Baton Rouge’s Diversity House has launched the first housing and rehabilitation facility aimed at reducing the number of homeless LGBT youth on the Gulf Coast.
The facility was started by Youth Oasis Executive Director Rafael de Castro.
As 225 details in a feature from its current issue, De Castro opened Diversity House as an offshoot of Youth Oasis after witnessing firsthand the plight of homeless LGBT youth in the community.
“I had noticed that a lot of our requests (from the state) for kids to house were kids that identify as LGBT,” de Castro says. “When you start looking at the statistics, and you start identifying the tremendous need for helping LGBT young adults, and (you see) that there were really no residential resources for them, we decided to develop a program to offer housing options for them.”
Though only 7% of the total youth population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, those youths represent 40% of homeless youth in the country. Many of them find themselves on the streets after being rejected by parents or foster homes because of their identity, and it can be hard to find a new home that welcomes them for who they are.
Diversity House opened in March. It currently houses five young people, with space for 10 as the program grows.
In addition to a safe place to live, the program provides guidance in everything from day-to-day life skills to finding a job or getting a degree.
Inside the one-bedroom apartments allotted to each resident, cooking skills get sharpened and budgets get balanced. For some, Diversity House is the first time they’ve had their own personal space, and they’ve spread their lives out into the corners of these little homes with teddy bears, photographs and all the knickknacks they’ve been able to carry with them this far.
“What I’m seeing right now is kids coming in for the first time in a long time, or for the first time ever, where they have some emotional space for processing all those different issues,” Carrie Patterson, a resident social worker, says. “It’s not only not worrying about where their next meal is going to come from or where they’re going to sleep for the evening, but also actually being able to do some of that soul searching that kids their age should have the ability and space to do.”
