I’ll call her Michelle.
She was a friend from youth group at church. Smart, spunky and self-sufficient, with a thousand-watt smile.
Her home life was tough. She didn’t talk about it a lot, but enough.
Eventually, around her freshman or sophomore year, she moved out.
She didn’t have anywhere to go, but that was still better than being at home.
I think she slept for a while under the cover outside a doorway at one of Centralia’s public schools.
Somehow she had kept up her studies despite all the turmoil at home, and then the unimaginable difficulties of having no home at all.
In fact, she was the top student in her class. I don’t know how she managed that. She certainly had uncommon strength, intelligence and drive. She also had a dream, of attending an elite out-of-state college. That dream was central to her vision of herself and her future.
But even that dream, even her immense resourcefulness, her smarts and savvy — I don’t know if that would have been enough to carry her through the risks she would have endured through extended teenage homelessness.
Fortunately, in our community and our house of faith, several families came alongside her and offered her a home.
She stayed with one family, a deeply devout and structured household, for a year or two. I don’t know if it was a great fit for her independent spirit, but it was a home with support and love.
Eventually, I think after tensions rose, she moved in with a family from our church that was also loving and supportive, but that perhaps offered her a bit more room for her to operate according to her vision.
She graduated valedictorian of her class — a remarkable testament to her uncommon abilities and drive; potential that she was able to fully realize because of these people who gave her a home when she had none.
Last I heard from my old friend, she graduated from that university, and went on to become an attorney. Married with children, she created the household she could only dream of in her younger years.
I thought of my friend when I saw a story in The Chronicle this week about RISE Lewis County. This new nonprofit group wants to help create host programs for homeless youth.
According to this group, more than 700 students in Lewis County are without adequate housing. Some are crammed into unstable situations and living arrangements. Some are in hotels, campgrounds, shelters or streets. Some, I suspect, occasionally spend the night huddled outside the doorway of their schools, like my friend Michelle.
RISE Lewis County spun off four years ago from charity operations at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Chehalis. It is increasing its work and outreach. The group will have a community discussion on May 21 about if and how to create a host home program for homeless youth, ages 13-23. That meeting will take place at St. John’s Lutheran at 7 p.m. I hope that our community packs the house at this meeting.
“Oftentimes, youth homelessness is fairly invisible, because they’re living in an age where they want to blend in with their peers,” Lewis County Public Health and Social Services Director J.P. Anderson told Chronicle reporter Alex Brown. “There’s a lot of kids that don’t have stable homes, that teachers, faculty and other friends and students might not know they’re in that situation.”
These kids want to succeed. They want a home.
There are many host families out there who are already doing what those wonderful families did for my friend more than 25 years ago. RISE Lewis County wants to build a more formal system with a coordinator. The idea is to help make sure students don’t fall through the cracks — and to help potential volunteers connect with a young person who could use their help.
In a way, it’s similar to a foreign exchange student visiting for a year — but instead of coming from the other side of the world, these kids come from the other side of the tracks.
In some ways, that’s even further away.
I’ve lost touch with Michelle, but I still think of her sometimes, marveling at what she has accomplished. And I think about the Michelles of today, navigating difficulties I’ve never known and don’t even want to imagine.
I salute my friend and the young people doing their best to raise themselves when their original families have failed them.
And I take my hat off to the new families who open up their homes for a sometimes difficult and thankless mission: providing a safe place for these children to stabilize their lives and launch themselves boldly in the direction of their dreams.
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Brian Mittge can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com. He wishes he could tell you Michelle’s real name. She was proud of it, and made sure everyone knew how to spell and pronounce it correctly.
