It turned out, however, that this woman didn’t own the house.

The actual landlord came knocking at the end of August, looking for the rent that Asia’s roommate had never turned over to him. The roommate was nowhere to be found.

Asia had two days to move out.

“I didn’t know where to go. I had to pack a duffel bag and I had one trash bag of things. I walked down the street and was just standing in the neighborhood like, ‘Where do I go? What do I do?’

“I went to Greer’s on Williston Road—a 24-hour laundromat—and I sat there all day and night just trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I ended up falling asleep there that night.”

Early the next morning, Asia found a storage facility down the road, and rented the smallest unit they had. “I took my duffle bag and my plastic bag, and I sat inside of the storage place and I was like, ‘Okay. I’m protected from the outside elements.’ So I started
sleeping in there. I did that for a while and still went to school, still went to work. I also got a gym membership so I could shower.”

After sleeping in the storage unit for a month, the owner noticed and asked her to leave. She gave up the unit, packed what she could into the duffle bag, and found places to sleep wherever she could—all while showering at the gym, working, and going to school.

“I slept in gas station bathrooms…just crazy situations,” she says. “But once mid-terms started to approach, I was like, ‘I can’t do this,’ it’s just physically draining, mentally draining, keeping up the same facade.”

She went to Economic Services, but she couldn’t get food stamps. “They said that I made too much based off the school loans that I got and the amount of hours I was working,” she says. “But they said I can go down the street—there’s a place called Spectrum.”

“I went to the Drop-In Center and as soon as I walked in, Christina [Drop-In senior staff] greeted me and her spirit alone is just so sweet. I let her know my situation. She was very understanding. I never felt judged. I didn’t feel alone.”

Asia asked about housing and was connected to Alex, our intake coordinator, who offered her a bed in The Landing upstairs. “And when she said that, I just couldn’t even deal with it,” says Asia. “It was just overwhelming, but she took me right upstairs immediately said I can put my stuff down and to come back later when we’re serving dinner if I’m hungry. It made me feel like I’m not the only one in this, that they’re here for me.”

“The staff were very welcoming and it just made me feel so secure and so safe. It was just opposite of what I had been feeling and it just felt so good to just take a deep breath and just say, okay, I’m going to be fine.

“And from there, things just kind of got better.”

“The fact that the community supports this organization is just amazing to me,” says Asia. “Even when I thought I was alone, I wasn’t alone. Now that I know that there are people out there that care, it just makes living each day even better and it makes me want to do the best that I can. So thank you again, even the people that I didn’t know were in my corner.”

We’re in awe…

Asia still earned a 3.8 GPA that semester and got promoted at her job, even after all she had been through.

The post Asia’s Story appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

Here is a recent letter from Mark Redmond, our executive director, on his experience visiting Detail Works, our social enterprise that teaches youth the soft skills they need to be successful in the workplace.

Last summer I ran into a young woman in our counseling waiting room who works for Detail Works, our social enterprise that teaches youth the soft skills they need to be successful.

Her name was Ariel. I asked how things were going and she said enthusiastically, “I just got promoted! I’ve never been promoted in my whole life!” She was beaming.

A couple of weeks ago, I stopped by the shop to check in with the youth staff there. These are just a few of the things they told me:

“Without this program I’d be pretty broke. Because I would go to another fast food
restaurant and work there and it would suck.”

“It’s really helping me be able to manage people better. I’m learning different ways to approach people and asking them to do stuff, but in ways that help them meet their needs too.”

And when I asked why customers should bring their cars to us:

“Because we actually try. We care about the car and try to make sure it actually looks nice. I mean we take care of it and we actually make it look a billion times nicer.”

“We put our heart into it. We try our best and we all work together to push out a great product. There’s a lot of love around here.”

If you’d like to give our youth—and your car—a fresh start, you can book an appointment online here. In the meantime, Ariel said it best:

“I’m so grateful for your donation. Thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to have a good life, a better life that I want.”

The post It’s All in the Details appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

“Every person that I have met is an amazing human soul, whether they realize it or not.”

A group of students from Champlain College recently set out to tell the story of the young people that use Spectrum’s services, resulting in a short documentary titled “Spectrum Voices”. The teens and young adults featured in the documentary are getting the help that they need thanks to kindhearted and generous people like you who support Spectrum’s programs.

Want to learn more about the lives of the people that you’ve helped? Watch “Spectrum Voices” today to hear their stories.

The post Hear the stories of the youth you’ve helped support. appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

I’m guessing you already know the kinds of services Spectrum has to offer and I’m also guessing you have some assumptions about the individuals Spectrum works with.
Before I accessed Spectrum services, I assumed every person was homeless because they were in foster care or in some other type of unfortunate living situation. Boy was I wrong.

