I'll give you a little bit of an idea of what happens. I many times had to go through this cycle where my dad would break one of my bones and I would get sent to an emergency shelter. You can stay there for seven days, but you cannot be in that shelter during the day. We don't have any emergency shelters in this area, so they were often sending me to the Downtown Eastside without support during the day. You can go back to the shelter and try to sleep for a few hours each night, but after seven days you're discharged back into homelessness. You try to find another youth shelter that has a bed, but they all are operating at capacity because the need is so great.
What kept happening to me in my situation—it's what happens to a lot of the youth I work with now—was that I would get sent back home many times after seven days of respite, and then something worse would happen at home.
That cycle just continues and continues and continues until you stop telling anybody what's going on. You just live with it until you either commit suicide or you....
Our youth don't have options. I just want people to start thinking about “seven days”. If you have something that is catastrophic or damaging happen to you in your life, and then you're told that you have seven days in a shelter of some kind and then it's over, I think we can all agree that those seven days won't be enough to get anything fixed in your own life or to change anything.