A home and hope: TLP assists homeless and at-risk teens, young adults

MISHAWAKA — The rain is coming down in sheets as Roger Knapp Jr., barefoot in jeans and a gray hoodie, opens the door to his one-bedroom apartment in Mishawaka.

The 18-year-old, born and raised in Scott County, Ky., moved in about two weeks ago as part of The Children’s Campus’ Transitional Living Program, which pays the rent and utilities. Food stamps help keep food on the table.

Moving to self-sufficiency

Developed by The Children’s Campus, an affiliate of the Family and Children’s Center, in 2002, the Transitional Living Program, or TLP, is designed to help homeless and at-risk youths, ages 16 to 21, make a successful transition to self-sufficient living.

The program is federally funded under the Family and Youth Services Bureau, or FYSB, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It is one of about 200 nationwide, accounting for about $40 million in annual grant funding.

Prior to entering the program, Knapp lived on the street, at a safe house in South Bend, and at a halfway house in Osceola. It marked the end of an extended period of sporadic homelessness. “As far as drifting from place to place, that’s not anything new to me, I’ve been doing that for the past couple of years,” he says.

Located on the second floor, Knapp’s apartment consists of a modest living room, bedroom and bathroom and a small, windowless kitchen. It contains an assortment of mismatched items, including a desk and couch, an armoire, and a tall kitchen table.

A 2010 graduate of Scott County High School, Knapp lived and worked in Kentucky until August, when his father kicked him out of the house. Unable to afford a place of his own, he quit his job and moved to Fort Wayne to live with his sister — but she kicked him out, as well.

“I found out very quickly that my sister and I do not get along,” he says. “I was using the money I had to support myself, but it ran out and I couldn’t find a job … and it just got to the point that I had to leave.”

By coincidence, his boyfriend at the time, a South Bend man, visited him in Fort Wayne that same day. “And when I told him what happened,” he says, “we got my stuff and came up here.” In South Bend, he stayed at his boyfriend’s place a few nights and then at a Safe Station operated by the local Youth Service Bureau. Later, he contacted the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, which told him about the halfway house in Osceola.

While at the halfway house, he enrolled in a certified nursing assistant program at Michiana Healthcare Training in South Bend, which his paternal grandmother paid for. He also contacted Patti Vandergrift, director of the Transitional Living Program, about housing.

The day before the start of the nursing program, a Sunday, he walked from Osceola to South Bend. “It was the first day of class so I couldn’t miss it,” he says, “and I had no one to take me there.”

That night, broke and with no place to go, he wandered the city in the rain, a shy, awkward kid, cold and alone on the streets of South Bend.

“I had a box of stuff on me,” he says, “and two guys tried to get me to sell the stuff. I also had a group of guys chase me out of an alley I was in … and another guy stole all the money I had on me.

“I never really got to sleep. I drifted around the city all night. I had people keep saying, ‘You can’t stay here, you can’t stay here, you’ll get in trouble with the police.’

“Eventually, I laid down on a bench.

“It wasn’t frightening,” he says of the experience. “It was just very disappointing. … I felt like the people that should have been there for me failed me. But as the night went on and it started to get closer to the start of class, I knew that, as bad as it was, I wasn’t going to give up.”

‘Mom’

The Transitional Living Program operates out of an unassuming apartment building on Liberty Drive. The building, part of a larger complex, contains 16 units. The program occupies nine of those units, with one of the nine serving as an office and the other eight as resident apartments.

Located on the ground floor, the office contains desks and chairs but also toys and books. A flat-screen TV sits on a stand in the front room, opposite a table with three donated iPads.

For the youths enrolled in the program, the space serves as a family room, a place to hang out or watch TV or job search on the iPads or the office’s one laptop computer. Vandergrift, the director of the program, is “mom.”

“I look at Patti as my mom, it’s true,” says Brian Fairres, a recent graduate of the program. “She used to force me to get out of bed and force me to clean the house.”

“Patti seems to care deeply about the kids here and deeply about where they’re going when they leave here,” he adds.

“We support them and help them (residents) as needed,” Vandergrift says, “but they still do it on their own.”

As if on cue, a young woman enters the office. She is on her way to see her dad, she tells Vandergrift, and then to work. She appears to be under the weather.

“Are you sick?” Vandergrift asks.

“Very sick,” the girl manages.

“Are you sure you should go to work?”

