Lighting the way for street youth.
Light Patrol director Tim Huff talks to a couple of street kids.
Courtesy photo
When Light Patrol first found Kayla, she was a scared teen mom-to-be spending her days on the streets and her nights in a shelter.
What a difference a little bit of time and a helpful, supportive hand can make. Now, just 16 months after that first encounter, the bubbly 18-year-old is off the streets and sharing a fully furnished apartment with her one-year-old son, is enrolled back in school, and regularly volunteers to do outreach work with the very organization she said likely saved her life.
"At the time, I was beat down to the point of believing I was nothing. I was depressed and scared and alone," she said of the toll street life took on her after leaving home at age 15 and living in a van for six months. "I don't know where I'd be right now if it weren't for (the Light Patrol staff). I have more self confidence now, and all it took was that one person to tell me I was doing good. That's how it started."
Since the summer of 2002, Light Patrol - a specialized outreach initiated by Youth Unlimited Toronto - has been sending fully trained and equipped street teams of staff and volunteers out to care for both the immediate and long-term needs of homeless youth like Kayla. With the help of their trusty mobile home as a travelling base unit, Light Patrol's seven staff and 30 frontline volunteers are able to reach youth wherever they choose to call home - on the streets, in the alleyways, under the bridges and off-ramps, and in the parks of the city.
It was Tim Huff, a 23-year veteran Youth Unlimited worker, who first envisioned what Light Patrol could be. Always drawn to work with troubled youth, Huff helped open the Frontlines drop-in centre at Weston and Lawrence in 1987.
"From that, I started following the lives of some of the street kids and found that a bunch had been lost between the tracks. I spent 10 years trying to build up a trust with these kids, to bridge their gaps and help them get the I.D., food, work, and places to live they needed to survive," he said.
At first, he helped those who came in to the centre, but soon learned through those connections of the many youth out on the streets too scared, too proud, too suspicious to reach out and ask for the help they, too, so desperately needed. And so, he decided to go to them - Toronto's 'hidden homeless.'
"The ethos of Light Patrol is go to where the kids are," Huff said. "In my 10 years working solo downtown, I came to know dozens of street kids living beneath the I-beams of the Gardiner Expressway, with no access to anything. It's ironic, because coming off Bay Street every day, some of the city's richest people drive over its poorest, without ever even knowing it."
Twice a week, the Light Patrol mobile home - emblazoned with the message: "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness" on its side and loaded with hot meals and snacks, warm clothes and dry socks, blankets and sleeping bags - shines its headlights upon those youth otherwise left in the shadows to fend for themselves. The Light Patrol goes to Bathurst Bridge. They go to Boys Town. They travel a five-kilometre route along Lake Shore Boulevard West and The Queensway. They help all those homeless they find along the way.
Light Patrol's approach is three-pronged: CurbLight brings homeless youth the clothes, food and necessities they need to survive. SafeLight reaches out to those youth whose addictions are so strong they've turned to 'survival sex' and prostitution to feed their needs. And HealthLight, the next initiative to be rolled out, will see volunteer nurses join the team to tend to the immediate health care needs of street kids.
"A 15-year-old kid on the street shouldn't have to be living the problems of a 55-year-old," Huff said. "They should be worrying about homework and what boy at school likes them, not about where their next meal is going to come from, where they're going to sleep that night, or about having to deal with pimps and dealers."
That was a lesson Kayla learned the hard way - through experiencing it. But all that's changed now, thanks to Light Patrol.
"I'm seeing myself now in a place I didn't think possible back then," she said of the change she's seen in herself over the last year. "My advice to street kids now is that if you see that support, take it. All you need to change your life is that little push Light Patrol gave me. Take the support when its offered, because you can't always do it by yourself."
Now that she's off the streets, Kayla's currently taking control of her life and mapping out a future for her young son. She's taking a SmartServe course in the hopes of getting a job to provide for her young family, and is also looking to enroll in a business or social work program in college. She wants to help others, as she was helped.
Her own experience on the street, she said, has given her a common ground on which to meet the youth at a level playing field.
"They don't feel judged with me, because they know I've been where they are now," she said of her volunteer work with Light Patrol. "Helping kind of feels like a weight off my shoulders. Knowing that I can help some of the girls so that they don't have to go as deep as I did, that I can give them that push up, and seeing that I made a difference...it's, like, wow!"