State fully funds STAR House youth shelter
The Ohio State STAR House is no longer on life support.
Thanks to a $655,000 line item approved in the state’s two-year, $62 billion budget, the only drop-in center in the state — and perhaps the nation — that caters to youth won’t have to worry about whether its doors will close. Instead STAR House, located at the corner of N. 4th Street and 12th Avenue, will throw its doors wide open 24 hours a day, seven days a week with the new funding.
“I will be doing a happy dance for several days,” said College of Education and Human Ecology Professor Natasha Slesnick, who started the house as part of a research project in 2006. “What this means is basically we can focus on expanding our services and reaching some of those 1,500 other homeless youth we haven’t been able to serve because we didn’t have the funds to do it.”
Slesnick wasn’t certain until the budget was signed on June 30 whether Gov. John Kasich would use his line-item veto to strip out the funding. That he didn’t, Slesnick said, shows Kasich supports youth age 14-24 in the state who are both vulnerable and underserved.
Jeana Patterson, the house’s program coordinator, said she and Slesnick have been keeping the youth apprised of the budget process, and they asked a couple of them if they would send personal hand-written thank you notes to the governor and Ohio Rep. Cheryl Grossman (R-Grove City), who has been a strong proponent of funding STAR House from the start. When other youth at the house heard about the letter writing, they asked if they could add theirs as well.
“The message that this funding sends to the youth is that it’s not just a handful of folks at the STAR House who care,” Patterson said, “it’s that the state collectively is invested in them. They see they have value and they’re not a throwaway member of society.”
Shannon Underwood admits being homeless makes her feel she is on the outside looking in. The 20-year-old is pregnant with her first child and lives in the woods with her boyfriend. It was just by chance she was introduced to the STAR House, but she comes there regularly now to shower, wash her clothes, eat a decent meal and apply for housing and medical help.
In the woods, she jumps in fear sometimes when a stick breaks, wondering if it’s an animal or someone coming to ransack their tent, or worse. The STAR House to her means being free of fear and worry — and a chance at a future.
“This is the only thing we have right now, literally, in any kind of home sense,” she said. “This is it.”
Being open year-round means OSU STAR House will have to add staff, so it will be weeks before the house can make that transition. But no more, Slesnick said, will she have to lock the doors at 5 p.m. and wonder if the youth leaving the house will become victims during the night.
The state funding also will support a full-time outreach counselor (the current counselor was tied to grant money which has run out) and a full-time therapist, who will be in addition two part-time therapists hired with a grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office.
“Our therapists are overwhelmed by the demand for their services, so we needed a full-time therapist, and they’ll be located at the house,” Slesnick said. “With someone solely devoted to outreach, that means going to the streets, soup kitchens, sandwich lines, the woods and libraries — anywhere homeless kids might be hanging out to tell them about the STAR House and engage them to come to us, where we can get them more intensive services to help them get off the streets.”
Slesnick also plans to hire a business manager who can run the day-to-day operations and focus on fundraising, which will allow her to devote time to trying new ideas to help the youth.
“I had plans to test different methods to see about getting money in the kids’ pockets, such as social enterprise models,” Slesnick said. “Goodwill has some good programs using social enterprise and I want to learn from them. I’m hoping we can set up relationships with local businesses so youth can work at that local business. If a youth makes $12 an hour, for example, $9 goes to the youth, $3 to the STAR House and it becomes a self-sustaining program. They can have money in their pocket to save and get off the street.”
Without the STAR House, 21-year-old Anthony Dumont said he wouldn’t be as far along as he is in removing the word “homeless” from how he describes himself. On the streets since he turned 19 and aged out of foster care, Dumont was able to get a job through someone affiliated with OSU Star House and apply for housing. He’ll move into his first apartment this month, and he continues to attend classes at Columbus State Community College.
“Homeless youth are struggling every minute of the day,” he said, “and at night a lot of things can happen. Shelters don’t always have what you need help with. The STAR House is a nice, warm, welcoming environment. Now my ‘better’ is better than I could have imagined.”