“I kind of need the money,” the girl says, and she’s out the door.

Numbers hard to pinpoint

The number of runaway and homeless youths in the U.S. is difficult to determine. In a 2007 report, the Congressional Research Service cited “residential mobility” and “overlap among populations” as part of the reason, but also “the lack of a standardized methodology for counting the population and inconsistent definitions of what it means to be homeless or runaway.”

Estimates put the number of homeless youths at between 52,000 and 1 million, and the number of runaway youths — including “throwaway youth,” or kids that have been asked to leave home – at between 1 million and 1.7 million.

According to Bonnie Stryker, director of the local Youth Service Bureau, which operates a “Safe Station” for runaway youths on Lincoln Way East in South Bend, an estimated 1,600 to 1,800 youths leave home in St. Joseph County each year. Most end up “couch surfing” with friends or relatives, she says, but some, like Knapp, also end up on the street.

“People don’t really have a clear idea of the number of kids that walk around without a place to live,” Vandergrift says. “They’re not going to school, they’re not working … they’re just looking for a place to stay.”

In most cases, young people leave home to escape conflict. According to the CRS report, “A literature review of homeless youth found that a youth’s relationship with a step-parent, sexual activity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, school problems, and alcohol and drug use were strong predictors of family discord.

“Runaway and homeless youth also described abuse and neglect as common experiences,” the report states.

In Knapp’s case, the abuse, physical and emotional, started early. “My parents were just bad people,” he says. His father did not approve his sexual orientation, either, he says, which added to the tension at home.This is not uncommon. According to the CRS report, “gay and lesbian youth appear to be over represented in the homeless population, due often to experiencing negative reactions from their
parents when they came out about their sexuality.”

In five studies on unaccompanied youths, between 20 and 40 percent of respondents identified as gay or lesbian, the report states.

“The kids who come to the Safe Station are not kids who are defiant, who said, ‘If you don’t give me the car tonight, I’m going to run away,’ ” Stryker says. “Most of the kids that come to the Safe Station are running away from a situation that has become chronically filled with tension and violence.”

Services provided

In addition to runaway and homeless youths, the Transitional Living Program also serves emancipated and pregnant teens and young adults. Currently, eight young people are enrolled in the program. Two are mothers, accounting for a combined six children.

The program generally works through referrals from outside agencies, including the Center for the Homeless and Youth Service Bureau, and local schools, but “we do take kids right off the street,” Vandergrift says, adding: “Roger is an example of that.”

Nationwide, about 50 percent of the young people entering a transitional living program have recently run away from or been asked to leave home, according to a 2010 report to Congress by the FYSB. About 25 percent come from a shelter or other residential program, and about 10 percent have been living on the street.

Residents are typically between the ages of 17 and 20, and slightly more than half are female.

In most cases, the youths possess few life skills. Many have mental and emotional problems, as well, including low self-esteem, related to long-term abuse and neglect.

“People, mainly my parents, always told me I was stupid, that I’d never accomplish anything,” Fairres says.

“A lot of these kids have never seen dad get up and go to work or mom get up and earn a paycheck,’ Vandergrift adds. “They have grown up in an environment where working and going to school are not normal.”

To counter that, the program provides a number of services, including:

•  Supervised and subsidized apartment living for up to 18 months;
•  Educational and vocational training;
•  Access to community resources, including social services and government assistance;
•  Individual and/or family therapy;
•  Independent living skills training; and
•  Weekday, evening and weekend training and case management services.

The apartments are fully furnished with donated and purchased items, which residents are allowed keep at the end of the program.

There are rules, of course, without which, Vandergrift says, “there would be chaos.”

Among other things, residents must:

•  Find a job within 30 days or volunteer at least 15 hours a week;
•  Report all finances to staff and commit to a savings plan;
•  Avoid drugs and alcohol (Residents who test positive twice for a controlled substance must attend substance abuse counseling or leave the program).
•  Not stay out past midnight Sunday through Thursday and 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday; and
•  Announce all visitors and overnight guests.

Residents can be kicked out of the program for violating the rules, but staff try to avoid such situations. “We do have people we have to ask to leave,” Vandergrift says, “but we try to do everything we can before it comes to that.”

At the same time, residents also earn incentives, including laundry money and gift cards, for maintaining a clean apartment or demonstrating good work or study habits, among other things.

‘We worry about them’

Of course young people like to test boundaries, and it’s no different with the teens and young adults in the program, Vandergrift says.

