Amber Matthews tries to stay rosy and upbeat as she prepares for an upcoming event. Her nine-month-old nephew’s relentless cries had kept her up late into the quiet hours of a snowless January night. All too soon the sunrise had arrived.
She throws on a loose-fitting, light brown blazer, dark brown dress pants, and mahogany loafers with maize and blue stripes. Matthews knows clothes can make the woman, so she hopes to exude an image of budding professionalism. Her apparel choices — aiming to impress impressionable youth — show off the woman she aspires to become, an approachable authority figure, yet still preserve her girlish charm. “I want to give off, like, a big sister vibe,” she says. Half of her hair is dyed a funky and luminous pea green shade, which she processed herself. She styles her locks back into French braids, pulled away from her cherub-like face. Her big brown eyes show the strength of her soul.
Around 8:30 a.m., Matthews leaves the two-bedroom apartment on Detroit’s west side she shares with her older sister Danielle Spratt and Spratt’s three sons to go to work. She begins her commute by riding two city buses for an hour and a half — luckily enough, the wait times aren’t too long. She arrives at The Detroit Phoenix Center, situated inside a stocky building with a silvery facade on a nondescript stretch of Woodward Avenue. Established as a nonprofit organization in 2017, the center is an asset-based, youth-driven services provider helping teenagers and young adults transition out of homelessness and poverty. They also help build power among young people to drive systems change.
After losing some sleep, Matthews is sapped of the energy she needs for the day. The days before already felt heavier and more burdensome. The 24-year-old is a senior youth advocate — the best job she’s ever had. She earned the position after working as a peer support specialist through AmeriCorps and serving as the president of the Youth Action Board, a coalition of young leaders-in-training who advocate for policy and reform of systems which combat homelessness and poverty. Matthews took advantage of the center’s resources and services, such as the food pantry, housing support, leadership workshops, and a life skills coaching program, as she couch-surfed and slept on the floor of a shelter just a few years ago. Now she’s held the job for almost a year.
She knows — so do her co-workers, her sister, and her boyfriend — how far she’s come. She has finally begun to blossom. But lately, Matthews has been growing tired for reasons that aren’t the fault of a weepy infant. A tension gnaws at her heart. She worries about burning out, knowing she can’t be everything for everyone all the time. She’s always been a furnace of compassion, laboring in care ever since her mother began drinking wine like medicine while growing up in rural Mississippi.
At the center, commotion erupts over the next few hours, during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration Matthews helped organize and plan with current Youth Action Board members: donation drop-offs of essentials like toothbrushes, toothpaste, and clothes; a workshop on leadership and advocacy that imparted the necessity of lifting one’s voice on behalf of another.
The youth were coming and would benefit from inspiring speeches on a day annually reserved for that kind of inspiration to flourish. And when they come, they often blitz Matthews with questions about what high school was like, what college would be like, and the next chapter, and the next.
In her role, Matthews is more than a mentor, advisor, and connector of resources. She sees herself as the keeper of dozens of little flames. She’s there to light the match, start a fire within them, she says, so one day they can stand on their own.
How much more could she give them so they could have another chance toward some semblance of stability? Some semblance of a life? They remind her, as they scurry to her knees, again and again, of the child she once was.
“There are a lot of homeless youth that I’ve come across that have so much potential and drive, and they really want and have aspirations,” says Matthews, who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian as a little girl. “But their living situation, sometimes it’s so bad that they have to put their aspirations and dreams to the side just to try to survive. After a while, they don’t care for their dreams anymore.”
Her eyes were watching the streets
The precarity of their lifestyles makes youth experiencing homelessness elusive, so Matthews often relies on her intuition to guide her to where she thinks their hangouts and pit stops are as they roam the city: gas stations, Starbucks cafes, liquor stores, anywhere with Wi-Fi.
On her outreach quests, Matthews carries a stack of white and orange square cards in the pockets of her winter coat, which list The Detroit Phoenix Center’s programs, such as after-school enrichment clubs on college preparation and entrepreneurship, or resources such as showers, laundry, a food pantry, a hygiene closet. She drops these cards on the counters of stores and shops or on the seats of city buses, hoping they catch the youth’s eyes and hook their curiosity.
