As a disabled female survivor of sexual violence who became homeless the moment I graduated high school, getting to college was more difficult than I had once imagined.
On June 6, 2017, with my high school diploma still in my backpack, I stood on the side of a Chicago street as the future of higher education seemed to crumble like a cigarette beneath my sneakers.
Two months before this moment, I had reported a sexual assault to the police about abuse that had happened while I was hospitalized during the fall of my eighth-grade year. When I returned from the hospital, my parents, fearing alienation in a community where “bad things didn’t happen” threatened me to keep the circumstances of the abuse silent. By March 2017, a week after my 18th birthday and five years after struggling against the effects of trauma, something instinctual inside me understood that if I didn’t speak, I couldn’t keep living. I reported the abuse to the police knowing it would never be safe to return home.
I spent the first nine nights hopping between a network of friends’ and strangers’ houses and apartments this summer. I tried to tuck this past behind. I tried not flinch when a stranger’s house became even stranger at the sound of sirens flooding the area. I tried to root myself firmly in the present, to not think about the black holes that swallowed me in the past and future. But after nine nights between porches, basements and spare rooms, I began to wonder if the future was really an option. Then, I remembered a resource my school social worker had informed me about and dialed 1-800- RUNAWAY, the National Runaway Safeline.
My story this summer is one of incredible privilege. After nine nights, I eventually found temporary housing in the Chicago area’s only youth shelter for 18 to 21-year-old girls. But National Alliance to End Homelessness’ studies reveal that a majority of youth are not so lucky.
From the approximately 740,000 contacts that street outreach programs — which the federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act funds — reach annually, fewer than 43,000 youth find a shelter bed, and only 3,600 of those contacts are enrolled in longer-term transitional living programs.
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Considering that these statistics only account for data a single institutional body collected. The amount of youth who are forced out of their homes and onto the streets each year is much larger — and the percentage of those youth who obtain the privilege of higher education even slimmer.
This fall when I came to campus without my parents and family, I understood my journey to college was much different than a majority of my peers at University of Wisconsin. But, I also understood that youth homelessness — especially youth homelessness between the age of 18 to 25 — as indicated in a recent University of Chicago at Chapin Hall study, was not an uncommon narrative. I had wrongly assumed that institutions of higher education — especially public institutions like UW — would have policies and people in place to support unaccompanied youth.
I had assumed also that because the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act defines “youth” up until age 21, there would be someone on campus in charge of advocating for students who have no permanent home to go back to, in charge of questioning discriminatory housing policies such as the recent $1,400 surge in the cost of housing, and in charge of educating and expanding knowledge on campus about homeless youth.
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I am deciding to write this letter today because I am a FAFSA-defined unaccompanied homeless youth who will likely be unable to continue attending UW next year because of a more than $15,000 difference between the cost of attendance and an apparent “maximum” financial aid package. The university is aware that homeless and foster youth with no family support and no access to parental information have been barred from this institution. Without a campus scholarship fund or financial aid to cover full tuition expenses, unaccompanied youth are given no other pathway to education except to never enroll or drop out when the institution fails to recognize their financial need.
I am writing this letter because despite a change in circumstances that made college seem impossible, I told myself I would do whatever I could to come to UW. I was adamant to prove that despite stereotypes that label homeless youth “delinquent” and “at-risk,” these stereotypes were coming from a misinformed notion that the failures of institutions were instead failures of homeless youth.
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Over the course of two months, I worked through the long dependency override process to receive an adjusted package for financial aid. But when I finally received the adjustment less than a week before my first semester on campus, it was not enough to cover food or housing. When I arrived on campus, I began working in dining. Instead of being able to eat meals with my shift, I learned that gallons of fresh food ended up in the bottom of a trash can.
I am writing this letter because while the assumption is that I am first and foremost a student on this campus, the most demanding identity, every time I struggle to find housing over break, is “homeless.” Because what makes homeless youth a “vulnerable” population is not the essence of their identity but the result of institutions that constantly turn a blind eye.
Unfortunately, institutions headed by employees who have always had a bed to turn to every night hardly ever work with the same sense of urgency. Additionally, institutions that have used family income as a measure of disadvantage have no incentive to help those whose disadvantage appears “circumstantial”—whose identities as queer, or as survivors of violence, or as disabled has forced them out of their homes into the hands of systems or the streets.
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Homelessness is not circumstance. It’s a sentence if institutions continue to neglect our narratives. The narratives of homeless and foster youth are not easy to swallow, but this is not an excuse to push our stories aside.
The refusal of institutions to serve underprivileged populations isn’t news to me. But I am tired of statements like “cost should never be a barrier” when the university makes no mention of the words “homeless and foster youth” in any campus office, scholarship fund, or university webpage. Cost should never be a barrier. But in the subtext of every statement that relies on family income as a qualifying measure is a direct “not you” to the thousands of homeless and foster youth.
This semester, I am determined to move away from silence into making demands for the rights of homeless and foster youth to exist on this campus. I need to do this for me, but I also need to do it for the girls who are not here — who are sitting on the side of a street right now, or lying in bed in a shelter, saying to themselves “I’ve had enough,” and yet, “but not quite.”
The student’s name has been left anonymous to protect the identity of homeless students and survivors of sexual assault.
