two-year project, at least we know that now Joe knows what's on his hands.
When Jessica, age 15, heard about the school shooting at Santana High School on March 5, 2001, she was horrified. "I was sad that a boy would feel like he had to take people’s lives in order to get back at people who hadn’t been nice to him," she said. Two students died and 13 other people were wounded when a 15 year-old freshman boy opened fire. What the Serra High School sophomore didn’t know is that the incident would change her life.
Jessica’s dad, a deputy sheriff for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, was the first policeman to arrive on the scene. "My dad saw those two boys lying there dead in the bathroom—that hurt my family, to know what he had witnessed." His extensive involvement with the police investigation after the shooting inspired Jessica to take action. She couldn’t wait for long—"I thought, I have to take action fast!"
. Serra High School’s Peace Wall
After reading a letter from Martin Luther King III in an Ann Landers column that encouraged students to participate in the Do Something Kindness & Justice Challenge, Jessica saw it as a great opportunity to promote kindness, justice and tolerance at her high school and create a positive response to the Santana High shootings.
Jessica’s idea was to create a giant mural called the "Peace Wall" to be displayed at her school on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, January 15. To spread the word about the Peace Wall, Jessica and her friends spent hours tagging individual Lifesaver™ candies with strips of neon-colored construction paper that said, "Be a Lifesaver – Join the KJ Challenge!"
She passed the tagged lifesavers out, and signed people up to work on her project, two times every week for four months. "I definitely got tired sometimes. What kept me going was the need to send out a positive message," Jessica said. They gave out over 2,500 neon-tagged lifesavers to students from September to December.
Jessica's lifesaver handouts did much more than satisfy her classmates' sugar cravings. Her hard work recruited a diverse group of 100 Serra High students who assisted with the creation of 21 different six-foot by four-foot murals. The artwork depicted everything from civil rights hero Medgar Evars, to a piece entitled "More than Just Words" which showed the true power of the words "peace," "justice," and "kindness" by displaying different quotes from famous poets, writers, politicians and activists.
The students stapled the 21 murals to a large refrigerator box to form a giant "Wall of Peace!" The mural was displayed on school grounds as part of Serra High's King Day celebration— the murals even made it into San Diego's annual Martin Luther King Day parade as a huge Kindness and Justice float!
Jessica's project drew tons of media coverage and grew into a community-wide event. "Teachers told me they thought it was a great idea, and a great job. Kids that weren't even involved in making the Wall thought it was really cool," she said.
"It really made me feel good to know that the kids that got involved were proud of themselves, for working as a team, and for looking at things in a positive way. I think I learned that one person really can make a difference. You don’t think that you can actually do it—then wow, one person changed so much!"
Jessica’s mural project won’t be the last of her activism. "I try to live by the quote, 'Let me do what good I can for you now, for I do not know if our paths will ever cross again,' I don’t think I’ll stop here."
- Cloe Axelson
As president of his high school environmental club, Dave, now 21, got other high school students in his county in Maryland involved in local environmental campaigns. By the time he graduated, he and other students had helped protect the final remaining old-growth forests on the mid-Atlantic coastal plain, had protected a forest from becoming sprawl development and had convinced the Governor to veto a bill that would have made it voluntary for Maryland car owners to get their cars inspected every year for emissions.
"Before I became an environmentalist, I spent my weekends at the mall, spent my afternoons watching TV and playing Nintendo. I never spent any time outside except for soccer practice. When I was 15 and a half, I went to this summer camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I wasn't having a very good time. I saw this lake there and decided to spend some time sitting by it and basically had my first experience with the wild and that sort of profoundly changed me. After that I decided I was going to do what I could do to protect it."
Check out how Dave involved his school environmental club in local issues in his community and how you can do it too.
ACTION STEPS:
1.) Find out what's going on in your community by contacting local environmental groups. One way to find out about local environmental issues is to just read your local paper and find out what's going on. What I did was call the local Sierra Club and started attending conservation committee meetings. I eventually got linked up with this guy Larry, the conservation director of the Maryland Sierra Club. He was leading a campaign to protect the final remaining old-growth forests on the mid-Atlantic coastal plain in a place called Belt Woods. There was a bill in the Maryland legislature to approve a $1 million bond to help buy the Belt Woods and turn it into a Maryland wild land, which is the Maryland equivalent of wilderness. The people in my school environmental club decided we wanted to work on this and also wanted to get other students working on it too.
