Vancouver Foundation

Broadway Youth Resource Centre When Yosef Spivak laughs, he makes a sound like warm wind, and his eyes completely disappear behind red, round cheeks. He's a cheerful guy. It's his nature, even though, at 22, he's had a lifetime's worth of hardship. Spivak first went into foster care when he was seven years old. He's a little vague about the reasons but his family was breaking up and he says he started acting out. He was diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder and prescribed Ritalin, along with other drugs that he says made him even wilder. "I was a violent child," he says, an image that is hard to reconcile with this young man, happily chatting about his past. For the next decade, Spivak went back and forth between his mother's home and foster and group homes, and spent time in a minimum security group home for youngsters with violent tendencies. When his mother would take him back, she would also move him – to Montreal, to Israel, back to Richmond. Then the cycle of foster and group homes would begin again, and the school moves – too many to count. It didn't help that he had also been misdiagnosed as a youngster with a rare genetic disorder that included reduced mental ability among its many conditions. It wasn't until he was a teenager that he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. "I'm great at math and knots. I'm great at languages. I learned Hebrew and Yiddish in Israel. But I'm not great at spelling. Or grammar." Spivak says he was relieved to get that diagnosis, even though it only came after two stints in the children's psychiatric ward. "It explained a lot of things. The problem was that I was already branded in the system as something else – a troublemaker with emotional issues." At 19, Spivak became an adult and that meant he could finally move into his first apartment. "It was horrendous and awful. I was not ready at all. I freaked out the first night. I didn't know what to do." It's hard to imagine how being in your own apartment could be worse than shuttling between foster and group homes, sleeping on friends' couches or finding temporary beds in safe houses and shelters, but this part of Spivak's story is shared by many other youth at risk of homelessness. Kristine Kredba, Supervisor of the Youth Transition and Housing Program at the Broadway Youth Resource Centre (BYRC), has seen it many times. "Young people like Yosef who have been bounced around the system most of their lives often have large gaps in learning the basic skills they need," she says. "Like how to shop for groceries, budgeting and paying their bills on time or keeping their home clean. When it's just housing without support, or just support without housing, it almost always fails." Vancouver Foundation helped the BYRC establish a supported housing program for at-risk and homeless youth. The goal is to secure safe housing for young people, and to provide them with the skills necessary to successfully transition from supported to A way h independent housing. The program targets high-risk youth, specifically those who have experienced challenges finding and maintaining housing. These tend to be young people, like Yosef Spivak, who have lived in government care, "couch surfed," or lived in a safe house or shelter at some point in their lives. The 2011 Metro Vancouver Homeless Count found 397 unaccompanied young people on the streets. That's the highest number ever found in the region, and it's probably lower than reality as it does not count young people sleeping on a series of couches in a series of basements, and it does not count young people moving in page 10 I Vancouver Foundation l Spring 2012 p10-11_Way Home.indd 10 6/6/12 10:53:43 AM

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