The popular stock images of homelessness show a person sporting tattered clothes and sleeping on a sidewalk alone or standing at the corner of an intersection, holding a makeshift cardboard sign asking for spare change or spare compassion and sometimes inches away from a stampede of cars beating the traffic lights. But youth and young adults often experience a form of homelessness that’s less recognizable.They are stuck in a cycle of transience, jumping from couch to couch, living in hotels or motels, camping grounds, cars, abandoned buildings.
People who are doubled up — meaning they live at someone else’s house — or pay for hotel or motel stays generally do not meet the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of homelessness, and they are not eligible to stay at a shelter and access any associated services, like job training, says Jennifer Erb-Downward, the director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, who studies youth homelessness across the state.
Even when they qualify, the majority of young adults tend to avoid shelters, making their plight largely unseen. All of this disconnection from the systems charged to support them amplifies their risk of harm. “The reality of couch surfing, a lot of these situations are not safe,” Erb-Downward says. “People are often forced to make this choice between having a place to stay and not be on the street, and maybe being in a situation that might put them in danger in some other way.”
And some of the reasons why youth become homeless are breathtaking in their severity. Their families, gripped by financial hardship, were forced out of their homes because of an eviction or the loss of stable jobs. They aged out of foster care and struggle to find their own footing. They were incarcerated as juveniles and once they returned as citizens, they lack the necessary skills to get work or have trouble finding a stable home so they can jumpstart their life again. They are ostracized by their families who’ve kicked them out of the house because they express their true gender that doesn’t match their birth certificate, or they fall in love with people no matter their gender at all.
These youth are among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, who’ve escaped hostile homes and wallowed in broken systems. They’ve spent nights without a warm bed, a harrowing experience some in the city will never truly know or turn away from entirely. Many youth experiencing homelessness lack basic items: a birth certificate, a driver’s license or state ID card, a social security card, a phone.
If Matthews sees teens wandering during school hours or looking lonely or sullen, she’ll walk up to them, flash a smile, say her name. She’s perfected her spiel. “I’m not trying to pry,” she tells them. “I’m willing to be here [for you].” She’ll sell them on what they’ve been missing out on — a safe sanctuary — where she could become their surrogate guardian. She wants to teach them self-reliance when some of them didn’t grow up with much life guidance. She’ll cultivate their strengths, not their deficits. But she can only take them so far.
She already helped one young man polish his resume and prepare for a job interview at a Ford plant. He tanked the interview, Matthews says, but at least he tried. Matthews believes more employers need to meet young people where they are. Not having a mailing address shouldn’t prevent a young person from getting hired. She also offered feedback on a college application essay to another young woman, who then started her undergraduate degree in North Carolina, which Matthews quietly celebrated because so many youth who are homeless don’t make it that far. A 2019 national study revealed youth experiencing homelessness were less likely to enroll in a four-year college compared to peers who’ve had stable housing. They also have difficulty accessing financial aid and can’t afford to pay for their education, which may belong on a lower pillar among their hierarchy of needs.
Sometimes when Matthews talks to youth and young adults on the streets, they brush her off, assuring her they’re totally fine. Thanks, but no thanks. Matthews is never fazed by these gentle rejections. Other times, her pitches land, and the youths come to visit the center. Some come once and then never return. Others decide this is the place where they could mend the shattered parts of their lives. Even then, once she tries to get into the nitty gritty of problem-solving for what ails them, Matthews suspects they aren’t revealing the full story. That’s one of the toughest parts of the job, Matthews says — trying to unearth the truth.
“It’s always kind of hard because they’re not really comfortable speaking about everything that they’re going through,” she says. “So it’s like, you get little bits and pieces and you’re trying to see how you can help with the little information that you do get.” Matthews knows they’re out there, somewhere. A chance encounter with them could mean access to all of these lifelines. Because what are their chances to survive without them?
Nobody’s taught to listen, nobody cares
Some youth are surviving the trauma of homelessness along with their families, who tried their best to provide and loved them all along. But there are children and young adults who are out on the streets completely alone, who face an even greater risk of losing themselves, spiraling headfirst into calamity. Roughly 500 unaccompanied youth aged 24 and under, who aren’t in the physical custody of a parent or guardian, experienced homelessness in the city in 2021, according to the Homeless Action Network of Detroit, the lead agency over the homelessness response system for Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. Experts say the numbers are likely higher.