Every individual who utilizes these services is as one-of-a-kind as the circumstances that brought them there. I am no exception. Three years later, I still find a knot in my stomach and a little water in my eyes when I think about the events leading up to moving into the Landing, Spectrum’s emergency shelter.

However, when I think about how far I have come and everything I have accomplished, I am amazed and overflowing with gratitude. Four years ago, I was on top of the world after being accepted and awarded presidential scholarships at all of the colleges I applied to. I was graduating magna cum laude, I couldn’t wait to get out of the seemingly small and mundane town of Burlington, and I was ready to take on the world to make a change. What I didn’t know was that I would return less than a semester later and make my impact here.

It’s still too painful for me to delve into specifics about my return, but it happened at the end of 2015. For many months after being back in Burlington, I somehow carried on with life. I smiled, I made commitments, and I packed up the house I had lived in for 15 years and watched it start its own new adventure with its new inhabitants. Despite all this sadness that was weighing me down, I continued to smile, and have summer adventures and just take life day by day. Except I’m a planner and spontaneity was not, and still isn’t, my forte. So, summer 2016 can basically be titled “The Summer of Pretending.”

Like most things in life, I found that the pretending was manageable until it wasn’t. By the end of the summer I found myself falling down the all-too-familiar rabbit hole of depression, anxiety, and more.

I managed to pull myself out of the rabbit hole with assistance from inpatient psychiatry at UVMMC and, when I was ready to be in the world again, I came to the Landing.

Without a job or school, I spent my days at the Drop-In Center and what I realized after about ten minutes of being there was that I was not ready to be in the real world. I was still seriously depressed and anxious and, for lack of better terminology, a “hot mess”. I might have been out of the rabbit hole but I wasn’t ready to wander away from it.

Fast-forward two years and here I am. I have now been living on my own for nearly four months. I also just took a midterm for one of the two classes I am taking at CCV. Neither of these things would be happening if I hadn’t found people to encourage me to wander a little farther from the rabbit hole every day. And I definitely wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t had Spectrum help me understand the importance of building and maintaining healthy connections with positive peers in my community.

I still don’t have a job and I am still a hot mess, but I have something that I didn’t have when I first came to Spectrum. I have a wonderful community of people who support me with pretty much anything and everything, and I have an endless amount of gratitude for the work that they do and the people who support them. I have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what being successful in life means, and I have a clearer idea of who I am and who I want to be.

I don’t know what I would be doing these days if I hadn’t stumbled into Spectrum when I did, but I know I am so glad I did. And I’m really glad it wasn’t easy because now I know what I stand for and what I value. Today, I am standing here because of Spectrum, and Spectrum is here because of people like you who show support—whether it’s making meals, making monetary donations, or being crazy enough to sleep outside in March. So, from the bottom of my heart to yours, thank you!

The post “Spectrum is here because of people like you.” appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

This piece was written by a young person who accesses Spectrum’s services, thanks to people like you, who keep our doors open. It is part of a series of Spectrum Youth Voices.

Dear reader,

I am nearing 21 and under the impression that society would prefer it if I had my act together, and I was nice to you and smiled when you said “hello,” even though I don’t have my act together, I don’t feel smiley, and I don’t want to say “I’m fine” when you ask me how I’m doing.

What I want to say is “horrible.” I am doing horrible because everybody is supposed to be happy around the holidays but all I feel is empty.

I grew up with a comfortable home life but, due to events I won’t go into detail about, that life was taken from me almost 3 years ago. I was thrown into a world that didn’t make sense and I had to make decisions I wasn’t qualified to make.

I had to go with my gut, and it didn’t always lead me in the best direction. So I also spent some time backtracking, so to speak.  I’m not telling you all this so you pity me; I’m telling you this so you understand me.

I’m not the only individual accessing Spectrum who has undergone significant—even traumatic—loss. I’m not the only one feeling empty or struggling with the enormous isolation brought on by all these complicated feelings.

So, reader, this is where you come in. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me, the holidays are just a big, national reminder of what’s missing and what I can’t get back.  The holidays have so much emphasis on material goods but I would give anything to have back the life I lost.

So over the next month or so, take time to hug someone a little tighter, and listen a little longer, because these are the memories that count. These are the memories that will never lose value and can never be replaced.

The post An open letter to those who don’t know how to help. appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

This article was written by a young person who accesses Spectrum’s services.

At the end of October, I lost a friend who was very near and dear to my heart, to almost 10 years of battling cancer. The loss is still very new, and very raw, and likely will be for many weeks if not months to come; however, it has allowed me to write this with a new perspective and determination to write from the very bottom of my heart.

As I’ve been working through my own grief process, this writing has also undergone significant changes. Through the many edits, complete re-writes and even different viewpoints being expressed, I have kept certain parts, discarded (many) others, and completely started over on more than one occasion. Although you can’t really discard or completely start over with life after loss, you can keep parts of that individual and your perspective of the world will change. As I reflected on my life and current thought process I discovered several parallels between writing and grieving.

