Berkeley shelter YEAH! listens to youth and builds a sense of family in a safe place.

It’s a Saturday night at the Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. The streets are cold and wet from recent storms, but inviting light spills from the church’s open dining hall door. Inside, half a dozen young people sit around four long tables arranged in a square, eating burritos and watching TV. Because it’s the holiday season, the tables are swathed in red plastic; green and gold cardboard stars and silver swags of tinsel hang from the ceiling. Punctuating the television dialogue is the clatter of kitchenware as volunteers begin dinner cleanup.

“Oh, Nathan, I love you,” one of the kids says in a fake British accent, mocking the actors on the TV screen. He has his chair tipped back on two legs. “You mean more to me than life itself.”

The scene could be a youth gathering anywhere in America. What makes it different, however, is that these youth are homeless, and the Church of the Cross is where Berkeley’s Youth Engagement, Advocacy, and Housing, known as YEAH!, hosts its nightly shelter program, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. from November through May.

YEAH! (pronounced “yay,”) was established in 2002 by a small group of volunteers from the Ecumenical Chaplaincy to the Homeless, and is the only shelter in Berkeley that serves homeless young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. Of the city’s 1,200 homeless, almost 20 percent are in this age group. YEAH!, a nonprofit organization, offers counseling and case management; acts as a liaison between the youth and educational, employment and housing organizations; and provides such physical basics as showers and laundry machines, a hot dinner and breakfast, clean socks and underwear, and sleeping mats with fresh sheets.

Up to 25 people can stay each night. The shelter operates on a first-come-first-served basis. The only requirement is that youth be in YEAH!’s age range. Drugs and alcohol are not tolerated at the shelter, but if a youth arrives already under the influence, that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. And—in contrast to most other shelters—pets are allowed.

“Pets are really important,” says executive director Jaclyn Grant. “They’re real companions. So youth are allowed to bring in their well-behaved pets. We’ve had cats, dogs, and rats.”

Has the shelter ever hosted 25 pets—one for each guest? Not yet, according to Grant. “It’s usually more like four or five,” she says.

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YEAH! collaborates with other service organizations, such as the Berkeley Homeless Commission, Berkeley Mental Health, the Homeless Action Center, Lifelong Medical Clinic, and the Suitcase Clinic. More than a third of the young people YEAH! supports say they have mental health problems and have lived in foster care; the average age they became homeless is 15, and the average time they’ve been homeless is 2½ years.

“They’re homeless not just because of personal factors, but also because of larger societal problems, like a lack of job opportunities and affordable housing,” Grant says.

Grant holds a master’s degree in social work in management and planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and although she is relatively new to her post, she has been working with YEAH! since 2009, when she started as a social work intern. Blonde and petite, Grant looks more like a yoga instructor than a badass homeless youth advocate. But it doesn’t take long in conversation with her to get a sense of both her compassion for young people and her skills in working with them.

“In general, there are a lack of services for youth, as well as a lack of understanding of where they are developmentally and how best to respond to their needs,” Grant says. “We want to support them with a stable place to stay so that they can move safely into adulthood.”

As a teenager growing up in Southern California, Grant used to spend hours talking to people on the street, listening to their stories. “In late adolescence I realized there were people who didn’t have a stable place to live, and I noticed they were treated differently— ignored or looked down on,” she says. “I started talking to people and came to understand that there weren’t a lot of resources available to them, and that the issue of homelessness was often ignored not only by city governments, but also by the people living in the community.”

Homeless youth are a particular population, Grant says. “Really, each person has different circumstances and different needs or goals, and we want to be sensitive to that,” she says.

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Adjacent to the YEAH! dining hall is a locker room, a laundry room, two bathrooms, and a large sleeping space. Tonight board member and YEAH! alum Joseph Sanousi is supervising check-in.

Slight and lean, Sanousi has an open face and laugh lines around his brown eyes. He’s no stranger to homelessness: His parents kicked him out when he was 15 because he didn’t agree with their religious beliefs. After almost a decade on the streets, Sanousi discovered YEAH! in 2003 and stayed at the shelter on and off over the years until he aged out of the program. Now 35, Sanousi has found some stability and rents a room in Berkeley.

“My first experience with YEAH! was when I saw a big group of people lined up outside the church, and I went over to check it out,” he says. “I managed to get a spot and stayed the whole winter there.”

The program has been important to Sanousi, not only providing a clean and safe place to sleep, but also a sense of family. “I consider the people at YEAH! my family, since I don’t really have one,” he says.

