When I graduated with my BA in Social Work, I had already done enough time volunteering in local homeless shelters to recognize that there was a serious issue that wasn’t been addressed through standard programs. The news was always full of stories about homeless youth, and the violence that some of these kids were being accused of was appalling. Gangs were all over these children, knowing full well that a homeless kid is an ideal target for recruitment: no money, no home, no food and looking for a somewhere they can belong. There were shelters that weren’t anywhere near capacity, with kids shivering and sleeping on grates a block away. But how do you get a streetwise kid to at least come inside for the night? My idea was to leverage something that the current generation of kids has grown up on: video games. That’s one thing they don’t really have access to on the streets that they wish they had. Food they beg for or scrounge out of garbage. Booze and drugs -you don’t want to know how they get those. I convinced the coordinator of an underutilized shelter to drag a couple of old computers they had into a spare room and I downloaded some hidden object games. Something to make them think. The equipment isn’t exactly state of the art, but the beauty of the games they have for download these days is that they look good and they’re addictive to play, but they don’t require a three thousand dollar gaming rig to play. That and they’re free- I have virtually no budget for this. I printed up flyers promoting a free gaming night and lo and behold, within a week we were scrounging up six more computers and expanding into a bigger room. And the kids would end up staying the night so they were safe. A small victory you might say, but it appears that free games can do what free sandwiches couldn’t.
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