Reaching out to teens on streets

UNION-TRIBUNE
January 13, 2008
Every year, San Diego County turns loose – emancipates is the legal word – about 200 foster kids.
Most of the 18-year-olds have received help in making the transition to adult life. Counseling. Housing assistance. Planning for the future.
It's not mom and dad, but it's something.
A percentage, a few dozen maybe, are too angry at the foster system to bother, according to county records. Typically, they just disappear.
Some drift into Oceanside, North County's de facto sanctuary city for dead-end youth.
Artful dodgers on the loose, they often end up hustling drugs or their bodies. They prey – and are preyed upon. Either way, they don't appear to have a prayer.
On the street, they hook up with homeless kids of all ages, refugees from dysfunctional homes. Before long, they find their way to StandUp for Kids, located behind a nondescript storefront on Coast Highway.
When you've got nothing, nothing beats free.
Three evenings a week, they'll get a meal, shower, TV and Internet access. They clean up after themselves and then take stuff donated by good people with a bad feeling about what happens to street kids.
Before they leave at 8:30 p.m., the teenagers receive clothes, food packs, hygiene kits, condoms.
And tents.
It's the tents that blew me away.
The portable jobs from Target bring home how vulnerable this subculture is, camped out in the same danger zones as homeless adults.
How do you give teenagers tents and wish them good night as they wander off to the beach, canyons or riverbed?
How do you keep from crying?

The person to ask is Kim Green, a former Imperial Beach street kid with 30 grinning mug shots pinned to the bulletin board above her Oceanside desk.
The 36-year-old former meth addict sees much of herself in those who cruise into StandUp for Kids, a haven for the young and the extremely restless.
Green was one of them. Pierced, wired on meth and seemingly hopeless. She was 11 when her dad, an Army officer, died.
“It was like a baby's mobile,” she said. “Pull off one piece and everything is out of balance.”
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A good student who skipped two elementary grades, Green started using at 12, left home and came up for air at 18 when she realized it was clean up or die.
She moved to Orange County, went to continuation school to make up three years of high school, then business college, earned a paralegal credential, got a job in banking and then the building industry. Along the way, she lost the Goth style, prospered, married.
Today, the tall, slender woman lives in San Marcos.
“We were trying to have kids,” Green told me, “and the doctor said my job was too stressful, take time off. But then I was bored.”
So three years ago, she started volunteering at StandUp for Kids, a branch of a national nonprofit organization. Today she's the center director, a grown-up street kid with a maternal role in the lives of about 30 kids.
With the help of 40 volunteers – the youngest is 13, and the oldest is 65 – Green leads a crusade for the children she won't give up on.
To do so would be like giving up on herself, the 18-year-old she was 18 years ago.
As she talks about the teens who look older than their years, her eyes can well up like glistening pools.
“I'm a big crybaby,” she admitted.

If you're looking for the address of StandUp for Kids, no help here. By design, the center wants a low profile.
First, predators flock to the street kids like horseflies to honey. Some of the creeps may know where StandUp is, but why advertise?
Green knows how a street kid could be tempted by the twisted transaction: “If you have nowhere to sleep, 'Sure, I'll do a video. What do I care? I don't care about myself. Obviously, no one else does. Give me the 250 bucks.' ”
Second, Green doesn't want well-meaning looky-loos checking out the kids as if they're freaks. No matter how fleeting, StandUp is their home, not a stage.
No, the only outsiders welcome are volunteers who want to help kids turn their lives around as she did, Green said. Her dream is to serve meals five days a week and open a thrift shop next door where her kids can work for wages. For more information, go to standupforkids.org.
For four years, an anonymous angel has been paying the rent on the shoestring operation where kids, some of them troubled and addicted, receive counseling, sympathy and the means of survival as adulthood stares them in the face.
“This is a crucial point,” Green said. “Now you're 18.”
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com