On Monday, May 5, Tim was a guest on 100 Huntley Street, talking with hostess Moira Brown about the origins and purpose of his new book, Bent Hope. To watch the interview, click here and scroll down to Monday’s program. 

Tell a Friend

Click here here to read the official press release.

Tell a Friend

In March 2008, Tim Huff was a guest on the “Steve Brown Etc.” radio show on the KEY LIFE radio network, broadcasting from Orlando, Florida. “Steve Brown Etc.” is broadcast throughout the USA and into Canada on both contemporary Christian and non-Christian radio stations. Steve Brown is a career radio personality, an author, a seminary professor, an in-demand speaker across North America … and un predictable. To hear Tim’s interview with Steve Brown, click here.

Tell a Friend

Turkey, socks and a challenge

A dinner in the park, a news conference in the square. At  holiday time as no other, thoughts turn to the homeless.

NECO COCKBURN
Staff Reporter

It’s almost time.

The big white tent is well lit by candles and a lantern glowing amid the darkness of Grange Park downtown.

Hours have been spent preparing for the night’s feast.

Inside, a tarp covers the muddy ground. Eight chairs surround each of the five tables. A small bag of candy marks each guest’s place.

The dozens of street youth and homeless attending the meal will get other presents as they leave: a bag filled with gloves, socks, a hat, restaurant certificates, a new sleeping bag, chocolate bars and a Christmas card.

“They’ll leave here with their hands full,” says Paul Pryce, a street youth specialist with the Christian outreach program Light Patrol, which is run by Youth Unlimited. The meal and gifts will show them that someone cares.

Pryce leaves the tent and calls to the couple of dozen street youth who huddle outside, chatting in groups.

“You’re more than welcome to come in and have a seat,” he tells them. “It’s warmer in here than out there.”

Although most guests keep their jackets on, it is. And their voices seem to warm the interior. Tray after tray of food is carried in. The tent fills with the smell of turkey and gravy.

Pryce says a prayer, and then one at a time, each table of people heads to the front of the room. They return with steaming plates. The word spreads, amd more people come in. There’s enough food for 100; they’ll probably be close to reaching that by night’s end, as people move in and out.

“I called (my parents) a couple of weeks ago and wished them a Merry Christmas,” says a 17-year-old named Paul, who is spending his second Christmas away from home.

He was kicked out after getting in trouble with the law at 15.

“Family will always be there,” he says. “If it was my choice, I’d like to go home.”

But it’s not. Some of the others are in the same boat. Some want to, some can’t, and some wouldn’t if they had the choice, Pryce says.

But family and the holidays go together, says Paul’s friend Osman. Raised in a Muslim home, he follows a simple mantra: “It’s not about (the religion behind) Christmas, it’s about family.”

“Turkey. You never see turkey,” says Tav, 28. This is a great week for food with numerous suppers being held, he says.

“I’m sure it’s easier than it will be in January and February,” he says. “I definitely won’t be eating turkey and gravy and mashed potatos.”

This is a hard time for those who sleep without a roof over their heads. “It’s murder in the wintertime,” says Tav, who’s lucky enough to have found a room in a rooming house.

Many in the city don’t have even that, which is why the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, Sherbourne Health Centre and the Rotary Club started a drive to pay for sleeping bags and other items, yesterday at Nathan Phillips Square. They hope to raise $40,000 to $60,000.

A free breakfast was provided for homeless people. As a news conference began to launch the drive, a young man lay sleeping in a bright blue bag. John, 19, was using his shoes as a pillow.

“You get used to the cold,” he said after he woke up.

But each year, many of the homeless suffer in bad weather.

“I’ve been passing out sleeping bags since 1993. Since then, virtually no new housing has been built. And the problem gets worse and worse,” said John Andras, president of the Rotary Club of Toronto.

“This is a Band-Aid, but it’s absolutely essential, because unfortunately, we have no other options. Until the politicians have the political will to do something – to build housing, to have proper rent subsidies – this is the best option and the best solution we have.”

Holiday good deeds continued across the city yesterday. About 200 students from across North America attending a convention of United Synagogue Youth helped stuff some 200 bags at Beth Emeth Yehuda synagogue, on Elder St.

Their “baskets of hope” for the homeless were filled with toiletries, socks, candy, coupons and help pamphlets for Ve-ahavta, a Jewish humanitarian group.

“It feels much better knowing that I’m helping others, rather than myself,” said Evan Green-Lowe, 15, of Parkland, Fla.

Tell a Friend

Jim Coyle

The idea of home is a profound one, for most us a physical place, a sense of rootedness, a santuary, a yearning. It speaks so much to the heart of things, touches people so deeply, that the notion of homelessness should be among the most awful there is.

