The big picture
The new campaign from I Live Here I Give Here, the organization behind efforts like the annual Amplify Austin Day fundraiser drive, marked Oct. 21 as a day of action against family homelessness. Officials said renewed focus on the issue is needed given that, within Austin ISD alone, an estimated 2,500 children across more than 1,100 families are currently growing up without a home.
"It is a humanitarian crisis when we have that many children not being able to be children because they’re living unhoused," Mayor Kirk Watson said.
The Amplify Home initiative is meant to raise awareness of that problem with events and volunteer opportunities alongside fundraising to support resources for families in need. More information about the campaign is available online.
Put in perspective
Mark Hilbelink, executive director of the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center that offers various services to hundreds of clients, said the fundraising initiative was a chance to build local homelessness response for children. Hilbelink said the extent of youth and family homelessness around Austin wasn't fully known until the past few years, when improved data and programs gave service providers a better look at the local community.
“For years, we built a system that responded to single adults because that’s what we knew. And now that we know that the system is made up of many families and many different types of homelessness, we need to build a system that responds to them as well," he said.
AISD board President Lynn Boswell said stable housing is strongly tied to positive outcomes like better grades, graduation rates and personal health, and that more work is needed to help students who don't have a home.
“There are students in our classrooms today who woke up in cars and went to class. There are students today in our schools who don’t know where they will sleep tonight. They’re working to learn and grow like every other student in our district, but the lack of stable housing means they have a much bigger hill to climb," she said.
“What I have seen, what we all have seen, is shifting demographics. As fast as people have been displaced out of Central Austin, they have moved into areas like my district, the outlying areas. And as fast as homelessness has improved in certain parts of the city, it has surfaced in other parts of the city," she said.