The research literature is unequivocal. The dangers to the youths’ minds and bodies are real. They could sink into depression, consider suicide, have problems progressing in school and may graduate late or never at all, get sick and have a harder time recovering because they don’t have access to medicine or a doctor, become hooked on drugs, or engage in survival sex so they can have something to eat. Four out of five children who are experiencing homelessness have already witnessed at least one violent incident by the age of 12, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Who suffers the most? Beyond the imprints of violence during childhood, the risks of homelessness deepen depending on who you are. Those who belong to historically marginalized groups, including Black and LGBTQ+ youth, are more likely to become homeless across the nation. And those trying to rebuild their life may confront discrimination. Youth homelessness providers across Michigan, Erb-Downward says, are also raising alarm over some landlords refusing to rent to transgender young adults who’ve been previously unhoused. Members of a generation of already vulnerable youth may wind up living in uninhabitable quarters like vacant and blighted houses.
In Detroit, a city rife with aging and dilapidated homes, there’s also a shortage of emergency housing, Erb-Downward says. The COVID-19 pandemic made even more people homeless and strained a shelter system already struggling to accommodate the demand for more beds.
As warming shelters opened during the chilly season, the number of people staying in the city’s emergency shelter system rose for the first time since 2016. As of November 2022, 4,530 people stayed in these shelters, up from 3,428 the previous year, a roughly 32% increase. In 2016, 6,643 people were housed in shelters.
Whenever Matthews interacts with youth, she chooses her words wisely so she doesn’t unintentionally cast them aside, like so many other people already have.
tweet this
In a world that’s swallowed up much of their innocence, many youth experiencing homelessness are scarred by broken promises. They are often on high alert and skeptical, and this heightened sensitivity frays at their mental health. Many of these youths often don’t trust the adults around them. They’re often blamed and labeled, Matthews explains, as troubled kids who make bad choices — so they stay hidden, disconnected. “It’s hard for them to want to, like, reach out to people for help, just because of the stigma that’s attached. They don’t want people to put them in that category,” she says. “They just decide not to ask for help at all. And that’s a difficult thing.”
Even when these youth do show up to the center, the bonds of trust are fragile. Matthews once told a group of kids horsing around the center to leave because the site was closed. She later feared her order made them think she didn’t care about them, which may have affirmed in their minds that adults didn’t care about them, so nobody cared. The interaction haunted her. So Matthews became obsessed with gentleness. Whenever Matthews interacts with youth, she chooses her words wisely so she doesn’t unintentionally cast them aside, like so many other people already have. “They feel like because their own family just let them go, nobody else cares,” she says. “So they don’t even care anymore. Because they’re like, ‘Oh, well, the people that were supposed to care about me didn’t.’”
Observing youth fight off hurt feelings, Matthews feels a deluge of reasons why they can’t bootstrap their way out of homelessness flood her mind: low-paying or no jobs at all, no car, no money for the bus, no phone, no warm arms to embrace them, no lifelines. “Every week, I’m in a meeting trying to figure out, ‘What can we do?’” she says, frustrated. And these words can often trigger a remembering of her own journey.
How difficult it was, during the hardest days when she cried alone and questioned whether she should still be alive, to rise above the violent currents of the past, to reclaim her story.
Portrait of a mother and daughter
These are the memories Matthews carries: She was born in 1998 at Hutzel Women’s Hospital in Detroit, the second oldest of six children. Her first name is DeAndra, but her family always called her by her middle name, Amber. Growing up, the family had moved from house to house. Matthews was raised by a single mother, who decided to uproot the family and move to Kosciusko, Mississippi, a rural town, population 7,402 and the birthplace of Oprah Winfrey, when Matthews was 12. Her mother wanted to be closer to her mother, who didn’t live that far away.
The town, Matthews remembers, was memorable if only for its blandness. Kosciusko was more fitting for retirees, she thought back then, and there wasn’t much for kids to do. She’d see her peers get into trouble or do drugs. The racism, in its forwardness, was shocking. “They will literally let you know like, ‘I don't like you and yes it’s because of your skin’ and call you the n-word,’” she says.
