Kris Johnson and Jill Vorndran work at Covenant House, a nonprofit that since 1972 has provided support to over 1.5 million young people facing homelessness and survivors of trafficking. They stop by the WBCA Studio on their way to Gillette Stadium for Sleep Out: an event raising awareness and funds for youth homelessness. Learn about Sleep Out, the services offered by Covenant House, how Kris and Jill found their way to the organization.
WBCA Podcasts
Observation Room Boston: Covenant House Sleep Out
-W-L-E-C! -B-C! [MUSIC PLAYING] You are listening to WBCA 102.9 FM Boston, Boston's community radio station. I'm your host, Tommy Shenifield, and this is Observation Room Boston, or ORB, a show where we speak to organizers, artists, and more about spaces and places in Boston and beyond. And today, I'm very lucky to be joined by Chris Johnson and Jill Vorndrin of Covenant House, an organization that provides housing and other supportive services to youth facing homelessness around the US, Canada, and Latin America. Since 1972, I understand they've helped more than 1.5 million young people, which is a very big number, very impressive. Thank you for your work. And they are here because November is Youth Homelessness Awareness Month. And in commemoration and recognition of that, there is an event called Sleepout to raise awareness and funds for youth homelessness. So once again, Chris Johnson, the brand communications director, and Jill Vorndrin, the chief development officer of Covenant House, thank you for being here. -Thanks for having us. -Yeah, thanks for having us. -So you're actually here on your way to Foxboro for Sleepout Boston. And for those who don't know, could you tell us a little bit about what Sleepout is? -Yep, absolutely. So thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about one of our favorite things in the world, which is Sleepout. And in 2011, we began an event in New York City where we had 49 people sleep outside for one night, and they raised about a half a million dollars towards our movement to end youth homelessness. And what we have been very clear about with Sleepout since day one is that it's not pretending to be experiencing homelessness. It's not mimicking homelessness. Instead, it's enabling people to get a glimpse into what it must be like to experience homelessness for just one night and doing so in solidarity with young people who are facing that night after night and then also raising some much needed funds to support our movement to end youth homelessness as well. -What year did you say that the first Sleepout happened? -2011. -2011. So this is the 13th year. -Yep. -How was it changed and developed over that time? -Oh, my gosh. Just the number of places where it's happening. I think the-- where was the first one just to say? -In New York City. -In New York City. So but tonight we have about 15 of them happening across the country. -Wow. -And-- but in the last couple of weeks, we've also had them as some of our international locations like Honduras. Jill was there a couple of weeks ago. We've had them in Florida on separate nights. We've had them there. I think it's grown so much. -Yeah, I was looking at the list. It looks like tonight there are events in Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, New York City, DC, Anchorage, Los Angeles, and of course, Foxboro, Massachusetts, and many more. So it's great that this event has-- as grown, and as you mentioned, Jill, you did a sleep event in Honduras. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that? -Oh, my gosh. I would love to tell you about it. My family is asking me to stop talking about it because I've been so obsessed with the experience. But we-- a group of us, about a dozen of us, traveled from the US and spent a couple of days in Honduras, both getting to know more about the young people who are served in our programs there. They're a bit younger than the folks who we serve here in the United States. So they are typically between the ages of 12 and 18. And we've just got this firsthand witness to how extraordinary they are and how sweet they are and how motivated they are, but also the extreme poverty and really awful circumstances that they live in. Many of them have experienced human trafficking, both sex trafficking and labor trafficking, and at their-- at that very young age. Some were-- ended up at our program there, which we call Casa Alianza, because they were attempting to migrate from a violent area and weren't able to do so and were-- but found a home in our program. And so we-- that experience culminated with us sleeping out in a beautiful park that was a lot warmer than it is in Boston today. And really experiencing, you know, again, a glimpse into what it would be like to be in that really, you know, like the unsafe community and also facing homelessness. I guess it beats forest fires, but it is quite a rainy day for this event. But I think that, you know-- That's the point. Yes, of course, part of it is that somebody facing homelessness can't decide one day, oh, it's raining. I don't want to be without a home or a house today. Yeah, absolutely. We-- it's zero degrees in Anchorage today. And we have folks sleeping out there. And, you know, we've done it in the snow, in the rain, and, you know, in communities that, you know, aren't particularly safe because it's important to build awareness about what that experience is like for young people, even if-- even if for, you know, just 12 hours. Yeah, and it's my understanding that Covenant House not only provides, you know, direct housing and support to youth facing homelessness, but also is an advocate for policies around ending trafficking of minors, foster care reform, affordable housing, other things like that. Do you want to talk about the other ways that Covenant House is helping these many issues? Absolutely. So we love to say that we are-- even though the word is in our name, we are so much more than a house. We're more than shelter. As you just mentioned, as far as our advocacy goes, we're very careful to really emphasize the point that we want to advocate for people and policies that impact our young people in the best way. We want change for our youth, for our former residents, who are part of our alumni community, to be able to lead independent lives, to be able to sustain careers, and to go on and take care of their own families using the skills and the tools that they got at Covenant House. It's great work that you're doing. I'm curious. So people who are