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Advocacy Archives
January 11, 2008 -- Advocacy Report - January 2008
As a result of the work done by the Advocacy Department, along with the Executive Director and the Associate Executive Director, Covenant House New York has been awarded an earmark of $47,000 for its Regional Training Center through the federal appropriations process. Representative Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn, along with Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, were listed as the champions of this money. We will now begin the appropriations process anew for the upcoming fiscal year, hoping to take the momentum from this award to garner an even greater appropriations amount next year. Our first round of meetings in Washington, DC for this new year of appropriations request is scheduled for the end of February. Through the New York City Association of Homeless and Street Involved Youth Organizations, the Advocacy Department has taken on three new projects. The first consists of authoring the Job Development and Placement chapter of their annual State of the City’s Homeless Youth Report. This report breaks down by topic the various issues that homeless youth in the city must deal with, gives case examples, and provides recommendations for programmatic and policy changes. Second, we have continued to work with the New York State ID Advocacy Group to begin to put together recommendations for policy changes that would make it more possible for homeless, runaway, and foster care youth to obtain New York State Identifications. Currently we are working on a letter with recommendations and comparisons of other state’s regulations to use in trying to schedule meetings with key elected and public officials. Our first aim is to meet with the Commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services. Finally, we are working on putting together a Mental Health Roundtable to bring together social service and mental health professionals that work with homeless youth in an attempt to understand what services are available, where the gaps exist, and what can be done to address them. The Advocacy Department participated in two hearings in December. The first was a New York City Council Youth Services Committee hearing on the result of this summer’s Homeless Youth Census Count. The Director of Advocacy testified at this hearing in regards to Covenant House New York’s participation in the count, but more importantly spoke about some of the barriers that were encountered during the undertaking of the count, and the need to repeat it in the near future, taking into account everything that was learned, perfecting the process, acquiring greater resources, and getting closer to a more accurate number. The final report for this census is due to be released in the next few weeks. The second hearing was in front of the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Children and Families and the Subcommittee on Foster Care. The topic of the hearing was concerning the needs of youth aging out of Foster Care. The Senior Staff Attorney at Covenant House New York testified about how unprepared these youth are for independent living, how uninformed they are about the process of signing themselves out of care, the high percentage of them that are leaving care without ever having obtain identification or other necessary documents, including immigrant youth whose status issues were never addressed. With these past few hearings, and the testimonies that have been presented at them, Covenant House New York’s Advocacy Department has stepped into its new phase of advocacy. One which is more vocally calling for changes in practices and policies that affect homeless and runaway youth.
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