Homeless teens are granted phone service

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, Nov. 26, 2004 | 11:04 a.m.

Teenagers living on the streets of the Las Vegas Valley will be getting two cards that will allow them to make calls and get messages as part of a project launched Wednesday.

The project, run by the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth with donations from two phone companies, is one of the few in the nation to offer this service to teens.

Though no reliable statistics exist for the number of youths under 18 who are homeless in the valley, more than 3,500 youths needed emergency shelter in 2003, and Metro Police dealt with 4,527 runaways during the same period, according to Kathleen Boutin, executive director of the partnership.

Many of those teens need access to phones for obtaining jobs, housing or health care, or getting in touch with their families, she said.

Patricia Bonnell, spokeswoman for Community Voice Mail -- a Seattle-based nonprofit organization that has developed similar projects since 1991 at 37 locations in 19 states -- said being able to make calls and get messages is "key to ending homelessness."

"Reliable access to communication is key to advancing in our society today," she said.

Boutin's project is not connected to Community Voice Mail, but seeks to meet the same need -- reliable communication for people who live on the street or are too poor to pay for a phone.

Locally, the idea is a long time coming.

Shawna Parker Brody, analyst at Clark County Community Resources Management and an adviser on annual federal grants to help the homeless, said funding a voice mail system for the homeless -- adults and youths -- was proposed in that grant back in 1998.

But it didn't get funded.

The idea was also included in the "five-point plan" for ending homelessness that a task force led by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman created in 2002.

But that plan fell by the wayside.

Parker Brody recently got an e-mail with a news report about Community Voice Mail and forwarded the information to Boutin.

Boutin called Sprint and Mpower Communications and each company agreed to donate cards on a trial basis. One kind of card offers calling time and the other, a way to set up a voice mail system.

Her organization received 50 of the first kind and 100 of the second.

Parker Brody said she was surprised to see how easy it was to get the project off the ground, after the two earlier attempts floundered.

"This was available 10 years ago -- why couldn't we have had it?" she said.

Boutin said working to get youths off the streets is different from doing the same with adults.

She said drugs and alcohol are not as serious a problem with youths as they are with older homeless men and women.

Many teens will make the effort to reunite with their families, she said.

As well, she said, today's youth is "technically savvy," and seeks communication through e-mail and phones.

Bonnell, of Seattle's Community Voice Mail, said her organization recently partnered with a homeless shelter for teens in Denver to implement a similar project.

As for the organization's project nationwide, she said that 47,000 people, most of whom were homeless, used free phone and message systems last year.

She said slightly more than half of those people were successful in finding housing because of Community Voice Mail projects.

Slightly less than half found jobs. About two-thirds found health care.

And 86 percent found what she called "safe communication" -- a less tangible commodity than the other three, but an important one nonetheless.

Bonnell said that this sort of service could be particularly useful for homeless teens.

"Being a homeless teen can be extremely frightening and challenging," she said.

"When your mom can call and leave you a message saying, 'I want you to come home, I still love you,' it can be extremely helpful."