Changing the Conversation

This week the National Center on Family Homelessness released A Report Card on Child Homelessness—America’s Youngest Outcasts. They found that one out of thirty children were homeless in our country in 2013 – one out of every thirty. This number is so large it baffles the mind.

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?

September’s Rolling Stone magazine highlighted the growing problem of LGBT Youth Homelessness in the U.S. The Center for American Progress estimates that between 320,000 and 400,000 LGBT youth experience homelessness at some point each year in this country; overall they comprise about 20 percent of the overall homeless youth population.