Choosing Our Roots
Home. It’s a powerful word and an even more powerful feeling. It’s a place to find belonging, where you can be your whole self and feel warm, safe, and accepted. It’s where you can feel a sense of connection, purpose, grounding, and community. Home is where you can feel excited and hopeful for a bright future.
Yet across Alaska, many young people don’t have the feeling, security, and comfort of home or the support of caring adults that can transform a house into a home. Children in Alaska experience homelessness* at high rates : 2-3% of Alaska students in each grade from Pre-K – 11th experience homelessness at any given time during the year. After grade 12, that rate more than doubles, to 5-6%. This means that of every 20 seniors in high school, at least one may be experiencing homelessness right now.
At Alaska Children’s Trust, we believe every child should not just have the bare minimum of a bed to sleep in, but should have everything they need to thrive, learn, dream, and be accepted for who they are. Nationally, data tells us that up to 40% of youth experiencing homelessness identify as LGTBQ+. To provide a safe space for all youth, we must meet them with open hearts and provide spaces that are both accepting and affirming. That’s why this month we’ve partnered with Choosing Our Roots. Learn more about them and what you can do to help in the following guest article.
Choosing Our Roots is a statewide nonprofit searching for effective and lasting ways to address homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth in Alaska. Choosing our Roots dreams of an Alaska where every LGBTQ+ young person has access to safe and affirming housing, communities that support them, and opportunities to thrive. One of the ways we work to accomplish this dream is by centering the experiences of queer, trans, and gender expansive young people, advocating for a reduction in barriers to service, and building spaces where all identities are celebrated! We also provide housing for youth and young adults aged 13 to 24 through a host home model, where community volunteers with extra space who are grounded in our core values and service model can provide a home and mentorship for young people experiencing homelessness.
As of this blog post, COR has had contact with more than 115 young people across the state of Alaska in need of our services. We currently have 9 young people being hosted and 10 young people receiving robust supportive services. Multiple young adults have moved from our services into their own stable housing. We have been honored to walk alongside them in their journeys.
We are connected with over a dozen LGBTQ+ youth and young adults in need of safe and affirming homes, including those on our waitlist. Several of these young people are currently living in unsafe situations, are in unstable housing, or are couch surfing. Many of these young people have experienced family, community, and agency rejection. This, in addition to a pandemic, puts young people in very vulnerable situations. We are in dire need of hosts throughout our service regions, but especially on the Kenai Peninsula and in the MatSu Borough where youth are currently waiting for a safe host environment to become available.
All Alaska youth deserve to be able to stay and be supported in their home community. We do our best to honor that need and find safe housing in the community where they already have connections and bonds. We’re reaching out through the Alaska Children’s Trust to expand our pool of possible hosts. If you are excited about making a life changing difference in a young person’s life by becoming a safe and affirming host, reach out to us! Or, if this may be a good fit for someone you know, share this piece with them or share it widely on social media - you never know the incredible domino effect you may have on a young Alaskans’ life just by sharing this opportunity. Our young people need you.
To best serve and support our hosts, we provide a wrap around network of volunteers dedicated to meeting the needs of our host families by providing emotional support, connecting them to resources, and holding space for them when they need help navigating unfamiliar situations. If this feels like a way you might like to contribute, we need you. We have a very intentional process, as our model relies on radical consent and building of relationships prior to hosting. We are equally intentional in our matching process and want to ensure that both the participant and host feel confident in the relationship and expectations prior to hosting. We need volunteers who can help provide this additional support to our hosts and young people receiving services.
Choosing Our Roots believes in community care - that when all of us are around the circle, we can meet one another’s needs, create beloved community, and inspire a shift in how LGBTQ+ young people experience the world. Please join us in our mission to ensure that all queer Alaskan youth and young adults have access to safe homes, supportive communities, and opportunities to thrive.
*It is important that we take a moment to reflect on language and how it impacts our perception of people. We, as an agency, do our best to use person-first language as it acknowledges that someone’s lived experience is not their sole identity. For example, we will say, “a person who is experiencing homelessness” rather than “a homeless person” because their experience in this one moment does not define who they are as a person.