For more than 10 years now, Tim Huff has seen homelessness in this city up close and in its worst manifestation: the mounting numbers of homeless youth. On Monday, he’ll help formally launch a project to do something about it. Huff is director of Youth Unlimited’s Light Patrol program, which has assembled and trained staff to help reach street kids, to gain a little trust, foster a little hope and link them up with the best available services. He’s been with Youth Unlimited for 15 years, helped develop a drop-in centre in Weston, then followed some of the most troubled of the clients downtown when they migrated there.

Since then, the 38 year-old father of two has been working on the front lines of pain and poverty – under the Gardiner, in the most remote alleyways – dealing with society’s highest-risk kids: the abused, the addicted, the violated, mistrustful and frightened. He’s sat with them as they put needles in their arms. He’s helped dig the unlucky out of snowbanks.

“The kids I focus on are kids who are so completely broken that they will not get help from adults,” he was saying yesterday. “They just are so afraid that someone else is going to hurt them. They’d never go into a shelter or drop-in centre because they couldn’t trust mom and dad, so why on earth would they trust another stranger? How could they close their eyes in a shelter? What we are is brokers of trust, I guess is one way to put it… They need to learn how to retrust an adult.”

One of the project’s benefactors has been former Ontario Lieutenant-governor Hilary Weston, who is to attend the launch Monday. Over the past year, her fundraising has helped acquire and outfit a 9-metre mobile home – containing a laptop with a database of every street-relevant agency in the city – that will be used as a base from which teams and supplies can reach those in need.

“We feed and we clothe and we take care of the immediate needs,” Huff says. “But the goal is to build enough trust over the longer term that we can move these kids to a better place. What I’ve discovered in 11 years on the streets is that we do not have enough people working physically on the street. So we decided, let’s create something where we can train staff and volunteers to be street workers.”

When Huff began this sort of work, the belief was that the people who did it best had come from the streets themselves, that they’d relate better, speak the language. He didn’t. Though he looks fairly young, has longish hair and dresses in a ’street look.’

“But, you know, that lasts only so long. The best people I’ve seen on the street are people who just had the right heart for it. Understanding street culture, we can teach people that. You can learn what the name of the street drugs are, where the tranisent movement happens across the city. We need them to come with the right heart. I always tell people the biggest three issues on the street are trust, hope and dignity.”

Of course, Huff has run into his share of spoiled brats, kids who don’t want to obey the rules at home and – especially during the summer – have decided to hit the streets. “But the point is even if they’re out here for the wrong reasons, the street will eat them up if they stay.”

Youth Unlimited is a Christian group, the Toronto chapter of an organization called Youth for Christ. But religion isn’t peddled, coversion isn’t a goal and “one the streets is never a barrier,” Huff says. “We don’t go out and say, ‘Let’s convert people to what we think.’ But we do care for their spiritual welfare, just as we care for their mental and emotional and physical.”

To Huff, the rise in youth homelessness over the last decade “correlates with the decline of the family. The more neglect and abuse, the more we see it on the street level. I always tell people the next wave of homeless youth are in your kindergartens, your nursery schools. I’m at the tail end of homelessness. The prevention actually happens with the people who are working with young kids right now.”

And with a belief, he says, that homelessness is unacceptable. “The great and tragic irony is that every day the richest people in the country drive 6 feet over the poorest people in the country. Kids sleep in the I-beams of the off-ramps to Bay St. Driving by, you’d never even know they existed.”

Report by Jim Coyle

Tell a Friend

December 6, 2003

In the shelter of a kind word

Maltreated teens – no one’s sure how many – eke out a bleak life on the margins. Calling them back takes rebuilding faith, one deed at a time, by Leslie Scrivener 

On any given day, 22,000 cars sweep across the old iron bridge at the foot of Bathurst St. toward the railway corridor, never knowing they are driving above 18-year-old Chantal Gagnon’s home.It’s a shack, built into the bridge abutment with found lumber, sandwich boards and cardboard. It’s looking good so far – except for the rats.

How do you keep them out?

For a while, Gagnon and her friend Cyndi Thomas, whom she calls her street mom, mused about hauling in 100 pounds of soil to seal off the holes. But by the end of the week, they’d settled on some wooden pallets as a floor and were feeling house-proud. They even had a door with a lock.

Despite these efforts, the harsh reality is that they are living in the undercroft of a bridge, the walls are damp, the nights are cold and their shanty is surrounded by litter: bottle caps, needles, condoms, old shoes, blankets, plastic foam. They’ve been cleaning it up, sorting the garbage – Gagnon was picking up syringes the other day so their dog, Sally, wouldn’t step on them.

No one really knows how many young people live on Toronto’s streets. Some estimate there are at least 2,000 or 3,000 kids between 15 and 24, but not even the experts, the street workers who go out each night with clean socks, kind words and hot chocolate looking for the hidden homeless, know for sure.