2.) Form a committee of students from all the schools in your community. We formed MCSEA (Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists), which got started when my environmentalist friends and I decided we were going to help Larry and other people pass this bill to protect the Belt Woods.
3.) Start a petition drive in all the high schools in your town. We had a petition drive to convince the Governor of Maryland to veto a bill that would make the Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program voluntary instead of mandatory. In general, Maryland's air quality is not up to standards with the EPA, so this was a huge bill that we did not want to see get passed. We only had two days to collect 1,000 signatures. There were seven periods in my school day and for the first three periods I ran around looking for every environmental club and MCSEA member to give them some petitions. Those members found other people to take some of their signature petitions to help collect signatures. By third period, we had basically gotten everyone's signature in my school that we needed to get. So I drove to the next school in Montgomery County that MCSEA worked with and found the environmental club leader there and did the same thing and by the end of the day we had gotten signatures from our three biggest schools.
4.) Lobby, Rally, and Testify. We also lobbied the legislators, we helped at rallies, and we testified at hearings. We did all the things high school environmental clubs don't do, but should do. A few months later the bill to protect the wild lands was passed for half a million dollars. We originally wanted it for $1 million but we got some extra funding from other places and by April the woods were saved. They are still protected today and will be forever.
5.) Appeal to the Governor about bills that would help or hurt the environment that he/she could sign into law. There was this Clean Air bill sitting on the Governor's desk and he was 50/50 about whether or not he would sign it or veto it. We had two days to collect 1,000 petition signatures and then send them to the Governor to convince him not to sign it. Since we didn't have much time, we just decided to start faxing the signatures around the clock to the Governor's office. There came a point when we kept getting a busy signal and we realized it was because they were running out of fax paper so we continuously called the Governor's office and said, "Hi, we're from the student group that's faxing in our petition signatures. We think your fax machine is out of paper. Could you refill it?" They were like, "Yeah, yeah, we'll refill it."
6.) Be persistent, contact everyone you know and don't give up. By the end of our petitioning for the Clean Air bill, we had actually collected 2,000 signatures from the entire state. When I got home from school the next day, there was a phone message that my sister had taken down. It was from the Governor's secretary informing us that he would be vetoing the bill and was interested in working with us on other environmental issues.
7.) Take a high school environmental leadership-training class. The Sierra Student Coalition provides something called the Student Environmental Training Academy, SETA for short. SETA goes from state to state and brings together high school and college environmental clubs to do a weekend-long training on organization skills and learning major issues that are going on in the clubs' community. At the end of the week, you're left with a new set of skills, a better idea of what's going on and a better plan for what you can do to really make a difference in your own community.
8.) Have passion for the environment and a willingness to go out and try something new. The most valuable asset that people will have is their own passion and their own willingness to just go out there and try stuff. When I was trying to help save the wild lands, I didn't know campaign-planning models yet. But because I kept plugging away, I met the people who supported me the right way so I was able to do good work. The skills training and the nice ways of looking at things will come later.
Heide, age 17, from North Carolina, had no idea what was in store for her when she stumbled upon a jobs bulletin board at a coffee house.
"It all began one day last spring when I got locked out of my house. I didn't have anywhere to go, so I walked to a nearby coffeehouse. As I was peering over the bulletin board, something caught my eye: "Summer Jobs for the Environment." I was thinking about getting a job, and this sounded much more interesting than working at The Gap.
"I decided to call when I got home, and ended up going in for an interview that evening. When asked which environmental issues concerned me the most, my response was, 'I'm not sure, but I'm willing to learn.' It was with this attitude that I began my career in the environmental movement. I began working for the summer canvass for PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) only a couple of weeks later, and have since become an avid environmentalist. Soon after, I knew I wanted to start an environmental group at my school."
Check out what steps Heide took to bring an environmental club to her school and how you can do it too.
ACTION STEPS:
1) Find an organization that has a training camp to give you the skills needed to form a successful and sustainable group at your school. Through PIRG's canvas office I became acquainted with a group called Free the Planet! I made a last-minute decision to attend Free the Planet's! Georgetown training at the end of the summer, which ended up having an incredible impact on my next few months and probably the rest of my life. At the training I realized the potential my own high school had for housing its own successful environmental group. It dawned on me that students really do care and are willing to work if they are given the opportunity.