Eventually, Matthews’s mother found a house with a big front yard peppered with pine trees and a backyard with a shed, a pool, a wooden swing set. By that time, Matthews thought she was too old to ride the swings, but she admired them anyway. In the living room, her mother displayed her children’s awards, like when Matthews made the honor roll, on top of a mantle. Her mother, who often worked 12-hour shifts, sometimes overnight, as a medical assistant, always marched forward as she raised her children alone.
As a child, Matthews loved reading and escaping into the world of her crime-fighting game on her PlayStation 2. Inside her bedroom, an explosion of colors: red, green, blue, pink. She couldn’t decide on just one. Around the family, Matthews was clumsy and silly, so silly she once ran into a light pole, her oldest sister, Spratt, recalls. “She was just the clown of the family, the goofiest,” she says. Moments of joy and laughter helped the days roll on.
But growing up, Matthews started noticing how many times her mother went to the fridge to pour wine into a plastic tumbler with a straw. Spratt remembers she’d often fall asleep while smoking a Black & Mild cigar. And the past never truly left their mother. Matthews’s father wasn’t around much. “He gave good advice once in a while,” Matthews says. Their mother couldn’t find a righteous and caring love. An ex-husband, a different man from Matthews’s father, Spratt and Matthews recall, started sexually abusing the sisters when they were little. He threatened to kill them if they ever told their mother about the abuse. Then he tried to kill their mother by slitting her throat. “There was blood everywhere,” Matthews says. Blood splattered on the walls, dripping onto the stairs. Her mother, Matthews says, never got justice. Other men exerted control and manipulation over her. Even now, Spratt says, the family has not reckoned with what happened in that house.
Matthews tried to comfort her mother. The words she told her she still keeps close to her heart and doesn’t need to share with the rest of the world. When her mother couldn’t function, Matthews became a caregiver to her little brothers and sisters. She made sure they got on the bus right on time. She helped them with their homework. “I was young,” Matthews says “I really wasn't ready to take on some of the roles I took on.” All the while she had to bury some of her own suffering. She had a hard time relating to kids her age. She always wore plain clothes and didn’t rock Air Jordans, so she got bullied by classmates. She never learned the language for her private pain. “Sometimes when I was younger, I would cry,” Matthews says. “I was sad. I was going through stuff. I couldn’t express it. I didn’t know how. I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Even though she consoled her mother about her troubles, she couldn’t confess her own. She tried. “I couldn’t talk to my mom about it,” she says. “She was emotionally unavailable. You can’t tell anything to a drunk person.” The daughter cared about her mother, until the turbulence of their lives stretched them too thin. One day, her mother let Matthews go.
A rupturing
The day 15-year-old Matthews got kicked out of the house, she did not scream. She did not cry. Her mother did, telling her daughter she’d given her all she had. This rupturing upset Matthews. Didn’t her mother understand the gravity of her choice? Matthews’s mind spiraled into the questions about what she would do next, and the next chapter, and the next. “I didn’t know much. There was a lot more I needed to know,” Matthews says. “I was unprepared for life.” Her exile ushered in an era of crashing on friends’ couches, never staying in one place for very long. She dropped out of Kosciusko Senior High and didn’t graduate. She earned money by manning a Popeyes drive-thru. She didn’t talk to her mother at all.
Here she was, holding onto the shards of a life. Her dreams, washed away. She ended up under the wing of her male cousin, whom she thought she could trust. But he sold her, Matthews says, to a man in his 50s. Matthews was 18. She lived in his trailer, surrounded by horses grazing farm fields, hills, and a ditch, somewhere deep in Mississippi country. The older man treated her like a piece of property. He injected her with drugs. He didn’t allow her to have a phone. He controlled how she spent the hours of the day. Here she was, trapped in a dangerous and unpredictable place. Her freedom, stolen from her.
Matthews spent a year under his ceaseless surveillance, until she chose to save herself. “This isn’t where I wanted my life to be,” Matthews remembers. A few months before Matthews' 19th birthday, the violence boiled over when the man slapped another girl so hard she dropped to the trailer’s floor. After the assault, the man left the trailer. Matthews then started cooking in the kitchen. She doesn’t remember what the meal even was. The other girl begged her to snuff out the flames, but Matthews let them billow until the entire trailer caught on fire. The girls got out of the trailer and began to run. Matthews kept running and running and running. Running far down the dirt road.
