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There's something else I learned, or rather had confirmed, while I was talking to Rebecca the Lambert House staffer. The fraction of the youth that Lambert House serves who are homeless has fallen during my time as a volunteer.
How good is that? Parents still kick their kids out of their homes for being queer, but has the rate of such incidents fallen? That would be wonderful, but there's a less pleasant alternative explanation: homeless queer youth just aren't showing up at the house.
I can think of why that might be the case. Early in my years and Rebecca's, the biggest complaint about the house that the youth had was that we weren't doing a good enough job of keeping banned youth out; one day's group of floor volunteers wouldn't necessarily know what had transpired on an earlier day because the records were all on paper. One of the first things that executive director Ken Shulman had me do with the database and front desk app was add features to make communication between volunteers about such issues more automatic and to alert them to potential problems. Maybe what I did worked.
Are homeless youth historically more likely to be banned for substance use or other inappropriate behavior? It would be wrong to assume so, and I couldn't honestly hazard a guess. I have access to the data that the house has on that, but I've never queried it myself. And that data is based on voluntary reporting by both the youth and the volunteers, so I can't promise that it's any good.
Mind you, COVID scrambled everything. Lambert House, the physical building, is again open to the youth five afternoons a week as of October. If we're going back to the situation of ten or twelve years ago, I guess we're going to find out shortly.
How good is that? Parents still kick their kids out of their homes for being queer, but has the rate of such incidents fallen? That would be wonderful, but there's a less pleasant alternative explanation: homeless queer youth just aren't showing up at the house.
I can think of why that might be the case. Early in my years and Rebecca's, the biggest complaint about the house that the youth had was that we weren't doing a good enough job of keeping banned youth out; one day's group of floor volunteers wouldn't necessarily know what had transpired on an earlier day because the records were all on paper. One of the first things that executive director Ken Shulman had me do with the database and front desk app was add features to make communication between volunteers about such issues more automatic and to alert them to potential problems. Maybe what I did worked.
Are homeless youth historically more likely to be banned for substance use or other inappropriate behavior? It would be wrong to assume so, and I couldn't honestly hazard a guess. I have access to the data that the house has on that, but I've never queried it myself. And that data is based on voluntary reporting by both the youth and the volunteers, so I can't promise that it's any good.
Mind you, COVID scrambled everything. Lambert House, the physical building, is again open to the youth five afternoons a week as of October. If we're going back to the situation of ten or twelve years ago, I guess we're going to find out shortly.
