Who Are You, And Why Are You Living On My Street? A Report On America's Homeless Children

By Theodora Filis

Update: This article was written in 2012. Today, in 2023, a staggering 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. This historic high represents one in every 30 children in the United States. Eleven years may have passed, but, the reality of being a homeless child in America has not.

It is estimated that as many as 50,000 youth sleep on the streets in the United States, and evidence suggests that the problem is real and growing.

More families entered the homeless shelter system in September of 2011 than in any other month since data has been collected – 25 years ago. An estimated 600,000 Americans are currently homeless, including nearly 70,000 veterans, according to the recently released The State of Homelessness in America from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

US rates are alarmingly high: 21 homeless per 10,000 people across the country.

Compared with low-income housed children, homeless children experience more health problems, developmental delays, increased anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and lower educational achievement. Young people who are too old for foster care and too young to apply for social services face devastating short- and long-term consequences from being forced to survive on the streets.

                                     Homeless Kids on the Rise in the US

“There's not enough space for all these lost kids in shelters, which are relatively safe. On the street, they panhandle, steal, and prostitute themselves in order to survive. Rape, sexual exploitation, physical assault, addiction, mental illness, and physical illness like HIV/AIDS can be hard to avoid. Some commit suicide. Like their adult counterparts, however, youth receiving shelter services fare better than those on the streets. Teens who find beds and make connections in shelters are more likely to complete high school, escape victimization and make homelessness a fading memory.” Change.org

A study by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that 46% of homeless youth escaped a home where they suffered physical abuse, while 17% left because of sexual abuse. Children who have been in foster care have a greater risk of becoming homeless at an earlier age than other youth and are more likely to remain homeless for a longer period of time. Young people are at far greater risk of becoming homeless if their parents engage in substance abuse or have mental health problems, if there is child abuse or neglect in the home if the family has been homeless previously, or if they identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

Poverty, racism, and homophobia, reports Change.org, are “the trifecta of our failure to these youth – are often silent, but pervasive. Black and Native American youth and youth from low-income and working-class families are overrepresented among teens on the street. “LGBTQ youth are overrepresented at extreme rates, with 20 to 40g percent of homeless youth identifying as LGBTQ versus two to three percent in the general population.”

According to the National Alliance To End Homelessness, “A large contributor to youth homelessness is discharged from state institutions. Without a home, family support, or other resources, homeless youth are often locked up because they are without supervision and arrested for “status” offenses, such as running away or breaking curfew. In addition, as youth age out of the foster care system or are released from juvenile detention, they may lack support systems and opportunities for work and housing. In fact, 25 percent of former foster youth nationwide reported that they had been homeless at least one night within two-and-a-half to four years after exiting foster care.”

On any given night, between 300,000 to 400,000 youths sleep on the streets:

• The US Federal Government must increase the budget for the Chaffee Foster Care Independence Program.
• Early intervention services for family preservation and housing options are key to ending youth homelessness.
  
• Funding should also be increased for the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act in order to increase services like outreach and emergency shelter.

We must work together to end youth homelessness now – our future depends on it!

Are Bill Gates & His Team Of Elitists Perpetuating World Hunger?

By Theodora Filis

                                    Bill Gates and Carlos Slim Helu

Bill Gates with a fortune of $58 billion -- exceeding the annual budget of Russia -- just to put things in perspective. 

Carlos Slim Helu, has a personal wealth of $60 billion, according to Forbes magazine. 

Both men teamed up and donated $25 million to build a cluster of biotechnology labs at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CUNNYT) in Mexico -- promoting the increased production of GMO seeds to sell to farmers who don't want them, so they can feed the world's "starving" population that would rather starve than eat their GMOs.

Why would the world's richest men want to invest so heavily in GMO research and production? One reason – they see lots of money in it? Actually... it has everything to do with control.

                Control the food supply, control the world. 

That could explain why Gates purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock in 2010, why he teams up with the world's wealthiest and most influential people, and why he has been shoving Monsanto’s US agenda and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) down the world's throats, since 2010. 

            Insisting GMOs are the only option to prevent                                                    starvation in poor nations.

CIMMYT is a non-profit research and training center headquartered in Mexico. Director Thomas Lumpkin insists, "Nothing is being pushed, nothing is being forced, and CIMMYT will not profit."

Mexican environmentalists and groups like Greenpeace disagree and are fighting the planting of GMO corn in 2.4 million hectares (six million acres) of Mexican farmland.

"Mexico, known as the 'cradle of corn', is home to 70 native varieties of corn, almost all of which could be wiped out by the implementation of GMO seeds. “We are talking about damaging more than 7,000 years of indigenous and peasant work that created maize – one of the world's three most widely eaten crops,” said Veronica Villa of environmental group ETC's Mexico office.

The Union of Concerned Scientists examined the true yield of GMO crops, only to find that GMO crops do not produce increased yields over the long run — despite their excessive cost and extreme danger to health and the environment.

      The lack of scientific support behind the GMO crops was so                         startling to the Union that they documented

             all the details in a report entitled ”Failure to Yield.”

Back in 2006, Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation, the Government of Norway, and his group of elitists invested millions of dollars in a “Doomsday Seed Vault” built to gather and preserve the world's crop diversity while continuing to pour millions of dollars into GMOs.

Are Gates and his friends preparing for the end of the world's crop diversity or causing it?