Youth Shelter Asking For Token Donations
Posted February 9, 2011 2:35 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Aside from providing a safe place to sleep, food, skills training and other services, Etobicoke’s Youth Without Shelter also hands out thousands of tokens to homeless kids, enabling them to get to school, doctor’s appointments and job interviews.
On Friday high school kids will take over subway platforms between 7am and 7pm for the Tokens4Change fundraising effort, offering live poetry, music and dance on train platforms in exchange for donations of TTC tokens for the youth shelter — the only facility of its kind in Etobicoke. YWS celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and has helped more than 14,000 kids in that time.
If you’re not going to be in the subway Friday you can text “Tokens” (45678) to donate a TTC round-trip.
According to YWS, 65,000 young people are homeless at any given time in Canada and 70 per cent of them have suffered some form of abuse.
“The one commonality that [YWS clients] do all have, or mostly all have, is that they come from broken homes and abusive environments, whether that be emotionally abusive, sexually abusive, physically abusive,” YWS Executive Director Wendy Horton told CityNews.ca.
“We also have a number of youth that come to us that have grown up through the Children’s Aid system … and as a result they’ve aged out of the system and now, where do they go?”
The shelter has 50 beds and offers four different programs: (1) the emergency shelter, which provides food, clothing, hygiene and transportation necessities; (2) the stay in school program, which boasts 21 high school grads in three years; (3) a housing program, which works to help get youth into an apartment with rent within their means and (4) a Steps To Success program offering anger management, health, and resumè writing workshops.
“We’ve got confidence in them, we know that they can be something and they will be something and we’re here to help them do it,” Horton said.
“[The objective of Tokens4Change] is sort of two-fold: yes it’s very much to raise tokens, we need over 5,000 tokens a year for youth here … but it’s also to raise awareness of the issue of youth homelessness,” YWS development manager Judy LeRoux said.
Project Humanity, which raises awareness about the issue through the arts, is also a partner in the campaign and will be staging its piece “The Middle Place”, based on true stories of youth homelessness, at the Berkley Street Theatre Feb. 14.
