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https://www.al.com/news/2024/10/their-parents-died-during-covid-now-a-birmingham-nonprofit-is-helping-them-out-of-homelessness.html>
"By the time Natasha Pierce found herself spending the night under Birmingham’s
rainbow bridge, she’d already been sleeping in abandoned buildings for over two
years.
But it wasn’t until that cold night in January of 2023 that Pierce realized she
was homeless at 19 years old.
“I’m them now,” she thought as she surveyed the older men who also slept
beneath the railroad underpass that night.
Both of Natasha’s parents died during the COVID pandemic, first her dad in
2020, then her mom a year later. She and her two siblings were among nearly
235,000 children in the United States who lost primary caregivers during the
pandemic.
In Alabama alone, nearly 8,000 kids became orphaned or lost a caregiver to the
pandemic, pushing some into homelessness, in what the national childhood
bereavement organization, Evermore, called “a crisis hiding in plain sight.”
“For every youth we find, there’s at least another one that we did not find and
cannot count,” said Michelle Farley, executive director of One Roof, an agency
that connects homeless people in Birmingham to the services they need. “It is
frightening to us when we see numbers go up at all, because we know there’s a
lot more that we’re not seeing.”
It’s nearly impossible to know just how many teens are living on the streets.
But federal data shows there are about 200 in Alabama, including dozens in
Birmingham."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
