Dion Austin was almost 16 years old when his mother kicked him out of her house for being gay.
At first he worked at night and went to school during the day, using Burger King bathrooms to clean himself up and sleeping in the park after work. He graduated high school in May, but he lost his job. Penniless and unable to eat, Austin turned to having sex for money. He started to get sick, and that was when he went to the police, he said.
The police knew about the National Safe Place program, and they called the Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development, which sent a representative to pick Austin up.
The National Safe Place program is a nonprofit that designates different businesses and organizations as Safe Places, where youth from 12 to 17 years old who are living on the streets or going through conflict at home can speak with a Safe Place representative. The representative will call a local agency, which will transport the teens and provide them with the services they need, such as food and shelter.
The program first came to Arizona in 2005 with the Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development as its representative. Valley Metro started working with Tumbleweed in May, and in September, all light rail stops became Safe Place sites. The program has worked to help teens recover by bringing them to Tumbleweed, where they have access to beds, food and personal and family counselors.
Austin stayed in the Open Hands program, and when he needed more time, he was placed in the long-term Young Adult Program. Though family reunification is Safe Place’s main goal, Austin said he didn’t want to return to his mother’s house. He turned 18 in August and said the counseling the program helped him the most, allowing him to cope with the heavy depression and anger he said he was feeling while homeless.
“They gave me that push, that confidence,” he said. “They made sure I was ready to be out on my own.”
The Safe Place program, which began in Kentucky in 1983, is located in 39 states and Washington, D.C. A different agency in each state runs the program there, as Tumbleweed does in Arizona. That agency works with community organizations, businesses and government departments to establish Safe Places, said Hillary Ladig, a spokeswoman for National Safe Place.
In 2005, Tumbleweed became the head Safe Place agency in Maricopa County. From September 2012 to September 2013, the center received 129 Safe Place calls, or about one call every three days.
There are 183 Safe Place sites in the Valley, including all QuikTrip convenience stores, federal banks, libraries and, most recently, light rail stations. Teens who were kicked out of their homes, ran away or are facing other troubles can go to any of these locations and speak with an employee, who will call the Tumbleweed Center’s Safe Place hotline, said Michelle Cerniglia, who runs the Safe Place program at Tumbleweed. Then, a team from Tumbleweed can pick up the teenager and take him or her to the center.
The Tumbleweed Center will then place the teen in its Open Hands program, which offers counseling and shelter for youth in need, Cerniglia said. If they need somewhere to stay, she said, teens can stay with the program for two weeks.
In order to do so, their parents must sign them in. Bringing families back together is the No. 1 goal of the program, Ladig said. Cerniglia said Tumbleweed offers family counseling in order to help fractured families heal, and often, the teenage years see the most fracturing.
“During adolescence, there tends to be a heightened sense of conflict in families,” she said.
Family conflict, excluding abuse, makes up one of every three cases Safe Place handles, Cerniglia said. The next most common problem is youth homelessness, which is around 1 in 4 Safe Place cases in Arizona. Ladig said abuse and neglect problems make up 7 percent of cases.
On Sept. 18, light rail stops around the Valley became Safe Places. Instead of speaking in person with a representative, teens can press the button for the emergency call box at the stop and speak to a Valley Metro employee.
The employee will keep the teen on the line until someone arrives, either a Valley Metro representative to wait with the teen or the relief team from Tumbleweed, said Melissa Quillard, the public information specialist for Valley Metro. Quillard was the driving force behind the company’s work with Tumbleweed and inclusion in Safe Place.
Employees at Valley Metro discussed becoming involved in the Safe Place program for a while before going to Tumbleweed, Quillard said. The transit company started working with Tumbleweed in May 2013.
Making the light rail a Safe Place was both easy and sensible because each stop already had emergency call boxes and the train already had a large amount of teens riding, Quillard said.
“We were fortunate that we had a lot of the infrastructure in place already,” she said.
With every light rail stop, there is a site agreement that Tumbleweed and Valley Metro are bound to outlining each party’s responsibilities, Cerniglia said. Valley Metro employees must know how to respond to the teen and follow a script in their early conversation and the Safe Place sign has to be displayed at every station. Tumbleweed must provide training for those employees, showing them how to behave with the teen and what to do when a Safe Place call comes in, she said.
Across the country, 66 transit companies, including bus and emergency medical systems, participate in National Safe Place. Valley Metro is the second light rail system to join the program, Ladig said.
The first light rail system is in Cleveland, Ohio, though the Phoenix system is a longer line and is the first to work with the teens from a different location by using remote technology, keeping an eye on them with the cameras at the light rail stop, Quillard said.
So far, Safe Place has been used twice at light rail stations since it went live in September, Cerniglia said. Both calls worked as they were supposed to, Quillard said. Valley Metro did not anticipate a high volume of use for Safe Place as the program only gets a couple hundred calls from all 183 locations across the Valley in one year, she said.
Ladig was excited about Valley Metro’s inclusion in the Safe Place program, however, saying that having the light rail on board with National Safe Place was “really huge” — partly because of the high teen ridership, partly because transit systems such as buses and light rails operate early in the morning and late at night and give homeless teens somewhere warm to go, and partly because they cover more ground than a stationary building, such as the other Safe Places in Arizona.
“Buses and trains go places where there are no fire stations and libraries and maybe other Safe Place sites,” Ladig said.
The light rail system is being used as a pilot to test the Safe Place program on transit systems in Arizona, Quillard said. Valley Metro is hoping to eventually roll the program out to include buses, she said, but that won’t be for a long time — the bus system in the Valley is complicated and includes both Valley Metro and the city of Phoenix, each of which owns and oversees different regions of busing in metropolitan Phoenix, she said.
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu
