Lade Swanson (Ali Fournay Center) on waitlists, voucher access, and building code barriers
Lade Swanson of the Ali Fournay Center reports over 400 youth on their wait list, 21-24 year olds waiting six months for crisis beds, and 40 youth nightly at drop-in centers preferring chairs over DHS shelters. They criticize the lack of communication about CityHAP vouchers, share that an attorney took money from their own salary to cover a client's legal fee, and announce plans for legislation to allow overnight sleep in drop-in centers by changing building codes.
Good afternoon.
My name is Lade Swanson.
Pronouns they, them.
I'm the Senior Director of Advocacy and Global Programs at the Ali Fournay Center.
I know you share our outrage.
We have been doing this for a long time.
We have done the convenings.
We have written the reports.
We have come together as a coalition year after year after year saying the same thing again and again and again.
And you are right that they're just embarrassed and our youth can't.
Wait in crisis just because they're embarrassed by the mistake and we know what needs to be done and they should be jumping at the chance to fix this because it's not hard and it's not expensive.
We have over 400 youth on a wait list at AFC.
21 to 24 year olds are still waiting six months for a crisis bed and every night we have about 40 youth accessing our drop-in centers.
They'd rather sit in a drop-in chair than go to DHS.
We were so excited after, you know, 10 plus years of voucher that we got CHAPS.
Very exciting.
It was really disappointing to hear that they knew almost nothing about it and haven't met about it, even though we're supposed to have these access to these in March.
That doesn't feel so reasonable anymore.
And so we need them to get together and we need our young people and our providers to be at that table because we can't fumble this after we finally got it for the first time.
I stand with my friends on ADK for...
We need case management and mental health providers.
We currently have wait lists for case management and mental health that we didn't have years ago.
And the RFP needs to be released.
I also want to direct you to the $15 million for LGBTQ immigrant legal services that we're trying to get in the October transparency resolution.
We have 32% of the youth we serve are immigrants.
We partner with Free to Be Youth Project.
There's two attorneys for all of our young people plus seven other programs that they serve.
One thing that I know will outrage you is the Urban Justice Center that does Free to Be Youth and the Sex Workers Project.
Last month had a client who needed $1,000 to pay for a legal fee.
They didn't have that money in the budget, so the attorney said, take it out of my salary so that they could pay for it.
This is where we're at, right?
And, like, this should be embarrassing, and we are trying to do the best with what we can, but that should not be happening.
I also want to name and let you know that I'm working on introducing legislation to fix the overnight sleep in the drop-in centers.
And we need DOB to change the building codes so that we can allow those exceptions into the beds, group B and A3 classifications for temporary cots and low barrier for that.
And the second issue is how fast it takes, how long it takes to get these new sites online.
Are those 20 beds that you were asking?
About earlier, our Casa Cecilia site, we've been ready for DOB to do a walkthrough since last summer.
They just came in July.
That's 70 youth that could have been accessing a bed in the last year, but it should not have taken this long for them to come through.
So we need maybe an exception for nonprofits that are doing this critical work for folks in crisis, domestic violence, R2Y, et cetera, to fast track these inspections so that we can get these beds faster.