2) Talk to people at your school who you think would be interested in starting an environmental group. Before I went to the training at Georgetown, I talked to a couple of people from my school who I felt would be very interested. We kept a dialogue while I was in DC and I would e-mail them at the end of the day and tell them about my ideas and what I learned.
3) Find a teacher to sponsor your group. My sponsor for Free the Planet! at my school was also the sponsor of another environmental group at my school that just sort of died.
4) Go through the school directory or yearbook with friends to pick out people you think would be interested in joining the group and helping you get the word out. When I got back from the Free the Planet! training, my friends and I scheduled a meeting. There were about four of us and we went through the directory at our school and picked out the people we thought would be interested in joining our group. So we called these people and invited them to an initial meeting. We just kind of sketched out the school year and what we would like to see happen and went from there once school started.
5) Call and invite those people you think would be interested in an initial meeting and discuss how to introduce the group's purpose at the general interest meeting. At our initial meeting, we used a diagram I learned at the Free the Planet! training to sketch out the school year and what we would like to see happen.
6) Set a general interest meeting date. Try to set a date on a day when there are not a lot of other after-school activities or club meetings already planned.
7) Give yourself about 3 weeks to advertise the meeting with posters, flyers and word of mouth and create a buzz about the first meeting. We used a three-week plan to advertise the first meeting. We started sending out flyers and talking to people and everyone was really curious about it, because most groups at our school are either the typical honor society or other academic clubs or they aren't really activist groups. It was years since our school had an active environmental group, so when word got around about our new group, it became a big mystery. When the time came for our general interest meeting, we ended up having 150 students attend. I was shocked when I walked into the meeting room (expecting, at the most, our goal of 80) and saw almost everyone I knew. It was inspiring to know that despite our many differences, we were able to come together around a common issue. 8) At the general meeting, discuss your ideas of what you want to see happen during the school year, as well as listen to attendees' ideas. 9) Find a sponsoring environmental group in the community for support for your environmental campaigns. I think our biggest help locally has been the Sierra Club. They mailed out a notice about our first campaign "Walk for the Wild!" to all of their members and they have always been there for moral support. When I started Free the Planet! we didn't really know exactly what we were going to focus on since it was our first year. I had the most experience in environmental work in our group but I was hardly experienced at all. I wasn't even sure what issues would be best to work on necessarily, so we planned to work with the Sierra Club on some community-type issues. 10) Plan your first campaign. We hosted our first annual Walk for the Wild! in November, which taught us all a great many things, from the logistics of event organizing to simple people skills. We are currently planning to take Free the Planet! county-wide around a campaign urging the school system to phase in the use of recycled paper. This is only one of the many goals our school's Free the Planet! hopes to achieve in the near future. But one thing is for sure: this group of dedicated students has already made a positive impact on the community with their attitudes and their actions.
Everyday experiences don't often dramatically shape our lives, yet once in a while an event occurs which breaks the spell of everyday turnings and launches one into an experience of transformation. Arthur Schoepenhauer once said, "All truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. And lastly, it is accepted as self-evident." For me, this path of truth resulted from a summer camp called YES!, Youth for Environmental Sanity. Before the camp, I was "the perfect academic," yet I was rather apathetic about helping my neighbor, much less the world. I didn't connect my studies to my heart or my feelings. I didn't care deeply enough about the issues of the world to take action. When my sister suggested I go to this camp, I resisted the idea strongly because in their brochure they listed very interpersonal activities as key elements of the YES! experience. I actively ridiculed a camp that focused on expressing feelings. After my sister's fervent campaigning, I went because the camp was held in Maui. After a week of exercises focused on both interpersonal sharing and environmental education, I found how important both of these elements are. I have discovered that we cannot change the world nor have the confidence to be active if our passion for action, emotions, and ability to communicate successfully are not in balance.
The YES! exercises helped me to access deep feelings of care and passion for life. It is from these feelings that my will to be an activist has emerged. I am allowing my heart to be the guide that keeps my wisdom honest. When I came home I founded SEEC, Students for Environmental Education and Change at my high school. I shared my YES! experience as best I could and inspired as many fellow students as possible to care about our environment. As a club we have volunteered with local environmental organizations and cleaned up our beautiful and unique Yuba River as well as attended environmental conferences and launched heated debates.