listening won't be able to attend this particular one, but I'm sure that there will be more sleep-ad events in the future. And I'm curious, could you describe a bit for somebody who wasn't familiar with this event? What would it be like to attend? What sort of things will people hear or experience, or maybe even feel? Yeah, so that's my favorite thing to talk about. I am part of a small team that writes the programs and the scripts. So my favorite part, I think, of the program is having our former residents who are just mentioned in our alumni community come and be part of the sleep-out. They come and they tell their story. They share their experience with homelessness, and they talk about everything that Covenant House has done for them, and they're so excited to be a part of it and to give back, we have alum, particularly tonight, here in Massachusetts, who have come from Atlanta. We have one former resident who's coming from Florida, just to get on stage tonight, or in front of the crowd tonight and share their experience, because they want to give back. They want to help Covenant House because of how much Covenant House helped them. We also have a celebration happening for our top fundraisers, which is a part of participating in sleep-out. So we'll talk about teams and individual fundraisers who have done the work to really get resources to our youth. We also have-- what else happens in our program, Joe? I don't know. We share a lot about-- especially for people who are coming for the first time. They often don't know a lot about the causes of youth homelessness and the services that Covenant House provides and what their support enables us to continue to be able to do. And so there's a focus, sort of an education around the issue. And that helps them both, obviously, become more committed to the work that we're doing, but also helps them with their fundraising, because then they can communicate it to their networks. And that alone builds awareness when all of these folks who are now motivated to join our movement are now sharing what they've learned with the people around them. Because youth homelessness is often an invisible issue. Our young people are incredibly skilled at hiding their homelessness and functioning perfectly well at school and at work, even though they're experiencing homelessness because they don't want anybody to know. And so just by definition, it becomes an issue that many people don't realize either exists or don't realize the extent of it. And so the more we're able to educate these folks who are so motivated to help us end youth homelessness, the better advocates and representatives they are for the work that we're doing. Yeah, and there are so many reasons to be all in with Covenant House, and there are so many ways to be all in with Covenant House. So I think being at Sleepout, as Jill mentioned, hearing all of the things that we fight for for our youth helps people, as she said, to communicate to their networks. And so seeing someone get on stage who appears to have it all together and saying, oh my gosh, she doesn't look like she experienced homelessness before. It helps our supporters get an understanding of homelessness as something that is not monolithic. That, as Jill mentioned, I was an educator for 10 years and I say all the time I had students sitting in my classroom every day that I knew that they were homeless because I was their teacher, but they didn't "look" like it. And so attending Sleepout, I think, is a way to get more education around that and to really see it for yourself. Something really interesting happened last year when we were doing our Sleepout in Foxborough. This is the second year that we've had the privilege of being able to use Jill at Stadium for our event. And most of the participants are representatives of some amazing corporations of Cisco, Delta, Accenture, Paragon, and they are, and so they join a team and they come and they raise money and they sleep out and we do a morning reflection. And in last year's morning reflection, we learned that two of the people who had participated had experienced homelessness when they were young and they had never shared that before with the people they worked with. And it was an awesome, and one of it was just beautiful that they felt comfortable to share something like that with people who were there going to see it work the next day. But then also it raised the awareness around homelessness being something that so many people experience that we don't know about. And so we see that happen throughout all of our programs is that people raise their hands and share that they were homeless and either lived at Covenant House or were helped by other incredible programs. - Yeah, I love the part of the goal of this event in Covenant House more broadly, its mission is to fight this stigma, which unfortunately exists because you're addressing the tangible level of problems need money to be fixed, but then also people need to be able to ask for help and for funds and different things. So it's great that it sounds like your organization is really holistically looking at the issue. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we think of sleep out with all of the participants asking their friends and networks and neighbors and all for money. We have this kind of mantra of like we ask so they don't have to. So we're doing the asking, we're galvanizing the resources so that young people don't have to do that on their own so that they can be young people and focus on building the life of their dreams. - Yeah, I'm curious to ask, how did YouTube become involved in Covenant House and with the sleep out events? - So I just mentioned that I was a teacher for 10 years and when I decided to leave the classroom right after COVID, I wanted to do meaningful work and I'm really, really passionate about youth and young adults. And so when I saw the opportunity to work with Covenant House, I was very familiar with them as an organization 'cause I grew up in New Orleans and there's a Covenant House there. And so I was like, this is perfect. I can put my background in communications with my work with youth. And so I came in to begin that work and have just fallen more and more in love with the organization as a whole. And so a part of my work as Brandon Communications Director, as I mentioned, is writing these programs but also leading our alumni community which is a network of former residents who now have each other as peers who have shared lived experience. To be