The five stages of grief look different for everyone, as does the writing process. Some people plan out what they’re going to write and others just do it. I’m more of the wait-until-the-last-minute writer. Similarly, grief looks different on everyone.

As I said, I’m more of a just-do-it type of writer, which means I definitely wait until the last minute. It’s not that I don’t want to be writing and advocating for my peers, it’s just constantly feeling like I have more important things to do in life. Grieving isn’t much different.

I know my feelings will always be there, and this particular line of thinking leads me down two distinct paths: (1) my feelings will always be here so I should really just deal with them now and get them out of the way; or (2) my feelings will always be here so I should focus on the more impermanent things (such as school) and deal with the feelings later.

I look at these two perspectives as denial and bargaining rolled into one and they don’t get you anywhere. It really doesn’t matter how you think or what you think because the feelings are still felt. Similarly, the writing still has to get written, the only difference is how you write and what you write about.

Acceptance came when I decided I wasn’t going to write about what was easy, I was going to write about what I know.

Depression is the beginning of acceptance. In the writing process, that may look like walking away from the piece entirely. In life, it can look like isolation or engaging in risky and harmful behaviors. Many of the individuals at Spectrum, myself included, have used or currently use these coping mechanisms to try and understand why life works the way it does.

They make us feel something other than the true pain of what’s beneath the behaviors; just as watching Netflix can help you ignore the panic of writing about something no body really enjoys hearing, which is a point I’ll elaborate on a bit later; there is nothing you can do.

The final stage of just about anything you will ever do in life is acceptance. In this particular writing, acceptance came when I decided I wasn’t going to write about what was easy, I was going to write about what I know. What I know is that grief sucks, and it’s hard. I know that “I’m sorry” and “I’m here for you” doesn’t help a whole lot. I know that words aren’t helpful as the loss is still lost and the feelings are still felt.

I know that it’s okay to feel. In fact, it’s a good thing, because feelings are meant to come and go. They’re what make us, as humans, different from one another. Intense emotions and being messy are not signs of weakness and do not make you any less of an individual.

This has been a hard piece to write as it’s typically not what people like to hear in terms of supporting those close to them through a tough time, but I’ve taken that to mean this is a subject matter of great importance. I know I am just one person, and one perspective, but I hope I have shed some light on the experience and process of losing a loved one.

The post The Five Stages of Writing, Grief, and Writing about Grief appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.

This article was written by a young person who accesses Spectrum’s services, including our Drop-In Center and supportive housing.

In one of my 8th grade classrooms there was a map of the world with everything upside down. At least, that’s what we’ve been trained to think: north is up and south is down. In thinking about how I wanted to go about writing my first article for Spectrum, I thought about the one thing I’ve really learned in the past year and, in doing so, this map came to mind.

August 25th was exactly one year since the first time I walked into The Landing, the emergency shelter above the Drop-In Center. To say I was terrified would be a pretty significant understatement. I really didn’t have any words for anything. One person asked what my name was and I ran away in tears.

From what I could tell at the time, I was on my own. I didn’t know what was next and I really wasn’t okay with that. I made several attempts to take control over my future, many of which did not go as planned.

I signed up for classes at CCV but then dropped out, got (and then lost) a number of employment opportunities, and went from being high on life to the depths of despair in the blink of an eye.

I was pretty sure I was a failure at life so I did what I had to do to make it through each day. Correction: I did what I thought I had to do. I thought I always had to be okay. I thought I always had to smile and laugh and be happy when that really wasn’t true.

To be in the housing program at Spectrum, you are required to be working on something. Whether it be employment and building your savings, school, or yourself. I chose to work on myself so I went to a 3 week respite and, upon my return to Burlington, was in therapy twice a week for a few months.

During that time, it felt like I cried every day. I also laughed every day. Most importantly, though, I felt more and more real as time went on. Spectrum has given me the tools and space that I was lacking in order to become messy and fall apart. A place where I was accepted regardless of how messy or crumbly I was.

In just 365 days, I have made a complete 180 from where I was then. Don’t get me wrong, I am still very messy and very crumbly but now I have a vacuum to help me clean up when I need it. Which brings me back to the map I mentioned at the beginning.

Why are we, as a society, so set on a specific path to take in life? It seems so many individuals at Spectrum get thrown off by the fact that they’re not doing what they’re “supposed” to do (graduate high school, go to college, get a job, etc.) and yet nowadays the norm is to do what feels right to you.

So, if there’s one thing Spectrum demonstrates spectacularly it’s that north isn’t necessarily up.

The post Is North Really “Up”? appeared first on Spectrum Youth & Family Services.