That was one of the things I found back in 2007, when we had those 500 youth coming. We assumed that the majority were from St. Catharines, but when I looked at who was actually coming, I saw that 60% or more were actually from all the communities around St. Catharines.
What we found most troubling at the time was that this group of youth was particularly vulnerable. They were vulnerable not only from their experiences of homelessness but also because we were forcing them to travel to St. Catharines in order to have access to shelter.
At the time, I called it the bus station challenge. Anyone could go to the bus station and watch the out-of-town bus and tell when someone coming off that bus was not from the city. What was happening was that not only did I have no outreach, but drug dealers and pimps did. They would wait at the bus station for those kids to come off a bus. Then they'd bring them in and say, “Do you need a place to stay? Do you want to smoke?” We even had examples of gangs enrolling students in high school in order to bring drugs into that school or to recruit for human trafficking.
That's what happened, and when we started Youth Reconnect, that's why the program was so successful. It's because we were able to keep kids in their community so that they never had to travel to receive service. We didn't force them to become vulnerable in order to access service.