Do1Thing Blog

As we consider the plight of runaway and homeless teenagers on this Valentine’s Day, I’d like to toss out two  numbers — $9.2 million and $18 million.

First, let’s talk about the $9.2 million. In May 2008, Daybreak of Dayton, a nonprofit organization that has been helping homeless and runaway teenagers since 1975, opened a new shelter in a former dry cleaning plant. The bright, peach-colored brick building holds a 16-bed emergency shelter for homeless youth, ages 10 to 18; 24 furnished apartments for youths 18 to 21, offices, a kitchen, recreation rooms, a play area for the babies and toddlers that come with the young mothers, and a computer lab for job training.

Private donors raised more than $6 million of the total $9.2 construction cost. The rest came from government grants and other public funding.

It is a bright place where frightened, often abused, young people can feel safe, sometimes for the first time in their lives.

The average stay in the emergency shelter is two to three weeks; older teens can stay longer in the apartments. The place is full almost every night.

Daybreak has another 33 apartments in the community and works with at least 200 “street outreach” clients, young people who can’t or won’t come into the shelter. Those who stay in the apartments pay $40 a month toward the rent, which is subsidized by Daybreak. They also have to   meet the terms of their individual contracts. This means getting job training or going to school, working, attending counseling, staying sober.

The nonprofit’s total budget is about $3 million a year to keep services going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at the shelter and throughout the community.

Forty beds at the shelter times 365 nights a year is 14,600 bed-nights a year. Or put another way, that is 14,600 times a year that homeless children and youths don’t have to sleep on the street or stay in abusive situations.

As I walked through the new Daybreak facility yesterday, I admired the cheerful daycare area with its white cribs and bright educational toys, the streamlined apartments, the lounge with sofas and a flat-screen TV. The social worker accompanying me, nodded but she looked worried. What was I going to write?

“You know, there are some people who say it’s too nice. That we’re giving them too much,” she said.

I was surprised. The new building is clean and nice and all that, but it’s hardly luxurious.

“I think they would feel differently if they could see what we see with these kids,” she said. “But they just hear the numbers and well…”

How much is too much to save a child? To save 50 or 100 or 500 children? How much is too much to combat homelessness in one of the most economically depressed regions of the country?

To answer that question, let’s consider the $18 million.

Last September at a Sotheby’s art auction, the British shock artist Damien Hirst sold a calf carcass pickled in formaldehyde and encased in a Lucite box for $18 million. The hooves were cast in solid, 18-karat gold. As record-setting as $18 million was for this so-called “animal art,” that price paled next to the $100 million that Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull brought a few years ago. Art critics lauded this pickled bovine in a box as brilliant satire and a few went to so far as to predict the $9 million spent by its new owner would be seen as a good investment.

Now, one can argue that the $9.2 million spent for a new shelter for homeless children and youths has nothing to do with a sum of almost twice that amount spent at an art auction for a pickled calf with golden hooves. But I don’t see it that way. The way we spend our money, individually and as a society, says a lot about our priorities and about who we are. 

Which investment would you rather make? Nine million dollars to improve the lives of countless teenagers? Or $18 million to look at a dead cow suspended in formaldehyde?

Homeless teenagers? Pickled cow? Homeless teenagers? Pickled cow?

Gee, that’s a tough one…

– Debbie M. Price, Dayton, Ohio.