By Dr. Lois Lee | Founder & President
In 2011, Dr. Lois Lee created “Children of the Night With Out Walls” (WOW) and partnered with the National Runaway Switchboard who fields over 100,000 calls from youth and their families each year.
Children of the Night WOW offers young people in shelters, drop in centers and outreach programs throughout America on-line GED assessments and GED tutoring, funding for GED testing, sophisticated mental health services including application for financial assistance from the Social Security Administration, and professional volunteers such as lawyers, psychiatrists, physicians and dentists.
In 2011, we helped 58 young people in 15 different states and provided 14 youth with GED assessments and 115 ½ hours of online tutoring to prepare them for the GED. We provided case management to 21 youth and independent living skills to 16.
We reached out to 47 programs in 20 different states and 2 different countries providing 74 WOW services to those programs. Our program executive visited 21 youth programs to offer our services and to explain how WOW can help other agencies with educational and mental health services.
We provided 17 agencies with Program Development and another 7 with start-up information in an effort to help more people develop programs to help young people forced to live on the streets of our cities.
And we helped 6 programs start schools and other educational services in their programs.
Youth living in shelters across America are not receiving the educational services or mental health services required to permanently remove them from life on the streets. Most youth shelters are funded by the federal government and limit a young person’s shelter stay to 21 days.
Our shelter partners and detention centers report that no one is providing a continuum of care for youth when they leave detention centers and foster homes. The countless children living in shelters, motels or on the streets are without services or opportunities to escape the streets. WOW is the first program taking comprehensive educational and mental health services to the streets of our cities.
WOW is a cost effective means of providing resources to America’s young people who are forced to live on the streets and WOW will leave a permanent and indelible mark on the standard of care for adolescents who are forced to live outside of their natural homes
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