She stopped at a woman’s house nearby, pleading for help. She told her the trailer was on fire. That woman, who may not have realized she paved the path for Matthews’s salvation, called the fire and police departments. Matthews then got a ride to stay at her grandmother’s house for a little while. A month before she turned 19, she bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Detroit, which was so big and full of people, where she could read peacefully by the river.
Reconciliation
The return to her birth city didn’t reinstate a sense of rootedness right away. Matthews stayed with her sister briefly. After a little while, she moved in with a friend but that didn’t pan out either. Matthews found herself in one of the city’s shelters, sleeping on the floor — all that was available to those struggling and striving and clawing for ways to survive. And there were strict rules, people crammed into close quarters, all the noise they made, the bitter confrontations, and the piercing lights while she tried to get some rest. Matthews had a janitorial job working nights cleaning up a Ford plant. “That was rough,” Matthews says. Eventually, she moved back in with Spratt.
And Matthews kept busy making herself feel whole again. In 2017, she got invited to a Friendsgiving party in the city, where she remembered the kindness of strangers and people making wishes for Christmas. Matthews met a staffer at The Detroit Phoenix Center, the nonprofit organization still in its infancy. As the celebration ended, she asked the staffer how she could get more involved. Then she began using some of the center’s services. Two years later, she earned her GED, a bittersweet milestone. She didn’t get to wear a cap and gown during a graduation ceremony, inspiring her to go forth and change the world.
Her family became her fortress. Around the apartment she helps Spratt, who works as a hairstylist and a Lyft driver, by cooking and cleaning. “I can depend on her,” Spratt says. It’s hard to deny her nephews more Xbox controllers, even though they broke the ones she already bought them. Spratt, who suffered herself and witnessed much of Matthews’s suffering and the detours she made along her slow crawl toward progress, sees her sister as an outlier. “After all of that, she still ended up being the best sister that I can have. Because most times when people go through stuff, it can affect them in the wrong way. But she turned it around,” Spratt says. “I hope she’ll be able to conquer life and whatever her true purpose is.”
Matthews has a new boyfriend, her very first. They met on a dating app, and so far the romance is running smoothly. She’s dated girls in the past. She doesn’t put a label on her attraction. She likes whomever she vibes with. Matthews also keeps in touch with her younger siblings in Mississippi, including a four-year-old brother. He’s smart and sweet. She doesn’t want him to forget about her. “It would have hurt my feelings to have a sibling who didn’t know me for real,” she says.
Not everyone who survived what Matthews did feels safe to tell their story. Experts say asking survivors to reveal the roughest details of their past may be retraumatizing, so those asking the questions should proceed with mindfulness, transparency, and consent. Matthews recalls her memories plainly. They don’t enshroud her like a hazy fog as much because she’s found some daylight. She doesn’t want to save animals anymore. She wants to save kids, hoping to open her own transitional youth housing program one day. She walks down city sidewalks, waves and says hello or shows off a smile to passersby because she believes being a good person doesn’t cost her anything. With every step forward, a sharper view of her own history, the life she reclaimed. “I love people as if I don’t know pain,” she says.
Although the days grew quieter, one phone call a few years ago shook Matthews’s carefully crafted normalcy. It was her mother. They hadn’t talked for so long, while Matthews was wallowing on the streets, endured abuse in a country trailer, and slept on a cold shelter floor. She told Matthews she was mad for the periods of radio silence that engulfed their relationship. “Did you even really care?,” Matthews remembered snapping back at her mother. She eventually regretted how sharp-tongued she was. “I was really, really rude,” she says.
Months passed without contact. Matthews had practiced the discipline of healing in so many other ways, establishing boundaries in her relationships, romantic and platonic. She cut herself off from the co-dependency of others. The one relationship that defined her life had bruised her for so long. Matthews then watched a video about forgiveness on social media, which gave her pause. Did her mother even deserve forgiveness? Some children may not be willing to forgive loved ones who abandoned them, although some intervention-based initiatives aim to reunite and mend family wounds before they become estranged forever.
