Homeless Youth

The Homeless Youth Program

image copyright Campbell Salgado Photography

The Homeless Youth Program brings yoga, meditation, and wellness classes to young people ages 9-26 living in various states of homelessness, including transitional housing facilities, crisis shelters, and the streets themselves.

Homeless youth are challenged with the same tasks as all young people: defining themselves, building personal meaning, and learning how to relate and grow with others. They face, however, the added burdens of poverty, sickness, interrupted education, violent childhoods, and lack of access to schooling, health care, work opportunities, and especially safe housing.

Yoga teaches young people to take responsibility for their personal wellness. It offers them a free, portable means of caring for themselves that no one can take away. Yoga helps the youth develop skills of intention, breathing, self-awareness, flexibility, strength, focus, and perseverance–skills that create a healthy foundation for dealing with challenges in life.

Ultimately, we see our work as offering the youth the cornerstone of life-long personal wellness and skills to meet their own needs.

Starting Points

  • Start Where You Are -- There is no "right" way to address youth homelessness. There is no "right" time, no "right" circumstance. Our philosophy is: begin with who you are and what you have to offer. (Otherwise you may never begin at all!) We teach classes based on what we observe in our students as we encounter them. Classes and interactions may be planned, but we try to remain open to what happens in each moment, accommodating our students as best we can as we go along.
  • Homelessness is a Wide Spectrum Issue -- Being homeless does not simply mean living out of a cardboard box on skid-row. It is as varied as the individuals who struggle and suffer with it. For a more detailed look at the nature of homelessness, please click here.

Four Homeless Programs

Our entire offering began at Outside In, with young people who had been, and were now transitioning off the streets. From there we expanded into other facets of street-involved homelessness among youth, as well as into work with abused, incarcerated, sheltered, and other populations at risk of slipping into youth or adult homelessness.

Outside In (Day Program)

Youth ages 15-21 can access this program on a drop-in basis. It provides safety off the streets, food, crisis counseling, and skill building activities. Many of the youth who access the day program also live in transitional housing and meet regularly with a case manager. Street Yoga provides these youth with a one-hour weekly yoga class on Sundays, as well as a meditation class.

Harry’s Mother Runaway Youth Shelter

This crisis agency offers short term shelter, case management, free family counseling, and a 24-hour crisis line for runaway and at-risk youth and their families. The shelter admits youth ages 9-17 who have conflict at home or other cause for displacement, youth in foster care awaiting placement, and low-risk juvenile offenders participating in a detention diversion initiative. Street Yoga offers an hour-long weekly yoga class on Wednesday afternoons, a program sponsored by the Hawthorne Wellness Center at their recently converted studio.

Road Warriors

A collaboration between Outside In and New Avenues for Youth, this outreach program serves youth up to about age 27. The late-night program is designed for hard-to-reach youth who seldom access daytime services. Services provided include safety, food, showers, and a movie. Street Yoga collaborates with these agencies to provide wellness workshops, including foot spas.

p:ear

p:ear provides educational, artistic, and recreational programming on a drop-in basis to homeless and transitional youth ages 15-23. This program serves over 350 youth a year, building positive mentor-style relationship with a broad range of youth within the spectrum of homelessness. Street Yoga offers these youth occasional wellness workshops, including foot spas.