I have also tried to prolong the sense of gratitude for life that I gained. At times it is very difficult, but with the help of other caring students and friends, I have been carrying on a new life since the YES! Camp. Before I attended the camp I believed that although environmentalists like my sister were doing something important, they were fighting a futile battle. I left with impassioned drive to take action for the issues I care so strongly about.
"I slept and dreamt that life was joy; I awoke and saw that life was service; I acted and behold, service was joy." -Rabindranath Tagore
For more information, write YES! Action Camps, 420 Bronco Road, Soquel, CA 95073, call toll free (877) 2-YES-CAMP or visit the YES! website at www.yesworld.org
One night my stepfather got really angry. My three brothers and I were all laughing and playing in our room. He came in and told us to be quiet. We kept on playing, and he came back. This time he hit us with a belt. He hit my finger with the buckle and dislocated it. The next day at school my teacher asked me what was wrong because I couldn't move the finger. I told her the story, and she called the Department of Corrections for Youth Services.
They called my mother to make an appointment. My mother and I both went, and after meeting with them, we began therapy for awhile. The therapist would tell us to just let our feelings out. We started to communicate a little better, but we were never that close.
I told my mother if something happened at school, but I never told her how I felt about my stepfather. Why would I? She always took his side. When she saw or heard the beatings and him screaming at me, she'd tell him to leave me alone. But she never mentioned a word about it to me later, when he wasn't around. I think she was afraid of losing him and his paycheck. She felt the best way to keep peace was to go along with whatever he said.
Growing up in that house was like being in prison. I thought about taking pills or choking myself-just to end the pain. One time I did take pills, but I didn't take enough to do anything. Neither of my parents ever knew I took them. I did always think about running away, but I didn't have the courage to do it. My mother's need for me to take care of my two little brothers was what changed my life. I left school early each day, took the bus to my brothers' school, and met them when school got out. We would walk across the street to our neighborhood Community Center and wait for my mother to get off work and come get us. Other kids my age might resent having to do this every day. I was just glad I didn't have to go home.
Jo Anne, the Community Center Director, involved us in their programs. She even got my mother to pick up my brothers at the usual hour and let me stay two hours longer until the teen program ended. Jo Anne drove me home every single night. After six months I trusted Jo Anne; every time she said she'd do something for me, she did. She always followed through, so one day I told her how awful my stepfather was and how my mother let it happen. I told her I just couldn't take it anymore. We cried. She hugged me and said, "You can always count on me to be there for you." She kept her promise. She helped me get a job and get money for college. When I turned 17, Jo Anne encouraged me to apply for SNAP (Safe Neighborhood AmeriCorps Partnership), a community service program designed to reduce crime, violence, fear, and drug-related problems in my town. One of the agencies happened to be at my Community Center. The program also offered an educational award to attend college.
I'm proud to say I'm now a SNAP worker helping high-risk kids at my Community Center-the same place that gave me my life back.
I don't think I would have made it without Jo Anne's help. In my senior year, I finally got to go to a rock concert. She was the one who told my mother, "Yes, Yesenia is going to the concert. I gave her the ticket as a graduation present. I'm taking her, staying there with her, and bringing her home."
Jo Anne also convinced her to let me go to my prom. Jo Anne paid for the ticket and drove me both ways. My date was not allowed to pick me up, but at least we got to be together at the dance and I got to wear a beautiful dress---one I bought with my own money. I graduated from high school and told my mother I was moving out. A SNAP staff member offered her attic apartment to me. I was "of age," and my mother couldn't stop me. I hope no teen has to grow up in a home like mine. If you find yourself in a situation like mine, find someone to talk to. Don't hold your feelings in, and get help. Jo Anne's love and advice worked. I am living on my own, going to college, working at the Community Center, and having fun. I am finally free.
Excerpted with permission from Teens with the Courage to Give by Jackie Waldman. Conari Press, Copyright 2000.
Page created on 6/26/2003 12:00:00 AM
Last edited 6/26/2003 12:00:00 AM
Do Something provides resources and support to help YOU make it happen. As part of Do Something at your school, you and your friends identify the issues YOU care about and create community projects to turn your ideas into action.
The following stories are by and about young people who have decided to change their lives and make a difference in their communities and the world. Let them inspire you to Do Something too. Then write to us and tell us about your experience!
