Kind Karma Inspiration — homelessness

"Being homeless can be a very isolating experience. Whenever I would go to school, I always felt different from everyone else. While everyone else would leave school and go back home to their family, I would leave to go back to a shelter. I would get sad, almost pitiful, looks from my teachers and other students who knew my situation. I began to feel so alone in school, I almost wanted to stop going. Even now in university, I still feel like people know that I had been homeless for the past two years, and it makes me feel anxious and...

It is easy to view homeless individuals through stereotypical lenses that they are homeless through bad choices or criminal actions but the truth is, most of the youth are there as a result of situations they cannot control. In a national survey, almost 80% of homeless youth reported leaving home because of abusive relationships and 63% of homeless youth reported childhood trauma and abuse. This account, from one of our youth employees, tells her story of how she ended up on the streets.