As she’s prone to do, Matthews reflected on herself. One friend jokingly called her “old man,” because of how she always seemed steeped in philosophical thinking, always reading books like Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee. To liberate herself, she told herself to think about the woman her mother was. She stopped being mad at her for not teaching her certain things. She understood she didn’t know how to be her parent. Was what her mother told her the day she got kicked out of that Mississippi house actually the truth? Was her mother the villain of her story? “She took me as far as she could,” Matthews reflects. One day, she called her mother back. They started talking again and agreed to repair the relationship. Another new beginning.
Somewhere home
In the late afternoon, a young boy in a powder blue hoodie darts toward Matthews. He asks if she needs help putting out the tiny bags of Wavy Lays and Fritos near the microwave. Mealtime is about an hour away. Attendees of the MLK Day Celebration walk through a doorway framed by a partial arch of blue, gold, and white balloons. A toddler in a pink and gray striped onesie is hoisted into the air by her father. Volunteers build metal shelves for donations. Matthews greets children, families, and the volunteers. She then grabs a water bottle, overseeing the joyful commotion buzzing around her. Another little girl gently approaches Matthews.
“Do you need help? You look a little sad,” she asks.
“I’m not sad. I’m just tired, a little bit,” Matthews replies.
The Detroit Phoenix Center is a refuge for wellness. Up to 1,700 people participate in outreach activities, and around 280 youth and their families receive consistent support each year. Life-affirming messages are scrolled across the teal and yellow walls, like “Gratitude is a reckoning force. We have so much to be thankful for.” The royal purple wall is emblazoned with a mural of a young person lifting their palms open toward the sky, haloed by the words: “YOU ARE WORTHY.” Sun-kissed signs reading “You Belong Here” and “This is a Safe Space” dangle from the ceiling.
The genesis of The Detroit Phoenix Center came after CEO and founder Courtney Smith discovered something missing in the overarching narrative of Detroit’s resurgence. “I just felt like young people were being left out of that,” she says. Smith’s own journey somewhat echoes Matthews’, as she herself once struggled with housing insecurity. She took a train ride across the country. Each city and its children taught her the myriad approaches to combat the scourge of youth homelessness. More precisely, the drop-in center model, what the center now implements, stuck out in Smith’s mind. When she returned home, Smith says she convened a cohort of young people and community stakeholders to gauge where exactly the gaps and needs were. Their voices weren’t being heard, Smith was told. Policies addressing youth homelessness didn’t serve them.
Ever since, the philosophy of youth voice and choice has been embedded in the organization’s DNA. Matthews is one of three senior youth advocates — positions which currently are time-limited and funded through a one-year pilot grant. Smith says they’re exploring ways to keep the opportunity available. Smith believes Matthews, along with the other advocates, are among the center’s best assets. They have the unique ability to build trust and connection with the youth they serve, passing down knowledge and skills from one leader to, hopefully, another in the making.
The Zen Zone is doused in soft, gentle lights and mint green colors, where little bodies can easily sink into the bean bag chairs as they try to relax. The Joy Zone houses board games, an air hockey table, and a flatscreen TV, but other kinds of games are afoot whenever Matthews overhears the boys gossip about their girl crushes. Hanging on a wall in the Innovation Zone, the heart of the space and where the leadership workshop will commence, is a staff photo of Matthews, sporting a half-pink afro, smiling next to The Changemakers, another group of youth ages 14 to 18 who receive leadership and development training as part of a one-year fellowship. That memory makes Matthews happy, and over the years, she’s noticed how many of the youth are bursting with the potential to go forth and heal the world. She’s a protector of those dreams.
Before the workshop, Matthews leads a group of teenagers on a mini-adventure to a nearby Subway sandwich shop. The day, Matthews recounts, has already been a little exhausting, and they are hungry. After they order their sandwiches, a man approaches them, asking for some money. One of the girls offers him a 30-day bus ticket instead, knowing this charitable token would benefit him much longer than a handful of pocket change. Matthews has watched so many of these youth learn how to think quickly, to act with care. This is another moment of epiphany. “I was so proud,” she says.
