When Christopher Wood was a teenager growing up in Virginia, he came out to his parents as gay. They rejected him and kicked him out of the house. As Wood describes it, a cell phone saved him from becoming permanently homeless. It wasn’t a smartphone; it was a flip phone, but it allowed him to contact a friend who found him a temporary safe place to sleep. The way Wood sees it, mobile technology saved his life. Now he's working to provide the same lifeline to teens today whose circumstances mirror his own years ago: young, alone, and at risk.
Wood is the co-founder of Connect 4 Life, an initiative of the LGBT Technology Partnership and Institute to provide homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth with mobile connectivity. Working with Cricket Wireless, Connect 4 Life distributes ZTE smartphones—loaded with unlimited talk and texting and 10GB of data—to organizations that work with these teens directly. The group launched a pilot program in Washington, DC, earlier this year, and Wood hopes to expand the effort across the country soon. The ultimate goal, he says, is to provide phones for more than 5,000 homeless LGBTQ teens in 200 cities and rural communities.
Despite their vast overrepresentation in the national homeless population, no [federal programs] exist to meet the needs of homeless LGBTQ youth. Even though homeless LGBTQ youth only account for roughly four percent of the general population, 40 percent of youth experiencing homelessness self-identify as LGBTQ. That’s a huge gap.
Young people typically come out in their mid-teens, when kids still depend on their families to meet material needs, including communication technology and mobile data plans. When their families reject them, these marginal members of an already marginalized group often end up on the street, disconnected. They face an increased risk of physical and sexual abuse, mental health problems, and dependence on drugs and alcohol. More than their non-LGBTQ peers, LGBTQ youths on the street are more likely to commit crimes and engage in survival sex to meet basic needs, which puts them at greater risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Recent research reveals that access to communication technology can be critical for homeless youth, allowing them to contact case workers and social support networks; connect with potential employers; reconnect with family; and access health care. Taken together, these connections all contribute to ensuring their safety.
The risks of life on the street can be especially acute for teens who identify as LGBTQ—risks that mobile tech could help mitigate. Homeless transgender and gender non-conforming youth, for instance, rely on a limited number of shelters and facilities that do not stigmatize or endanger them. Access to a mobile phone makes it possible to connect to these safe spaces. Getting kids off the street, meanwhile, decreases the likelihood of being placed in the criminal justice system—particularly for LGBTQ youth of color. Better communication tools could help them stay in touch with peers who could steer them away from areas with heavy police presence. Connect 4 Life also plans to integrate a location-based app that allows users to find reliable shelters and safety-net services.
Meeting the needs of homeless LGBTQ youth is uniquely challenging largely because this community isn't well studied. It’s difficult to find studies that account for different experiences at the intersection of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. By distributing phones to LGBTQ youth, Connect 4 Life hopes not only to provide assistance but to collect reliable data on this growing population.
Surveys are distributed monthly via text message through a service called Twilio. The only user data that is collected comes from the surveys – it's all active, self-reported, and opt-in. Connect 4 Life firmly states that it does not do any passive data collection (i.e. location tracking). Questions aim to get a sense of a user’s experience with technology and battery life, as well as information related to health, safety, housing, education and employment. Since the surveys involve minors, names and phone numbers of respondents are rarely shared.
“It’s not enough to tell some great stories, we need to be able to show that we can measure real improvement in people’s lives,” says Allyson Robinson, Connect 4 Life's program director.
Robinson says this project would have presented huge hurdles even a year ago, though relationships within the business community are slowly evolving:
“Non-profit-private sector organizations collaborate all the time,” says Robinson. “But this is multi-sector collaboration on a scale rarely even attempted." The effort brings together not only nonprofits and for-profits but government agencies, philanthropists, and researchers. " We think it's a new model for solving social problems at scale.”
Eva Kersey, Assistant Manager of HIV Testing at Larkin Street Youth Services, which offers education, housing, medical, and drop-in services to homeless and at-risk youth ages 12 to 24 in San Francisco, says stigma is a big reason why research with homeless youth is often difficult.
“Homeless’ is not exactly an identity most people want to adopt, and my guess is many people we might label as homeless do not hold that as one of their primary identities," she says. "So when asked to give their perspective on what it’s like to be homeless, fewer people are likely to volunteer their input.”
For some, she says, “This is compounded with stigma related to identifying as LGBTQ.”
According to Kersey, being homeless also entails a lifestyle that makes people more vulnerable to theft and damage, so homeless youth face real barriers to consistently accessing technology that most of us rely on. Since being homeless means moving around a lot, “mobile tech is the most viable option these youth have for staying in touch and accessing the web,” says Kersey.
If there’s one thing Kersey would like to see from programs that work with homeless youth going forward, it’s location services.
“There’s a lot of interest in a platform that would allow people to share unofficial information,” she says,“like places to charge a cell phone, where public clocks can be found, freight train schedules, what cafés let people use the restroom, good places to hitchhike, etc. One of my favorite ideas from a client is an app to help people manage public benefits, like an app that keeps track of your EBT (food stamps) balance and helps you budget your funds to last the whole month.” And don’t forget, an app will be better received if it’s fun and social. “People want to be able to find their friends and post photos,” Kersey says.
Growing interest from the tech community has helped push the project forward. The program benefits from partnerships with software and data management companies including Bluelabs, which worked on President Obama’s campaign. Now the group is seeking $1.5 million, a drop in the bucket for many tech companies that could nevertheless help put thousands more phones on the streets.
One of the most commonly heard critiques of initiatives like Connect 4 Life is that it’s a temporary solution to the homeless crisis. But Robinson adamantly disagrees. If we only invest in long-term solutions, she says, the cost could be teens' lives. For these kids, she says, “every day that passes is a day without a phone.” Wood says that if it were not for a cell phone, he would have stayed living on the street and not reconnected with his family.
As we talked earlier this year, Robinson got an alert on her phone, warning residents in Washington, DC, about record-freezing temperatures overnight and possible hypothermia. The irony does not escape her. For someone who gets dozens of notifications a day, just one more may not seem like a big deal. But for a young person without a home, mobile alerts could help them avoid harassment, arrest, or a potentially fatal night on a frigid street. They simply need a phone.