able to go back to each other and just to mingle, to socialize, to lean on each other, but it also keeps them connected to us so that they can reach out for resources if needed and we do whatever we can to wrap them in unconditional love and absolute respect which is something you'll hear say all the time. But they also have the opportunity to then give back to youth who are currently experiencing homelessness. So that's part of what motivates me to keep going. - Thank you for sharing. - Yeah. - And for me, I'm a lot older than Chris and so my story begins in the 1990s. (laughing) - When I was born? - I don't know, yeah. (laughing) See, I was gonna say third grade but yeah, probably when you were born. I was in law school and I went to law school because I wanted to find a way to contribute to the social justice, human rights movement and was finding my way to do so and I spent most of my 20s living in Newark, New Jersey and I was a community organizer there at the same time that I was attending law school and in the course of that got connected to Covenant House because often what happens with young people when they come to us is that they can be mired in different legal issues that are often pretty minor but are impeding their ability to advance in their goals and so sometimes as a means of survival their parents opened up utility accounts in their names and so they then end up having bad credit when they turn 18 and therefore have trouble passing a background check to get a job or an apartment and so there's minor things like that that I was representing them with as well as bigger problems like being denied access to public benefits that they're entitled to or domestic violence situations and so I volunteered as a law student there and then just fell in love with Covenant House and so I joined on and just said I just wanna do whatever, I wanna play any role that I can to be a part of this community and so I began working in our program there and built some of the residential programs that we have in Newark, New Jersey and then began working throughout the full state of New Jersey and then joined our international team about 10 years ago. - I don't think I've ever heard the beginning of that stuff. - Yeah, we're all learning new things. - Yeah, you were a child. (all laughing) - I need you all. (all laughing) - Tier nine. - Well, thank you both for sharing that. I'm curious, this is a question for both of you in your years of this great work. Is there anything that has surprised you or changed your thinking in working closely with this community? I understand that there's 4.2 million young people facing homelessness currently and so just, yeah, how has that changed your view of things? You go fair. - Okay, yeah, I mean, I don't even recognize the person who I was before. I started at Covenant House. It's really changed my perspective on most everything from the way I approach my faith relationship to what I know about community and what it means for people, good, good people to galvanize around a movement and the power that we could have to help people change their lives. But I think the biggest shift that I've had over, I've been at Covenant House for about half of my life and the biggest shift that I think I've had during that time is I signed up because I had this desire and responsibility to help people. And that was what I thought I was arriving at the front doors of Covenant House to do. And instead I've gotten so much more out of it than I could ever possibly give because I've met these extraordinary young people who are so incredibly talented and driven and resilient and funny and just, you know, some of the most impressive people that I've ever known and then get to work with the most amazing people that I've ever met, many of my best friends in the world. And then get to, you know, day in and day out, approach people who wanna have meaning in their own lives and ask them to contribute to our mission and, you know, more times than not, they say yes and more times than not, they give more than we even anticipated that they would and so for me it's been this, I signed up to give and I've just gotten so much than I've given. - Our former president and CEO had this quote that everyone who works at Covenant House knows which is that the least interesting thing about our young people is that they're homeless. So I think that's been the most impactful for me. Being on the communications team, I do a lot of content creation for our youth. So writing stories, creating content for social media, for our websites, for newsletters and all of the things. And so being one of the people responsible for respecting the voices of our young people and their autonomy in making them the heroes of their own stories, getting the chance to know them and them feeling comfortable sharing their experience with me and trusting me with what they're sharing has been incredible for me. I find that when they know that you respect them and you respect them absolutely and you love them unconditionally, they're willing to open up and to share more and you just realize how, as Jill said, how amazing they are, how funny they are, how resilient they are. So that's been incredible work for me to do. - Yeah, it's great that a part of the Sleepout event as well, as I understand it, is people sharing their stories and having it be this place again, not just to raise money, but to raise awareness for these issues. - Exactly. - Because it's something that, you know, everyone could stand to be more conscious of. - For sure. - Yeah. And just to move back a little bit further, we've discussed what Covenant House does, but could you tell us a little bit about the history of Covenant House since it's been around for, I guess, 52 years now? How did Covenant House become what it is today? - I can cover that. I can cover that one. Covenant House and I were born in the same year, so I could, that one's an easier one for me. So Covenant House began in New York City with just a handful of young people who were living on the streets and they were taken in and a movement began. And so we opened up our first program in Laura Manhattan and just a couple of years later, opened up our program in Toronto and our program in Guatemala. And so pretty quickly, our founders wanted to ensure that our movement was an international one. And then over time, we have grown to all of the communities that we are in today by partnering with local providers and supporters and government institutions. And every