SOUTH BEND tarting next month, young people ages 16 to 22 who are homeless or on the verge of it will be able to find refuge in a local apartment complex for up to 18 months.
The nonprofit Youth Service Bureau of St. Joseph County will start the program with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to be used over the next five years.
It will have room for up to eight people ata time. They’ll double up in four apartments at a local complex, which will be near another unit that will serve as an office, staffed 24 hours per day to provide casework and access to computers. The Youth Service Bureau asked that the complex’s name be withheld out of concern for the clients’ confidentiality and safety.
Clients will work on education, job-seeking, household, money management and other skills as they try to become self sufficient, said agency director Jennifer Pickering. Many have been in foster care or dealt with trauma, abuse or mental health issues.
“The whole goal is to get them stabilized,” she said.
The number of homeless students in northern Indiana has risen over the past decade. In the 2015-16 school year, more than 230 students in St. Joseph County faced uncertainty about where they’d sleep from night to night, the Indiana Youth Institute has reported.
But those numbers tend to be low because troubled youths don’t want to be counted — and they don’t want anyone to know they’re homeless, Brady August said at an IYI seminar last month. August runs the Youth Service Bureau’s Street Outreach program.
A part-time therapist will be devoted to the new program, dubbed “Keystone.” And Pickering expects the rooms to fill up by the end of the year.