i am more than a statistic

"I am one of the homeless youth living in California. The reality is that many young people are fighting the conditions of homelessness when we’re still works in progress. According to the 2019 Point-in-Time count, California is home to 12,396 unaccompanied homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 25 — one- third of the nation’s total.
In Berkeley, 225 such youth were counted in 2019. YEAH!, an emergency youth homeless shelter program in Berkeley, reports the demographics: three-quarters male, 54 percent Caucasian, 85 percent local, 73 percent active drug or alcohol users, 36 percent with mental health problems, half are not high school graduates, and 79 percent have no source of income. Couch surfing youth are not counted under the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) definition of homelessness. Advocates suggest that when accounting for that demographic, the number of unhoused youth in Berkeley hovers around 400. 
But I am more than a statistic."

Click here to read the whole story.  It is a powerful first person story of just one homeless youth