There’s a distinct difference between surviving and actually living.
That’s the mantra that Heather Engle, director of the WestCare Nevada Women and Children’s Campus, has drilled into the heads and hearts of her staff. It’s a message of hope and transformation that each is able to share with the hundreds of children who pass through the facility’s youth shelter every year.
“So many of these children come in here with no hope,” she said. “The things they’ve been through, when you hear them talk about some of their experiences, it can make adults uncomfortable because you realize these children are younger than 18, but they’ve lived lives that some 50 year olds couldn’t handle. They have lived lives of survival. We try to teach them how to change that.”
The Youth Emergency Shelter Services program serves youths between the ages of 10 and 17, providing a safe haven for runaway and homeless children who need crisis intervention or emergency placement. The program, which is open 24 hours per day, provides early intervention screenings with special attention to medical, psychological and legal needs. The shelter can house 15 children, and has beds dedicated to youth detox and withdrawal management.
“It’s not as uncommon as we all hope it would be,” Engle said. “Children come in here drunk and high. Some of them are seriously addicted to drugs. But we are here to help them through it. We are here to work with our community partners and help that child get the help he or she needs. That can mean entering a treatment facility or working with the foster care system to get them placed into a better situation. We get a lot of children who are already in the system. They’ve been in the system for some time, and understandably, they’re angry.”
The unit has been a part of the larger, 36,000-square-foot facility for more than 15 years. According to Engle, children find themselves there for a variety of different reasons.
“Some are coming down off of some sort of high, some have no place else to go and have been kicked out of their house,” she said. “We get children who come in here on their own because they feel like this is their safe place. They will actually run away from home and come here. They’re fleeing abusive parents or foster parents. There have been instances where parents drop their child off here because they can no longer deal with them. Those are especially tough cases.”
Right to Shelter laws mean that health care professionals and caseworkers aren’t required to notify parents of the child’s whereabouts for at least 72 hours. The shelter was designed to allow youths to stay for up to a month but there have been children who have stayed up to eight months.
“It is a case-by-case basis,” Engle said. “They know we will get them the help that they need. They know that this is a safe place where they are understood and cared about. We empower them. We give them a voice. We tell them to dream big, that they can do anything. Some of them have never heard anything like that before. That being said, we are also not a lockdown facility. So they can leave whenever they want to.”
Facility Deputy Director Alyson Martinez said that emergency services professionals and police officers have also been known to bring children in.
“Sometimes we get children from the Department of Family Services or the juvenile justice courts,” she said.
Whenever possible, family reunification is the ultimate goal. Martinez said that there are instances where parents are desperately trying to overcome their own obstacles or challenges with addiction to regain custody of their children from the state.
“You see them working hard, and they come to visit but you know that it’s a long road,” she said. “The children are just as tortured as the parents, sometimes more so, because who doesn’t want to go home? But everyone involved also knows that there are protocols and it has to be a safe situation.”
Martinez said that she has seen some happy endings.
“Those are the ones you try to focus on,” she said. “There can be a lot of sadness in this work. But when you see a family reunite, there’s nothing better.”
According to Martinez, children who have been stuck in the foster care system often find the shelter to be a respite of the never-ending cycle of change that is their life.
“Imagine going to work and not knowing if you would go home to the same place, the same family that evening,” she said. “That would wear on an adult. But it’s the reality of foster children. They are shuffled around a lot. They don’t have strong support systems. They often have emotional and physical trauma they’re trying to cope with. But they come here and our caseworkers treat them like people. We encourage them to never give up, get educated and live their dreams.”
Engle said some children come back to the shelter after graduating out of the system or going on to go to college and succeed in life.
“I know, when I see them walk through the door, that we’re doing the right things,” she said. “They tell me about the big, fat lives they’ve created, and I’m just overwhelmed to see that they have taken the lessons learned here and gone out into the world to make it a better place, to make themselves better. I could not be prouder of them or of this work.”