My name is Micha Petty, and I am a former runaway.  I and some who shared that part of my story recently began working on a memorial to those we knew whose stories are over, and it has been bringing the past to mind. I would now like to relay a bit of that experience with maybe more candor than I would ordinarily feel comfortable, hoping my effort might somehow repay a fraction of what I have received.

You see, I left home the week I turned fourteen. My reasons for doing so need not be laid out here, but suffice to say that being a street kid was preferable to where I came from.  Daily life meant sleeping in abandoned buildings, being cold and hungry through Minnesota winters with inadequate clothing, and where generally the only authorities I saw were not trying to help, but rather chase me away from the otherwise empty streets downtown after the rest of the world had left for the evening. I had no prospects or skills and no idea how to get them.  Now, almost two decades later, I look at kids that age and cannot imagine how I survived those years.  But then I remember… YouthLink (we will always remember them as “Project Offstreets”).

If YouthLink had not been there… for many of us, the only option (besides the random kindness of strangers) would likely have been a life of prostitution or crime. Even with the best upbringing (which none of us had), hunger can make a young person consider desperate things. Our defense back then was to just naturally form a ‘clan’ of sorts for mutual support.  If one of us was given a ten dollar bill, then ten of us had dollar burgers.  Often times, though, no one had ten dollars and YouthLink was the net underneath all of us. That handful of workers kept an unbelievably hard time in our young lives from being far more nightmarish than it already was, and just typing this much has brought tears to my eyes looking back.

The fact is, when I was fourteen years old I didn’t have a quarter, and no one to call who cared anyway. There is no way to understand how empty that feels unless you have been there.  Until your only option in life is trudging through snow with nowhere to be when you stop, it is hard to understand that a pair of shoes can be worth so much more than what they charge at the register.  When I could barely feel my toes and the only other unlocked doors downtown were for shoppers- it was YouthLink that had a heater.  I remember when I got cut crawling through a broken window trying to get into the then-deserted and pigeon-infested Mann Theater to get out of the cold at night, and again it was the showers and gauze at YouthLink the next day that kept my already taxed body from getting infections. Once I was old enough to have some chance of actually having a job, it was YouthLink that helped me get my general equivalency diploma.  And most of all–when I was sixteen and my mom finally got away from the man who had been the start of so many of those problems–it was in a counselor’s office at YouthLink that I gave my mother a hug for the first time in years.

Those people didn’t have to care. I think now about how someone’s pockets originally paid for that food and those jackets and so many things that the rest of the world just sets on the conveyor belt at the store with hardly another thought. Those people fought and scrounged for us when we were too young and ignorant to do it for ourselves. I have had teenage foster children and they are often a (worthwhile!) challenge, and I wince at the strain we must have been on those workers’ patience, but they put up with all of us, somehow.  Look at your teenagers (and I have “squatted” with kids who were not even teenagers yet)–how would they make it, what would they do if there was no place like YouthLink?

Since I was a sixteen, my dream in life has been to open a ranch that takes in at-risk teens like we once were, and I still hope to accomplish that.  Meanwhile, I am a husband, a foster parent, a small business owner, I’ve helped others get their GEDs, I am attending college in hopes of practicing Constitutional law … but I still make out my bills on a desk that I happened to sleep under many years ago. Like the rest of the world, I always wanted a healthy, productive life–I just needed to keep from starving there for awhile until I could figure a few things out.

There are indeed other services out there that try to help youth, I know.  I have seen those services, both as the person being helped and I now I know them from the perspective of a foster parent and concerned adult.  The simplest way I know to put it is that abandoned buildings also seemed preferable to those options (at least to us). I cannot impart my experiences to you with words alone, but I can tell you one thing clearly–I highly doubt that I would be where I am today had YouthLink not been there watching out for me and my friends back then. Their facility and its staff was the one place that noticed the kids the rest of the city did not, and if we had a “home” back then that was it, if only during business hours.

There is no way to ever add up the difference YouthLink made in our lives all those years ago. I cannot begin to imagine how I and the kids who shared those streets with me would have made it without their help … indeed some of those I loved did not make it, despite help. I still thank God that I will never know how much worse things could have been.

Thank you, YouthLink staff, for seeing a need and filling it. You may never know just how much difference your getting out of bed in the morning made all those years, but know that it is vast.

Sincerely,

Micha Petty

Owner, A Time to Build Remodeling and Maintenance

Webmaster, www.AmericanRevival.org