The Qualities of Youth and Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Tell me the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young… and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.

– Edmund Burke

The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement of danger. 

It demands the qualities of youth. 

– Robert F. Kennedy

I walked into the reception area at Springs Rescue Mission and saw a friend standing there. Two overloaded boxes of canned food filled his arms. I relieved him of one box and we began our walk across the parking lot to the warehouse. He beamed when he said, “This is from my daughter’s birthday party over the weekend. Sweet sixteen and she asked for her guests to bring canned food for the people the Mission serves instead of gifts for her. Pretty awesome, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is. We’ve benefited from dozens of such parties in the last year. Reports of those donations never fail to make us smile – maybe not as broadly as do the parents involved, but pretty close.

It is humbling to consider the contributions younger people in our community have made to the Mission in recent months. It is even more humbling to realize that those we serve, and the Mission, occupy such significant space in the minds of so many youth in the Pikes Peak Region.

There are scores of youth-driven fundraisers to benefit the neighbors we serve. There’s no way I can give credit to all of them. Not so long ago two area high school wrestling teams from Pine Creek and Discovery Canyon  high schools made us the beneficiary of gate receipts from a dual meet. Although the young men on the teams are fierce competitors on the mat (a good number had qualified for the state meet), they came together to help ensure that the Mission could care for families in need. A few months before , Rotary Medallion Champion Allie Morgan directed a gift in honor of her achievement from area Rotary Clubs to the Mission.

Youth and youth groups volunteer to serve the Mission in a variety of ways, some so frequently that they know Mission staff by name. Sometimes they plant, paint, rake, sort clothes in the warehouse, help set up and clean up events, and so much more. They come from small churches and mega churches and high schools and families. Sometimes they take on tasks that help us raise funds, as Mackenzie did in learning and testing a new way to help us raise money to purchase turkeys last holiday season. Again, naming each of them is beyond the capacity of this blog. But in every case, when our younger friends show up, special things happen.

Spring always brings proms and graduations and weddings, and thoughts of where all the time went in the lives of the kids we love. The Pikes Peak Region and friends of the Mission can celebrate the fact that hundreds of our youth show their character in being neighbors helping neighbors – a task which often demands the qualities of youth, no matter what our age might be.

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About Those New Crayons...

It isn’t that Ally doesn’t want to go to school. She does. Because she’s part of a homeless family, she faces a few extra challenges, like staying in one place long enough to really benefit from the learning sequence in any one school. Or, to gain a few friends along the way somewhere. Now a veteran of disrupted school and social surroundings at age eight, Ally has learned to adapt to everything from hunger to sleeping in the minivan for weeks in a row to the weird looks and comments she gets when she goes to a new school because of the things she doesn’t have.

It has been a long, wild and weird summer in Colorado. But Ally and thousands of homeless students in Colorado (along with thousands more students in El Paso County alone who have housing but live in poverty) are about to face something almost too mundane for the present Colorado context: the cycle of another school year. Indeed, among the many thousands of public school students in Colorado, by 2010 over 18,000 were homeless. That’s over a 50% increase from just four years before.[i]

 

That stinks. It stinks because homeless kids tend to be transient. And because their education process is so often disrupted, homeless kids are nine times more likely to repeat a grade, four times more likely to drop out of school, and three times more likely to be placed in special education programs than their peers who have housing.[ii]

Imagine for a moment how tough it can be for a homeless child to be considered a “regular student” just from the challenges of enrollment. Residency requirements -- does it really matter in which school district is the WalMart that let you park and sleep there overnight during June? Guardianship requirements? Delays in transfer of school records, if the child was at the last school long enough to even have meaningful records? Transportation insecurity? How about proof of immunizations?

It takes great determination and, almost always, a lot of extra effort for a homeless family to even enroll their children in school. The same goes for many families who live one paycheck or less away from economic collapse. But make no mistake, school is worth the effort for these families and their children. Education is still a pathway out of poverty. And while they’re going to school, students in poverty are fed there once or twice a day on school days. That makes a huge difference for them and their families.

And there’s something simple you and I can do to help: give the gift of school supplies so we can send our younger neighbors in need off to a new year of school with the classroom supplies they need. This week, visit Springs Rescue Mission at 5 West Las Vegas Street (or to your local mission wherever you are) to drop off a solid color backpack loaded with school supplies: notebooks, pens, pencils, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, blunt-tip scissors, pocket folders, watercolors and crayons for younger students, calculators for older students. Maybe you could fill up a backpack for a student the same age as your child.  And if you can’t fill a backpack this year, just drop off the supplies you can. 

You can stop by during business hours Monday - Friday anytime, any week, or come join us Friday, July 27^th from 8:30 am - 4:30 pm for a special School Supply Drive. Some of our local partners have provided light refreshments for that day, and KVOR’s Richard Randall will join us from 11 am - 1 pm if you can make it over the lunch hour.

Our goal is to collect enough school supplies this Friday alone to fill 500 or more backpacks, plain and simple. That number will greatly supplement the normal flow of school supply donations and help us meet the need of a growing number of kids, like Ally, who need adequate supplies for a new school year.

One last thing: Don’t ever think your school supplies donation of any size is insignificant.

• At the very least, you’re lessening the financial pressure on families that might otherwise have to choose between paying for rent and paying for crayons.
• And you’re providing special encouragement for homeless and at-risk kids to attend school as you remove peer pressure about new stuff or the lack of it.
• In turn, as noted earlier, attending school also gives these students access to school feeding programs.

Now, about those new crayons…

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[i][i] Colorado Department of Education, Homeless Education, http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeprevention/homeless_index.htm.

[ii] Institute for Children and Poverty, 2008. “National Data on Family Homelessness.” Retrieved from http://www.icpny.org/PDF/reports/AccesstoSuccess.pdf?Submit1=Free+Download.