Rethink Resources

Youth Outlook, an amazing youth media organization, reports this past week on Youth Together of Oakland CA finding youth peace-keepers in the same students who were involved in major fights that broke out in local high schools.

The Ali Forney Center in New York released a new campaign to reach homeless GLBTQ youth in New York.

In Cincinnati Ohio, a formerly homeless young woman is reviving a homeless youth empowerment program with other youth. Read more about it. Here they are doing outreach.

I’m happy to start out with the positive reports first.

And now for the other links: a mom and her boyfriend in Houston have been charged with prostituting the mom’s teen daughters.

And in New Jersey a man, with the appropriate last name of Coward, was found by police hiding in the closet when they arrested him for prostituting two sisters aged 14 and 16.

HPD: Mother Sold Sex With Teens (Texas) Wednesday, June 13, 2007 A mother has been accused of selling her two teenage daughters to men looking for sex with underage girls, officials told KPRC Local 2 Tuesday. Houston police said the mother distributed business cards advertising sex with children and negotiated the arrangements. Investigators said the woman’s 16-year-old daughter called them when she got tired of being forced to have sex with men.

Former addict out to save city: UC student revives the Youth Empowerment Program (Ohio) Wednesday, June 13, 2007 In a city with more than 320,000 residents, a group of young people lead quiet, stagnant lives in Cincinnati. More than 1,000 homeless youths slip into vacant buildings, huddle under bridges and drift from one home to another, according to homeless advocates. One young woman says she has a plan to pull them in from Cincinnati’s economic outskirts, and she knows how to do it because she was once a homeless youth.

Allentown girls forced into prostitution, N.J. police say: Teenage sisters taken to Atlantic City. Suspect is found hiding in closet. (New Jersey) Saturday, June 9, 2007 Two young Allentown sisters were found in good condition after they were taken Tuesday by a New Jersey man and forced to work as prostitutes, a New Jersey State Police spokesman said Friday. Casson L. Coward, 24, ”talked up” the teenagers, luring them into his Cadillac and driving them to Atlantic City, where he advertised their services on the Internet, said Sgt. Stephen Jones.

Homeless Youths Star in Ads for Ali Forney Center (New York) Friday, June 8, 2007 Eleven months ago, when David Williams’s mother turned him out of her home because he was gay, he wandered the streets of Manhattan for three weeks, sleeping in the Columbus Circle subway station. Eventually, he found refuge at the Ali Forney Center, a shelter for homeless LGBT youths. His experience there has been so positive that he wants to tell many people about it.

Peace Keepers Embedded on Campus (California) Thursday, June 7, 2007 When two East Bay high schools – Richmond High School and Skyline High School, in Oakland – erupted in large-scale fighting over the past school year, Youth Together (YT) was on the front lines, working with what they call “non-traditional student leaders” to end the violence and find long term solutions for peace.