Even by 9 or 10 p.m., some kids don’t know where they’ll end up at night.

“I’ll sleep wherever,” says a 20-year-old, looking the worse for wear on Queen St. W. “It always works out.”

‘Wherever’ can be a doorway, in a park, under a bridge, usually huddled with two or three others for warmth and safety.

With the constant traffic, it’s difficult to get a really good night’s sleep, says Gagnon.

“It’s bad in winter. I get cold.” She wears five or six layers of clothes during the day, fewer at night, but she’d rather sleep under the bridge than in a shelter.

“I don’t like people breathing down my neck, going through my stuff. I’ve had a sleeping bag stolen in a shelter, but here, I’ve never had stuff stolen, because we’re all looking out for each other.”

Less hardy street folk have found “sugar daddies and mommies” to look after them for the winter, says Thomas.

Gagnon is from Winnipeg and has lived on the streets for a few years; she calls home every week. “They like to know I’m still alive,” she says.

Why she left home – well, that’s a long story and left untold. “I have a street family down here.”

Gagnon and Thomas, who’s 44, have each other and a community of six others, mostly young people in their late teens or early 20s, living in tents or behind roughly constructed shacks.

A few blocks over, near Spadina Ave., a 24-year-old named Tu sleeps alone under a Gardiner Expressway on-ramp, perched on planks resting on the flanges of the bridges I-beams. You could almost miss his roost – though not the rumble of traffic, 25,000 cars a day overhead – until a flashlight’s beam captures the edge of a blue sleeping bag neatly folded over the boarding.

“Are you all right up there?” calls Tim Huff, who started a low-key Christian outreach last year called Light Patrol. Its street workers have a special interest, finding the young homeless hidden in out-of-the-way places, the kids who are turned off shelters, or too afraid to trust anyone in authority.

Tu says he’s just fine, but a little hungry With no food on hand, Huff gives Tu a fistful of coins, which he accepts in red mittened hands.

Tu beams and bids his visitors good night.

“How many people living in their big homes can even crack a smile like that?” asks Huff.

When former Lieutenant-Governor Hilary Weston came with him on a late-night tour, she watched a girl creep under the on-ramp. “Where can that sweet child be going?” Weston asked him.

“We have such beautiful kids,” Huff says. “Sometimes the media gives the sense that these kids are hardened, but they are like your own child, with beautiful hearts and minds, and they’ve had to do terrible things to survive – carry drugs, sell their bodies.”

Huff has seen kids in bad shape – gas sniffers who can’t string two sentences together, a kid who lost an eye sleeping out in the cold, kids he’s had to dig out of snowdrifts. In the 16 years he’s worked on Toronto’s streets, he’s lost 18 kids to suicide.

Huff’s career with young people started when Youth Unlimited and his Baptist church opened a drop-in centre called Frontlines in Weston, where he grew up. By the early 90s, skinheads in the area were beating up minorities moving into the neighbourhood. Huff took an interest in the troubled lives of the gang members and learned many were living in squats and under bridges. It led to his work downtown.

“I knew their lives needed to be changed,” he says.

Private donations cover the programs and salaries for Huff and a staff of five.

He often works from midnight to 3 am, when no one else is around and the teens may be coming down off drugs. He’s checking up on kids forgotten by others, looking the “sweet child” hidden behind the gruff exterior.

“It’s critical, it’s proof – if we are showing up it means they are still important, there are still people who care.”

His goal is simple: Get kids to the point where they will trust an adult again and believe that adults will not harm them. That trust may lead to accepting shelter, going back to school, getting a job.

“Our agenda is to show them God’s love. Kids will tell me God has screwed them over. ‘If there’s a God, why am I out here? If there is a God, why was I abused from 6 to 16 in my own home?’

“We’re not getting into grand theology, but they are really interested in the conversation. We try to love them as God wants us to.”

It’s important to get the kids off the streets, says Huff, before the bad habits and addictions destroy their lives and before mental illness sets in.

“I just love these kids,” he says. “There’s something amazing about helping a young person dream again, that they can be something when everything in their lives has worked against that.”

Life on the street, on the other hand, “eats people up. There’s nothing good on the street for anybody.”

The first step in those acts of love is hot food. The Light Patrol motorhome has a stove. One night, it serves a meaty stew made by street worker Ruth Heise’s mother; another night, soup. “Smells like Christmas in here,” says a young man stepping into the motorhome one night this week.

As the young people crowd into the van, you’d think for a moment they were sitting around a kitchen table at home. “Hey! Can I have a bun?” says one. “Do you have any clean socks?” asks another. “Black so they don’t look so dirty.”

They are frank and a little wry. They talk about police and drugs and their bad teeth.