different site has a different story of how we arrived there, but it's always with the common denominator of a community that needs more support around ending youth homelessness, a group of supporters who are interested in investing in our work to do so and robust authentic partnerships with the local expert providers who have been doing similar or overlapping work for a long period of time. And then we hire awesome leaders and form a board of directors that then builds that movement in those local communities. And so most of our programs are centered around having a place for young people to walk in 24/7. We have a principle of open intake, which means not only that young people can walk in for the first time to covenant house without any questions asked, without any identification, without any referral or paperwork. They could just be there because they need to be there, but it also means that they can continue to return as we all know life change isn't a straight trajectory. We can, you know, just that's evidenced by my continuous, you know, stops and starts at the gym and with healthy eating. It's a lifelong journey and a couple steps forward and a couple steps back. And so for most young people at Covenant House, you know, we provide a lot of accountability in terms of the life change that they want for themselves. And so sometimes they leave and we always allow for them to come back. Sometimes, you know, Chris had mentioned that, you know, the importance of the word house in our name and I'll lean into the importance of the word covenant in our name is that we expect a lot of our young people and we give a lot to our young people. And so if they are wanting to return to us, our principle of open intake allows them to do so. If their covenant is to work on some of the issues that are preventing them from becoming independent. And so we really enter into a partnership with them to do so. - And I think it's very important to us and Joe mentioned this earlier to address their most basic needs first. So when they do come in during that open intake, if what they need is a shower or to brush their teeth or a meal, there's this great story we have of a young person that we share all the time where he came in, his name's Nick and he came in and it was what 3 a.m. or something and he needed a meal. And the staff member there at that particular shelter just went to the kitchen and turned on all the lights and the cooks were gone for the day and she's like, I'm going to fix you a meal. So I think once we meet those most basic needs, then we begin to address what is this young person's story? What do they really need from us? And like Joe mentioned, what covenant do they need to honor to make sure they're taking control of their lives as well. - Yeah, well, one step at a time. - Yeah. - Do you currently have a location in Boston or the Boston area? - No, we do not. There are some really excellent service providers here in Boston, particularly Bridge Over Troubled Water and Pine Street Inn who have, you know, for generations been serving young people who are experiencing homelessness and helping them move into a happy and healthy adulthood. And our aim is to use the expertise and the resources that we've developed to, you know, help impact and support the work that they are already doing. And so we've been, you know, galvanizing support from the folks who were sleeping out tonight and, you know, in Massachusetts alone, we have 18,000 supporters who gave to us over the past year and so, and many, many more obviously who have given, you know, to us over our history. And so, you know, we're super proud of that and really just wanna help build upon the already existing extraordinary services that are happening in Boston already. - Well, it's great to hear that, you know, you're not alone in this mission. - Not at all, it's too big for any one of us, yeah, for sure. - Yeah, we've got just a little bit time left. Again, this has been Observation Room Boston on WBCA 102.9 FM. I'm your host, Tommy Shenifield joined by Chris Johnson and Jill Vorndren of Covenant House for people who are interested in sleep out and Covenant House, how can people or where can people learn more about the organization or how they can support your efforts and sleep out. And yeah, how can they do that? - You wanna take sleep out? - Sure, yeah, yeah, so we have a ton of sleep outs happening now and to register for any of our sleep outs throughout the year, you can go to sleepout.org. And we have an option too that you can create your own sleep out. And so we have a ton of in-person ones that are organized by our sites throughout the Americas, but we also have even more people who join us from their own backyards, from their companies, from their places of worship, from their schools and create their own movement within their own little communities and within their families. And so that is the best way to find out everything about how to either create your own sleep out or join one of the ones that we've organized. - Great. And November is Youth Homelessness Awareness Month. And so our sort of theme for the last month has been all in. And so if you're looking for ways to be all in with Covenant House, you can go to covenanthouse.org/awareness. And there are all types of ways you can get involved there. - Thank you. We have just about a minute left. So I have one last quick question, keeping in mind that you're about to be off to Foxborough for tonight's sleep out. What is the hope that you both have for how tonight will go? - You know, it's a given that I hope that we raise a ton of money. But really just as important is that I hope we raise a ton of awareness and help people deepen their commitment to this movement both through their own experience, but also by having conversations with some of my incredible colleagues who serve our mission and the alumni who Chris has recruited to participate tonight as well. - I would echo Jill's sentiments and I would only add that. I hope that it continues to grow our movement and to lead us into our current president and CEO's dream, which is to end youth homelessness as we know it. - Well, thank you so much, Chris and Jill from Covenant House for coming on the show to talk about sleep out and youth homelessness awareness month and everything else. The two of you and the broader organization are doing. This has been WBCA 102.9 FM Boston, Boston's Community Radio Station. - That will be-- - B-C! 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