A little after 3 o’clock, the workshop begins. Dozens of teenagers and some younger children sit in rows of blue, orange, and sunshine-yellow plastic seats. They have endured the same woes of not having a stable home or not having enough to eat. The youth then face a panel of speakers: a volleyball coach who champions mutual aid, a restorative justice advocate who’s also a mother, a head of a community development corporation who rehabbed homes he thought his neighbors deserved. Matthews serves as the MC and scrolls through her smartphone, which stores a bunch of questions written by The Changemakers. She looks a little coy and reserved, like she wants to melt into the background. Still, she is ready to deliver these questions before the crowd of little faces. Their bodies are swallowed up by their puffer coats and their necks wrapped in scarves.
There are little boys and girls who look tired. Another little girl adjusts her deep blue lipstick and giggles. Matthews is proud of them. All of them.
tweet this
What does youth advocacy mean to you? Is advocacy possible without a movement? What is mutual aid? As the discussion progresses, some of the youth’s answers showcase a little loss of faith. There’s violence in the city. There are wars waging in countries oceans away. People don’t want to listen to each other. Many don’t care. The speakers encourage them not to feel defeated in the face of so much sorrow, and explain how growing up in foster care and being housing insecure drove them toward advocacy. Retweeting a social justice message wasn’t good enough. Their time would come to heal the world. And the world needs them. Some of the youth heed that call.
All the while Matthews watches them speak. There are long lulls of silence, interrupted by flashes of heartfelt testimonials after they shoot their hands up into the air. The young boy in the powder blue hoodie talks about how sad he was after his grandpa died. Another talks about how barren her neighborhood is, how tough it is to be a young Black girl in America. There are little boys and girls who look tired. Another little girl adjusts her deep blue lipstick and giggles. Still, Matthews is proud of them. All of them. For speaking up even if they are a little shy or self-conscious. For being here at all. Many of the youth who’ve entered these doors have achieved small victories, like a good grade on a homework assignment, a job offer, as she’s nudged them along the way.
The Youth Action Board members want the pathways to go to school, find jobs and safe and stable homes, access to mental health services like therapy, among others, to be easier than they are for young people like themselves. Members, who are ages 16 to 24, have endured homelessness and poverty or know a loved one who has, or have been involved in the foster care and criminal justice systems. To solve the youth homelessness crisis, experts agree adults need to trust the youth, their perspectives, their eyes toward solutions. The board members have also conducted community clean-ups and recorded a podcast series called “Detroit Youth Rising,” which explores serious topics like food insecurity. Matthews is floating the idea of building a food pantry at a local high school. Ultimately, the board members must decide on what they want to do. Still, she cherishes these awakenings. “I love when they have the motivation in themselves, to be the best version of themselves. I don’t even know if they really either know that yet, but they all have potential,” Matthews says. “I’ll love them more than they’ll ever know.”
She knows, and so does her mentor and boss Smith and her big sister Spratt, there’s much left to come. Smith watched Matthews grow as a young woman as the organization expanded, describing her as a bright light, coachable, gifted. She hopes Matthews defines her own version of success and takes advantage of future leadership training the center offers. And as long as she’s an employee or falls within the age range the center serves, Matthews can still access the site’s wraparound services. In Smith’s eyes, the 24-year-old who forgave the mother who kicked her out of the house and dedicates her days to helping save Detroit’s lost and abandoned children already is one. “She is an example of why we exist in the first place,” Smith says. An example of a young life that regained its promise.
After the workshop ends, the youth feast on chicken, mac and cheese, and green beans catered by Happy’s Pizza. The kids start to play, bounce around, and scream. Matthews hears a body thunder into a wall as Lloyd and Ciara dance anthems blast over the loudspeakers. The roughhousing alarms her, so she plans to check in on the rowdy kids. She also promised another 17-year-old boy she’d follow up with him. She feels a little regretful. She didn’t mean to brush him off earlier. She was just busy. What he needed to tell her could have been serious. “You don’t know what’s truly going on,” she often reminds herself. “You don’t know the full story.” After checking in with the boy, she has another promise to fulfill, a game of Uno with a group of kids. The river of her life keeps flowing toward somewhere home. Matthews is still so young.
Coming soon: Metro Times Daily newsletter. We’ll send you a handful of interesting Detroit stories every morning. Subscribe now to not miss a thing.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