Is there conflict at the shelter at times? There used to be more, before the lockers were installed, Sanousi says. But in general, the youth are motivated to make it work.

“Before we had lockers, people’s things were in bins, and sometimes they’d get in arguments, blaming each other for stealing things,” he says. “Now that we have lockers, there haven’t been issues like that. Really, people don’t want to be outside during the winter, so they’ll do their best to maintain themselves.”

One of YEAH!’s goals is to help homeless youth take their place as part of the Berkeley community, both at the shelter with their peers and with the program’s volunteers. The program emphasizes that staff and youth can learn from each other—it’s not a top-down kind of deal—and open communication is encouraged. Case in point: There are regular meetings where the youths can talk about what works and what doesn’t work in the program—all part of an effort to give them a sense of ownership.

“For example, we used to turn all the lights on in the morning at 6:30,” Grant says. “Some of the youth didn’t like that. So at one community meeting, we had a discussion about it and negotiated that we’d turn half the lights on at 6:30 and the rest on at 6:45—and that there would be no announcements until 7.”

This emphasis on relationship and feedback from the youth makes YEAH! is a one-of-a-kind organization, says board co-chair Elisa Della-Piana. She has worked as an attorney for homeless people’s interests in San Francisco and Alameda counties for a decade, so she is familiar with this particular type of social service. Currently she serves as director of programs for the East Bay Community Law Center.

“I’ve seen plenty of shelters, but YEAH! is unique,” Della-Piana says. “It’s because the people matter more than the rules. YEAH! uses a harm-reduction model in the broadest sense, really, which requires a lot of balancing. Rather than, ‘If you’re 10 minutes late, you can’t come back,’ there’s dialogue. And asking shelter residents about how the program is working is definitely not the norm.”

She describes one young man, who, when he first came to the shelter, would often have violent verbal outbursts, shouting at people and swearing at them. Instead of kicking him out and forbidding him to return, the staff told him that he had to spend a few nights away and then come back and make a contract that would dictate how he would behave in the community. It worked: He was able to stay in the community and get case management, which helped him in the long run.

“Now several years later, he’s in housing and doing really well,” Della-Piana says.

Della-Piana likes to make Sunday breakfast at YEAH! a couple times a month—French toast and sausages are her specialty. And although the meal may start quietly, by the end, the conversation is animated.

“It’s a bit brutal, because they have to be up and out of the church by 8—pretty early on a weekend,” she says. “The beginning of breakfast is really quiet; they’re all bleary-eyed. But by the last 15 minutes or so, everyone’s awake. Last week they were talking about the Black Lives Matter protests, what’s been going on in our community and in Ferguson and Staten Island. It’s great to see them so engaged.”

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YEAH! depends on its roster of about 150 volunteers. They do everything: fundraising; connecting with civic, religious and educational groups; collaborating with social service agencies; preparing and serving food; distributing sleeping mats; supervising shower and laundry sign-ups; and keeping watch overnight. The organization receives about 40 percent of its yearly $500,000 budget from the city of Berkeley and relies on donations from foundations, individuals, and civic and religious groups for the remaining 60 percent, Della-Piana says.

“The hardest day of every year is the day we close for the season,” Della-Piana says. “As a board member, I take very seriously the responsibility of raising funds and trying to make it possible for the program to stay open longer. The long-range goal is for the shelter to go year-round, which would require at least double our current budget and more paid staff.”

Former volunteer and current board member Midhun Joseph found that serving the youth at YEAH! changed the way he viewed the world. “I saw my own assumptions about youth homelessness—and learned how much more complicated the reasons for them being on the street really are,” he says. “These young adults create a whole culture of connections, and a new family with each other that’s stronger and more stable than their families of origin. People see the homeless as an annoyance, but really, they’re part of our community.”

Grant agrees. Homeless youth need support, not censure.

“It’s such an honor that at YEAH! we get to work with these incredible, funny, smart, young people,” she says. “They have so much to teach us.”

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Kate Madden Yee is an Oakland-based writer.

Help Out
YEAH! can use your donations.

YEAH! can always use volunteers, as well as donations of both money and supplies. “We always, always need socks and underwear,” executive director Jaclyn Grant says. For more information go to the organization’s website, www.Yeah-Berkeley.org and click on “Donate/Contact.”
YEAH! stands for Youth Engagement, Advocacy, and Housing. It operates November through May at Lutheran Church of the Cross, 1744 University Ave., Berkeley, 510-704-9867. For general information, email Admin@YeahBerkeley.org; for volunteer information, email Volunteer@Yeahberkeley.org.