Knapp, for example, declined to participate in the program for a time upon arrival, choosing instead to hide in his apartment.“You get a kid that is truly homeless, you get them into an apartment and they don’t want to leave because they feel safe,” Vandergrift says. “So they take advantage of it. And we’ll tolerate it for a little while.

“Roger did it. He would wake up at 4 p.m. because he was watching TV all night. Finally, one day, I said, ‘I’m going out for a sandwich, Roger, fill out some job applications,’ and he did.”

Knapp now works part-time as a CNA at Michiana Health and Rehab. He has saved about $1,000 in four months and plans to attend Indiana University South Bend in the fall to study psychology.Including Knapp, six of the eight residents enrolled in the program are either employed or attending school, Vandergrift says. The other two are young mothers.

That said, Roger is still a work in progress, she says.

“With Roger, he has some abandonment issues and some trust issues, so we’re working a little bit on that,” she says. “But he also wants to go to school, so we’re working with him on the (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and getting him into IUSB.”

Vandergrift’s concern for Knapp and the other residents is evident.

“We worry about them,” she admits. “That’s part of the relationship building we try to do. If they don’t get home on time, we think, ‘I hope they’re OK, I hope they didn’t fall into something dangerous.’ Yeah, we get attached to them.”

In many ways, the staff become surrogate parents to the residents.

“I think we are in that parenting position, I think they see us as that,” Vandergrift says. “It’s a little different than some other situations, because we do get close to them and we do form relationships, and it’s about those relationships, that’s how these kids succeed.”

And the kids are succeeding, she says. Over the past two years, 70 percent of the young people in the program have achieved educational and employment goals and graduated to independent living, representing a “successful outcome.”Nationwide, most young people have graduated high school or obtained a GED, or are attending school regularly, upon graduation from the program, the FYSB reported in its 2010 report to Congress. About 40 percent are employed, and about 70 percent live in a private residence.

Hope

Vandergrift points to Fairres, the recent graduate, as an example of a successful outcome.

His options limited, Fairres, 21, enrolled in the program in March 2010.

“I had nowhere to go,” he says, “and it was either one of two choices: this program, which I’d never heard about, or the Center for the Homeless.”

Madison Center, now Memorial Epworth Center, referred him to the program.

“My big thing was I had major depression, and I was pretty much couch surfing and staying at people’s houses,” he says. “The last people were my grandparents, but they didn’t know how to deal with me, so they drove me to South Bend and suggested I stay at Madison Center for a while.”

Prior to that, Fairres lived with his mom and stepdad – his stepdad did not want him in the house, he says, so his mom kicked him out – and spent a few nights on the street, on one occasion sleeping in the woods.

“It was below freezing that night,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep, and eventually I went to some stores that were open 24 hours.

“It makes me very grateful to have a warm place to live,” he says of the experience.

During his time in the program, Fairres received additional mental health counseling, earned his GED, landed a maintenance job at a local apartment complex, and saved about $1,000.

He also learned to trust people.

“When I first came here, I thought every person was bad,” he says. “I did not trust anybody, I did not like anybody ... and it was Patti that broke me out of that shell.”

“Once we got through to Bryan that he could actually trust us to keep our word ... then it wasn’t a problem,” Vandergrift says.

Vandergrift recalls the day Fairres earned his GED.

“(He) struggled so horribly with depression and abandonment,” she says. “But I’ll never forget the day he got his GED in the mail. He came running over here.

“I studied for the GED, and I took it and I passed it the first time,” Fairres says during a recent visit to the TLP office. “And just knowing I passed it the first time, it felt like I proved everyone wrong and really accomplished something. And I did run in here, and I did jump up and down and say, ‘Look! Look!’ ”

“And I tell the staff, that’s you guys,” Vandergrift says. “In this job you have a real opportunity to make a difference, a direct opportunity to make a real difference in a kid’s life.”

Fairres now lives in an apartment complex in South Bend with another graduate of the program. He is unemployed but looking for work. He lost his maintenance job at the end of the summer season.

Despite that, he says he feels hopeful about the future.

“It’s actually a lot more positive than it used to be,” he says of his outlook on life. “I have a lot more hope.”

He adds: “In the beginning I thought this was just a program. But without this program, I’d be way worse off than I am now.”

Staff writer Erin Blasko:
eblasko@sbtinfo.com
574-235-6187