Children of the Night With Out Walls - WOW!

Martin is 23 year old from Los Angeles.  The last grade he completed was 10th grade.  He was homeless and living in a tent in Los Angeles.  Martin found Children of the Night through a drop in center in Hollywood, My Friend's Place, and began his GED assessment online with our call center on September 20, 2014. 

Since then we have prepared him for the GED and obtained his identification from the Mexican Consulate.  So far, Martin has passed 3 of the 4 GED sections.

He will test for the math portion July 30th and we anticipate his successful completion of the GED.

Martin wants to be a computer programmer and our next step will be to enroll him in Los Angeles Community College.

Martin represents one of the 132 students who have completed our GED assessment and is currently working toward successful completion of the GED required to pursue a career that will permanently remove him from the streets of our city.

Links:

• Full Description of Children of the Night WOW Programs

• 2015 Year to Date Progress on WOW (PDF)
  

In 2015 Children of the Night celebrated a new partnership with Goodwill California and we plan on servicing all of their sites throughout the United States.  The majority of WOW services are still in California (61%) and we have seen a marked increase in services in Florida, Texas and North Carolina. 

Last year we provided 5016 services to 490 clients in 30 states

407 of those clients participated in our online GED program and 83 received comprehensive case managment which includes shelter referrals, medical referrals, rescue from pimps and other crisis intervention. 

Although these clients are still on the streets moving from shelter to couch surfing, we are able to keep up our relationship through our 24/7 hotline that provides them 24 hour care. 

We noted that 331 of our WOW clients were female, 157 male and 2 transgender.

While we have noted over the years a sharp decrease in the number of boys and transgender children in our shelter, we have seen an increase and their return through out WOW program.

Of our 407 GED clients - 282 were provided complete GED assessments in all 5 subjects - and we spent 4027 tutoring sessions on this group.

We registered 84 clients for the GED and 31 passed parts of the test (they won't have to retest these subjects - if they complete the test in a reasonable amount of time.) 

And 26 of the 84 successfulll completed the GED.

Last year we faced special challenges including the privatization of the GED which resulted in various tests in various states and we needed to create curriculum to teach to these new tests.

We also were required to limit our travel to other states to offer our free online educational programs becasue of a lack of funds. 

Nonetheless, we are growing and we are quite proud. 

The construction of our Call Center which hosts our online GED program was completed and is fully staffed.

We are confident this will be a groundbreaking, trailblazing program for people who have been trapped on the streets with no way out.

Our growth is only tempered by the amount of funds we are able to raise.

Links:

• Children of the Night WOW Educational Program