“A cop isn’t allowed to do a lot of things, but they do them anyway. The same with us. Are we allowed to commit crimes? No! But we do anyway.”

While Light Patrol is a Christian program – part of Youth Unlimited, which in turn is part of Youth for Christ (founded in the ‘40s by Billy Graham) – its volunteers and street workers seem to spread the word by example rather than proselytizing.

“This organization is thoroughly Christian, but they don’t judge me if I don’t believe,” says Thomas. “I don’t have to accept Jesus into my heart before I step into this van. I feel like I’m walking into a cousin’s home. I can ask for seconds. Hey! Can I have a blanket? They fill in all the gaps.”

Outside Chantal Gagnon’s shack, an old, soiled teddy bear lies in the frozen earth. What’s it doing here amid the rubble and castoffs?

When young people run away from home, they move fast. They’re fleeing physical or sexual abuse, violent family breakups, adults with addictions, Huff says. He understands the teddy in the dirt.

“When they are racing from home, kids pack what they think they’ll need. I’ve seen abandoned suitcases with pink flannel pajamas with teddy bears. The little girl that owned that suitcase ended up on the street. Wherever she thought she was going, she thought she’d end up in a place where she could wear pink p.j.’s. No matter how harsh life is, they are still little girls.”

How do they spend their time? The Salvation Army brings breakfast; they panhandle for lunch or dinner. They rummage through dumpsters for building materials. They spend their money on batteries and duct tape, and once in a while, a couple of drinks.

They can wash their clothes, shower and cook in the community kitchen at The Meeting Place, the service run by St. Christopher House at Queen St. and Bathurst. This month, they’ll earn a bit of money selling Christmas trees for St. Christopher House.

Though young people 15 to 24 compose 12 per cent of the population, they make up 22 per cent of shelter clients, the Toronto Report Card on Housing and Homelessness reported this year. About 6,900 youth stayed in municipally funded shelters last year.

Most kids running from home gravitate downtown because more services are available there, but there are also homeless young people in the regions surrounding Toronto. Lennox Holdford, an outreach worker at Pathways Home Base Youth Drop-in Centre in

“It’s out there. Most communities live in denial that we don’t have that kind of thing.”

Huff says all the money in the world can’t really fix homelessness, because home is supposed to be a place where children and young people feel love.

“At some level, this rich country, beautiful country has decided that homelessness is acceptable. But until people stop hurting one another, we won’t stop homelessness.”

Tell a Friend

Special to ChristianWeek

Mississauga, ON – A new book launched in May will help children to understand the issues of homelessness.

The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge: Helping Children Understand Homelessness, written and illustrated by Tim Huff, lays the groundwork for parents and teachers to start talking with children about homelessness.

“The world won’t be shaped into something better because we’ve blocked or hidden children from difficult things. But it can be changed in miraculous ways if we hold them tight and walk through the harsh things of the world with them,” explains Huff, a Toronto resident who has dedicated his life to young people living on the streets.

For nearly two decades, Huff has worked full time among poor and marginalized youth in the Greater Toronto Area with Youth Unlimited (Toronto Youth for Christ), where he founded Frontlines Youth Centre and pioneered Youth Unlimited’s Light Patrol street outreach. His work on the streets among homeless youth and adults has led him into alleyways, under bridges and off-ramps and into other dark corners of the city.

“Homelessness has been called one of the greatest tragedies of our time. In an age of prosperity and plenty, hundreds of thousands of people continue to find themselves homeless.”

Although he’s traveled extensively throughout North America and Europe researching, networking with and training others in creative and compassionate responses to domestic poverty and homelessness, it was the voices of his own children that inspired him to write his first book.

“My children started asking hard questions about those who are homeless and I wanted to provide them with answers that were age-appropriate, gentle and truthful. Not answering them wasn’t an answer. This was the beginning of the concept for the book.”

It took Huff nearly five years to complete the book that captures what he’s seen in his 20 years of working on the streets into a form children can easily understand.

After several rejections from publishers who told him “this is the kind of information people are trying to keep out of their households, not bring in,” the manuscript caught the attention of Castle Quay Books.

“And here we are. Kind of seems like a big fuss for a little book,” Huff said during a May press conference. “But the actual issue is anything but small. I believe it’s the substance of what can change the world on every level. To some extent, I’ve fooled many people as I’ve called it a ‘children’s book’ – as though it would be something that helps adults teach children. But what I know for sure is that this is a book that will allow children to teach and inspire adults.”

Former lieutenant-governor of Ontario Hilary M. Weston (who wrote the book’s foreword) spoke at the launch event, and Fred Penner, a well-known children’s entertainer, performed.

“This isn’t only a global issue. Poverty is in our own backyard and we have a responsibility to our home communities,” says Dave Toycen. “Tim’s book is powerful and will help our own children to better understand the issue.”

Tell a Friend