The Crisis of Youth Homelessness in Chicago

Chicago’s homeless youth are often faced with impossible choices; particularly in one of our nation’s least forgiving climates. Not only at A Safe Haven but throughout the city and around the country, homeless youth are forced to compete for limited shelter beds, or live on the street. Thankfully, we have a choice of what we can do to help.

A Safe Haven’s Youth Overnight Shelter serves as the first step to engaging youth into our more robust programs that lead to a path towards independence and self-sufficiency. This overnight program is burgeoning with unmet demand by alienated, poverty stricken and homeless youth.

A Safe Haven will continue to do everything we can to remain an anchor organization, a national model and a beacon of hope in the community for those youth who have nowhere else to go. However, we also know much more must be done.

Horrific heartbreaking headlines have inundated national and international media airwaves from ‘ground zero’, right here in the heartland of America. However, the chronic systemic challenges that our disenfranchised youth face did not happen overnight! How you choose to respond will make the difference between our collective long-term success and failure.

The tragedy that led to the violent demise of Laquan McDonald has captured the attention of the world. As a result, our city is under a blinding spotlight that is forcing us all to look at and scrutinize all of the brutal facts, issues and systems surrounding his entire life and his death. We are learning that Laquan’s unfortunate lifelong circumstances are due to an entire delivery system that is fragmented and broken. This system is intended to protect and support our youth in crisis; instead it has chronically failed not only hundreds of thousands of youth that depended on the system, but also all of us who believed in the system.

I pray that this experience that has shaken us all to the core, not be in vain but that it serves as our ‘moment of truth’ and as the ‘impetus and jolt’ we need to be moved into action not only out of, perhaps, moral obligation, but most of all for the love for all humanity.

Rightfully, some people choose to make movies to incite conversation, others choose to march and demand accountability. We humbly invite you to support us as we continue down the path we started so many years ago. That is, to offer a time-tested and proven scalable, sustainable solution to the root causes of poverty and homelessness for many of our youth and others. The connection between violence and homelessness is undeniable, unite with us in love for others as we fight to protect our family, friends, neighbors and all those who need and deserve our support.