GR HQ Kicks Off Health Initiative
Grand Rapids HQ, located at 320 State Street SE, held a press conference Thursday, December 12, 2019, to announce its pilot program and how community members can help in supporting the work of shifting health outcomes for area youth who are in crisis.
HQ is collaborating with community partners at 3:11 Youth Housing, Healthnet of West Michigan, GVSU Family Health Center and Wisdom Center Counseling Services to create a healthier future for the homeless and runaway youth.
In this interview with the GR Times, Co -Founder and Executive Director Shandra Steininger talks about the youth age range that HQ serves, the purpose of Grand Rapids HQ and more.
GRT: When did HQ launch this health initiative and why?
Steininger: We just started offering services collaboratively in October and November, so it's brand new. We had to do this is because we were serving so many 18 to 24 - year olds who just didn't have any access to physical health care at all or had no health insurance.
Their physical and mental health challenges were really inhibiting their ability to maintain housing, school or a job.
GRT: Where did the idea for these services come from?
Steininger: It sort of just evolved. My team had some issues that were brought to me.
Loren Vanheuin, the executive director at 311 Youth Housing and I kept talking to other community agencies and we kept hearing, "No, we don't do that" or "We don't really have the funding or capacity to do that". We saw that we were going to have to figure this out on our own. We started doing a lot of research, read up on what other communities were doing, and it sort of just evolved over about a four - month period.
GRT: What are some reasons that teens are experiencing homelessness?
Steininger: The most common reason that a youth is experiencing a housing crisis is instability in the family of origin.
So, maybe the whole family is struggling with homelessness or maybe the youth came out as LGBTQ and the family is not supportive. Those are the primary reasons. Most teens hear about HQ through people who have been to the center already and kind of vouch for us.
For this population there is just so much distrust. Some have had bad experiences in foster care or through juvenile justice or with the police and so they just don't really know whom to trust, so hearing from someone who is in a similar situation is powerful.
GRT: Do you provide housing for teens as well?
Steininger: We don't directly provide housing, but we function as a hub for all of the youth services in the city. We are open multiple times throughout the week, and we provide basic need things like showers, food, laundry, personal high gene items and Wi-Fi.
Our staff then works to build relationships with the youth that we serve to help them navigate to the services that they need. So if they need housing, we can help them with their housing assessment and all the paper work has to happen with that.
We can even connect them with places 311 Youth Housing who a lot of our youth end up finding long term housing there. This is definitely a large crisis and we as a community just don't see it very often.
We at HQ serve about 450 unique youth a year. I can tell you that right now, just from our community housing waiting list, there are about 150 youth who are homeless and waiting on supportive housing.
International statistics show forty - percent of chronically homeless adults first experienced homelessness as a child or during their youth so if we don't intervene and break the cycle, then these youth become the homeless adults that our community has to continue to support for years.
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