To kick-off Homelessness Awareness Month, we are posting this blog by Ellen Bassuk, MD that originally appeared on Huffington Post on October 8, 2015 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-l-bassuk/not-one-child-not-one-nig_b_8258580.html.
How can it be in a country as affluent as the United States that 2.5 million children are homeless each year? Although the numbers are climbing, family homelessness is absent from our nation's agenda.
America’s Youngest Outcasts—The Report Card of Child Homelessness, released this week by the National Center on Family Homelessness, documented that a staggering number of children experience homelessness annually---2.5 million or one out of thirty. Why are the numbers so large and dramatically increasing?
The National Center on Family Homelessness just released A Report Card on Child Homelessness—America’s Youngest Outcasts. They documented that nearly 2.5 million children are now homeless in our country each year---that’s one out of thirty children.
How is it possible that in a country as affluent as ours a dramatically growing number of children and youth are experiencing homelessness—by some counts almost 2 million kids annually. In fact, in school year 2011-2012, the numbers were at an historic high. Although we seem to agree that children are our nation’s future, their needs have not been adequately addressed in our federal plan to end homelessness. How is it that children are expendable?
