Relationships May 13, 2017
It’s morning in sunny Southern California: In a transitional housing project in Lake Forest, a medical assistant named Stephanie Canada prepares for a normal work day. At a rehab center near Burbank, a Sears employee named Hava does the same.
Three years ago, both of these young women were almost homeless.
But thanks to Lauri Burns’s Teen Project, a program which provides housing, education, and financial and medical assistance for women from ages 18 to 25, these women are building homes and careers while changing the way people throughout the country look at children’s transition from the foster care system into society.
Burns knows the shortcomings of the foster care system firsthand; after growing up in foster homes and juvenile halls, she lived on the streets, becoming involved in drugs and prostitution, which almost cost her her life at age 23 after gang members left her unconscious in a canyon in rural California. But a miraculous rescue by a stranger saved her life and led her to become a foster mother herself.
Though Burns provided a safe foster home for 36 children, she soon found that the foster care system wasn’t doing enough to keep children off the streets.
“I started noticing how many foster kids become homeless,” Burns said. “About 25,000 kids leave the foster care system every year, and about half of them go homeless. It’s been that way since the ’80s.”
For years, homeless youth flew under the government’s radar. But in 2015, the “We Count, California!” project found that one in four youth who were emancipated from the foster care program is homeless. And state support for these youth is lacking; only one-third of California counties have shelters for homeless youth.
So Burns raised $180,000 in ten months to start the Teen Project, which began with a three-bedroom home in Lake Forest, California where young women could live after they left foster care. Since 2007, the Teen Project has expanded to another home and shelter in Venice Beach, a rehab project in Sun Valley, and a phone service that connects homeless children to shelters across the country.
Without the Teen Project, Stephanie Canada would have bolstered the statistics about homeless foster care children.
“I met Lauri in 2013, when I aged out of foster care and I needed a place to stay,” Canada said. “I graduated high school, but I only qualified for minimum wage jobs, and because of that, I couldn’t go to school, and I couldn’t afford a place to live.”
State programs in California aim to keep youth off the streets though legislation like Continuum of Care, which was passed in 2012 to provide transitional and permanent housing, among other programs to identify and assist youth who age out of foster care.
But these well-intended programs often struggle to reach young people: “Our public systems frequently come into contact with homeless youth and their families, but often lack the coordination and communication to work together to effectively address homelessness among youth,” Shahera Hyatt wrote in a 2013 report for the California Homeless Youth Project.
That’s where the Teen Project comes in, as it reaches out to young women with much more than transitional housing – it gives them practical training and career opportunities, as well. The Teen Project connects residents to vocational schools in the area, assisting women in starting careers as CNC machinists, medical assistants, beauticians and chefs.
“I’m their mom,” Burns said. “I’m a parent to the parentless. We do everything a parent would do.”
For Burns, these family connections are central to helping women deal with their past and plan for the future.
“I had been separated from my family since age 12,” Canada said. “My sister became homeless, and I told Lauri, who took her in. Now she’s going to school for medical assisting in Newport Beach.”
Canada is also entering the medical field, with plans to attend the Modern Technology School to become an X-ray technician. The two sisters are saving money to move into an apartment together, following the Teen Project’s encouragement that family members live together after they leave the project. Reconnecting young women with their families gives accountability and support, as well as making rent more affordable.
“Lauri taught me all kinds of life lessons,” Canada said. “She taught me how to be an adult – things like paying bills and rent and taking accountability for my actions. She taught me you can have a difficult upbringing and still have a normal life. But no one can hand it down to you. You have to work for it, just like she’s working her ass off for her charities.”
Much of that work, these days, involves balancing big paychecks and bigger plans for expanding the private- and grant-funded Teen Project. Burns said people are willing to donate to the cause of helping women stay off the streets – including big names like Russell Brand, Bill Johnson and Paul Blavin, who donated money for Burns to buy a warehouse near Burbank, extending her outreach throughout California.
In Sun Valley, California, 60 miles north of the original Teen Project house in Lake Forest, an administrative assistant named Shae gives tours of FreeHab, the Teen Project’s rehab program for drug-addicted and sex-trafficked women of the same age as those in the college housing project.
“The Teen Project is the umbrella program, and under that is FreeHab, the college housing, and The Pad, which is a drop-in center in Venice Beach,” said FreeHab director Sandra Estrada, who has worked with FreeHab since its founding in April 2014.
