Shelter Finds Site, Needs Funds

Three years ago, Carol Kanode, then a school nurse at Ocean View High School, met a student who was homeless.

The encounter, she said, changed her life--and opened her eyes to a need for more shelters for teen-agers in Orange County.

Kanode said the homeless teen-ager at Ocean View was “only 14--a freshman and a very nice girl.” She had been “kicked out” of the house by her mother after the two had quarreled. The mother, a single parent, then moved from her apartment, abandoning her daughter who was suddenly left without a home.

“The girl had to live on the streets for about a month,” Kanode recalled, “and she turned to prostitution.”

She wanted to stay in Huntington Beach so she could still attend Ocean View, but there was no shelter for teen-agers in the city. She ultimately became a ward of the court outside of Huntington Beach and had to finish high school elsewhere.

“It became real apparent to me that the community needed a place where we could send our young people,” Kanode said.

From that episode in 1987, Kanode launched a drive to found a shelter for adolescents.

Today, she is closer to realizing that goal. A professionally staffed, 20-bed shelter for teen-agers is scheduled to open next summer in a renovated caretaker’s house in Huntington Beach’s Central Park.

But Kanode needs to raise nearly $400,000 to open the facility, and so far the group has only $8,000. The $400,000 is needed to operate and staff the shelter for a year, she said.

“We’ll have on the staff a full-time program director, a clinical director, youth supervisors, counseling interns, clerical help and a security worker,” she said. “Right now we have about $8,000 in our checking account. We’re applying for state and federal grants, and we’re also getting donations from several private groups.”

Kanode said the nonprofit organization she helped create, Huntington Youth Shelter Inc., is optimistic about raising the remaining $392,000 needed by next summer.

“Our target is to open in July,” said Kanode, who is on temporary leave from the Huntington Beach Union High School District while working at a Cerritos hospital.

Child-care officials around the county have praised the efforts to open the new Huntington Beach shelter. Countywide, only 38 beds are available currently in the five existing teen-age shelters in Tustin, Laguna Beach, Fullerton, Garden Grove and Los Alamitos. Thus, the Huntington Beach shelter would mean a 53% increase in beds available in Orange County for temporarily housing homeless adolescents.

Besides funding, the group’s biggest hurdles in establishing the shelter have been finding a site and “working through a bureaucratic maze” to secure approvals from various city agencies to use the caretaker’s house in Central Park, Kanode said.

The house, near the city’s main library, dates back to the 1930s, she said. The structure will be renovated and expanded to accommodate the group’s needs.

“The building has 2,000 square feet as it is now, and 2,000 additional square feet are to be added,” she said. “The place will be very nicely furnished. Some groups and clubs are buying new furniture and donating it to the shelter.”

Homeless youths will be able to stay in the shelter for up to two weeks at no charge, Kanode said. During the youths’ stay, she said, the shelter staff will work to reunite the teen-agers with their families.

“If we had had something like this three years ago, I’m sure that I could have gotten that 14-year-old girl and her mother back together again,” Kanode said. “There’s often a need for a cooling-off period between teen-agers and parents. This place will allow a teen-ager to be in a safe place while that cooling-off is going on.”

Kanode praised the Huntington Beach council members and developer Frank Mola for supporting the project.

“He’s donating building material and assistance in getting the old house fixed up,” she said.

Kanode hopes that the Huntington Beach shelter will be a model program for other cities, and she expressed a willingness to help establish similar shelters elsewhere in the county.

“We want to help other communities,” she said. “We found very few resources available to help us get going when we started out. Now we want to share what we’ve learned. We think our youth shelter will be a model that others can emulate.”