Michigan forum aims to educate public on homeless youth

Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, November 18, 2015

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Youth homelessness comes in many forms.

Some children live in the family car. Some bounce from one motel room to the next. Others couch surf just to have a warm place to sleep. Most go unnoticed, their struggle for stability invisible to the greater community.

“Unless the person is sleeping on your couch, you don’t know it’s happening,” Traverse City resident Shenandoah Chefalo said.

The Traverse City Human Rights Commission is working to change that. They’re hosting a forum on Thursday to shed light on youth homelessness in the region.

“This is a really big issue in the area, and people just don’t know a lot about it,” Mattias Johnson, the commission’s forum chairman, told the Traverse City (Michigan) Record-Eagle.

Chefalo knows what it’s like to be homeless as a child; she moved around so much that she attended more than 30 schools before graduating from high school. She’s now working on a book about her experiences, “Garbage Bag Suitcase.”

She’ll share her struggle with homelessness and foster care at Thursday’s forum alongside three other panelists: Child and Family Services Youth Services Supervisor Nichole Dilloway, Traverse City Area Public Schools’ Students in Transition Empowerment Program coordinator Abby Jordan, and Traverse City West Senior High School graduate David Van Horn.

Van Horn, 23, plans to talk about what it’s like to be young and without a stable home in northern Michigan. He moved to Traverse City when he was 15 and couch surfed until he was placed in foster care. He almost always had a roof over his head but, like Chefalo, it never felt permanent.

Van Horn hopes that speaking publicly about his high school experience will raise awareness and dispel misconceptions. He wants the community to know that being homeless or in foster care doesn’t mean a child is delinquent or a criminal.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “It’s a situation and a circumstance that put them there.”

Johnson hopes the forum will motivate community members to combat youth homelessness, but finding a solution starts with awareness.

“It would be great if people would recognize that it is a problem, and not just in our own community,” Chefalo said. “It’s a problem everywhere.”

Elms writes for the Traverse City (Michigan) Record-Eagle.