Turnaways Campaign

In our initial strategic planning process, it became clear that turnaways - young people we were forced to turn away because we were full - was the most significant challenge we faced. 

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During the next year we led a public advocacy campaign with one objective:  to force the City of Philadelphia to fund a 50% increase in our crisis center beds. 

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We proposed to the local NBC affiliate a comprehensive series on youth homelessness, entitled "Faces of Homeless Youth," which would feature several of our young people.  NBC agreed that the stories of our young people were compelling and produced a 30-minute prime time broadcast special and robust digital series that raised the issue of youth homelessness, told the stories of our young people, and gave us the opportunity to call out the city for its failings.  The trailer alone - which was heavily promoted, and which is linked below - got significant attention from politicians and key homeless services leaders, in no small part because we called them out. 

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On the strength of that reporting, we then mounted a public advocacy campaign targeting the newly-elected Mayor and City Council, which engaged key members of Council and led to the first-ever Council hearing focused exclusively on youth homelessness.  

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Throughout the year-long campaign we were also featured in dozens of media outlets.   And at the conclusion of the campaign, we held an event called "Am I Cut Out?", where we put hundreds of life-sized cutouts on the steps of Philadelphia's City Hall to represent all of the kids we were forced to turn away because we were full.

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At that event, the Director of Philadelphia's Office of Homeless Services announced that the City of Philadelphia would fund twenty-five new beds in our crisis center.