Between the Wizard and the Deep Blue Sea: Notes on Homeless Youth Advocacy and Community Coalition Building

This article features a series of short self-reflective narrative vignettes about the experiences that led me to build and ultimately lead a coalition of homeless youth advocates who began the challenging work of calling attention to the plight of homeless teenagers in a mid-size industrial Pacific Northwest city concerned primarily with providing for and controlling its chronic adult homeless population. In the essay I draw from personal memory, social policy history and data from a participatory action research project to shed light on both the institutional politics of homeless youth policy and the varied possibilities of sustained grassroots community advocacy.