FreeHab houses 50 women at a time in dorm-style rooms similar to the Teen Project’s college housing, engaging residents in a six- to 12-month intensive recovery and education program onsite.
“What makes us different is that we’re gender and age specific,” Shae said. “We push on school, so we’re not just a short term rehab. We want women to be as stable as they can be when they leave, so we give them the knowledge and tools to support themselves.”
From day to day, that means a six a.m. to five p.m. schedule of group sessions, medical appointments and meetings with probation and child care officials, as well as meeting the personal needs of women recovering from drug and sexual abuse.
“It’s very hectic – it’s a whole lot of that,” Estrada said after an assistant slipped in the office and asked for her signature for a woman who said she forgot to visit her probation officer the day before.
“I’ve been in recovery for 13 years, so I know the games they play,” Estrada said. “It’s like a giant game of chess sometimes.”
But Estrada said FreeHab leaders give residents hope that they can not only get clean, but also build relationships and plan for the future.
“I’m like their mom,” Estrada said. “I’m here to do anything and everything I can to help youth get off the streets and find themselves.”
Estrada said FreeHab’s success rate is much higher than other rehab programs. Though the American Addiction Center claims that long-term sobriety rates of five to seven years are a more reliable statistic in the notoriously difficult task of determining success rates, FreeHab does remain in contact with 40 to 50 percent of its approximately 390 former residents after two and a half years of operation.
And that success rate is always growing, thanks to the program’s inclusive policy.
“They can always come back,” Shae said. “We know it’s tough out there, so we never shut the door.”
A large part of this success is the program’s emphasis on education. Currently, FreeHab connects women with some of the same programs as Teen Project’s college housing programs do — FreeHab residents earn certifications as machine operators, beauticians and chefs through local schools.
FreeHab is the only rehab program in the country that provides educational opportunities in connection with their recovery program, Estrada said. Eventually, women will be able to begin their careers onsite; Burns is working with donors and developers to found a school for web design in the warehouse connected to FreeHab’s housing. As they work through the accreditation process, women meet in the warehouse for AA and NA meetings, group sessions and planning meetings.
Estrada said promoting education reshapes residents’ plans for their future – but at their own pace.
“Hava, one of our residents, has been here for two years,” Estrada said. “When she first got here, she had this ‘lil thug’ mentality, and her whole plan was to get on Social Security. We told her she should get a job. She got two. Then she wanted to get her high school diploma.”
When FreeHab directors suggested that she enroll in college, Hava hesitated, saying she didn’t know what she wanted to do.
“I told her, ‘Let’s just start, and it will work its way through,’” Estrada said.
Hava got an A, and signed up for another class.
“Now she’s just glowing,” Estrada said. “I love seeing this with our women. They’ll come from jail or the streets, and they think they’ll never get their kids back. Then they get to learn to be moms again. It’s what keeps me here – the opportunity to work with young ladies and help them not to go through this again, and that they can do it on their own.”
FreeHab’s age-specific and education-focused program is causing foster care and rehab programs across the country to take notice.
“We get calls from everywhere – New York, Chicago – asking, ‘How did you do this?’” Estrada said.
In July, Burns received an invitation to Washington, D.C. to speak with Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration advisors about assisting transitional aged youth. On the federal level, Burns said, the foster care system should be extended to age 24 to help youth through the transition to adulthood and require them to go through vocational school or college.
“If you look at a normal American kid, they use parental support until age 26,” Burns said. “Foster kids are getting let out at 18. It doesn’t make sense.”
But though California passed Assembly Bill 12 in 2012 to allow children to stay in foster care until 21, most just want out.
So Burns advocates government grants for projects like hers, which provide intensive programs of transitional housing, career building, and financial and medical assistance.
“I want to be able to address the foster care system and finish the job, before they start costing people on the other side, paying for welfare, mental institutions, emergency calls and jails.”
Burns currently travels across the country, speaking and training other leaders of programs for homeless children. She recently hosted a pre-party to benefit the Teen Project at the Teen Choice Awards.
“I have a dream that someday, we’ll fix the foster care system,” Burns said. “Right now, we’re just picking up the wounded. But someday I want to win the war.”
