Editor’s Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on youth homelessness in Greater Bangor.
Peter barrels down the Shaw House stairs, a cardboard box balanced carefully on his shoulder.
“Donations!” yells the tall young man, a smile crossing his face.
Austin, a teen with dark hair and glasses, leaps forward and offers to take the box off Peter’s hands.
“Unless you want to wear girl clothes, you probably don’t want this,” says Peter with a smirk.
Austin laughs — a light, pure sound that bounces around the room.
The building where this scene takes place is filled with teenagers. Most in the room on this day are between ages 15 and 20, but Shaw House on Union Street in Bangor serves those between 10 and 23. They laugh and tease one another. They are fresh-faced and full of energy. But all have something else in common that sets them apart: They are homeless.
The youth of Shaw House come from Penobscot, Piscataquis, Hancock, Washington and Aroostook counties. There is no one way in which they arrive: Their parents may drop them at the doorstep. Some learn about Shaw House from other kids or outreach workers who connect with homeless youth on the streets. Others are referred by the state. Regardless, Shaw House offers them a place to call home.
Residents of Shaw House are expected to manage an allowance, meet curfew and work steadily toward independent living.
On a busy day such as this one, the patter of footsteps and conversations echoes through the building. Case managers meet with the youth they help get on their feet while outreach workers enter, only to leave moments later to canvass the streets. Teenagers scurry about, leaving to go to work, heading to school, chatting with their case managers or enjoying down time.
Peter pauses to take a break, leaning heavily on a chair. He has been homeless for a little more than five years, since age 13. In those years, he has been an on-and-off resident of Shaw House. He knows the place “better than anyone,” he says.
In that time, he has bounced around to different places. Sometimes his family wanted him back, but they didn’t have the means to support him. Sometimes he lived on the street.
Peter, 19, works part-time at Shaw House, helping with anything that needs to be done, from painting to cleaning. He has other goals in mind. First, he wants to get his own apartment. Then he wants to go to college to study photography.
“Peter, get back to work!” someone yells from another room.
“Yes, sir!” he hollers back, bouncing to attention then shooting off in another direction.
‘Even the bad ones are good’
On a stairwell landing of Shaw House, stark black-and-white photographs line the wall. Faces peer at passers-by, eyes staring straight ahead. Each photograph tells a singular story — one that Rick Tardiff knows.
At Shaw House, Tardiff is the director of programs, but he also is an accomplished photographer who sometimes is found with a camera slung around his neck. He took the photos lining the walls and he’s proud of the youth they portray. They are the success stories.
Youth homelessness in Maine is a hard issue to quantify, but the state has received high marks for its overall efforts to combat the causes of homelessness in children. A 2014 study from the National Center on Family Homelessness, for example, placed Maine in the top 10 of states for its handling of homeless children.
Tardiff’s wife, Sally Tardiff, is the executive director of Shaw House. The Tardiffs met a long time ago, in Sally Tardiff’s home country, Scotland, when they both were working with the homeless.
There was a street magazine called The Big Issue, produced by founder Mel Young and one other journalist.
“They would give it to the homeless people for 25 pence, and [the homeless] would sell it for 50. The public loved the idea, and it went crazy. In the beginning there was no budget, so I took the photographs,” says Rick Tardiff.
The magazine’s popularity exploded, and Young finally could start paying Tardiff, and then he asked if he would like to do more personal development work.
“I got involved with working with homeless people,” Tardiff says. “I started doing workshops, showing them how to print their own stuff and take pictures — because homeless people don’t have pictures. … Sally worked in the inner cities with young people. So I started doing workshops there, too.”
Twenty-five years later, as husband and wife, they moved to Maine, Tardiff’s home state. He began at Shaw House as an outreach worker, never thinking in the beginning that he would carry his old life with him in some way.
A haven since 1991
A 1990 study by the Bangor City Council “found that on any given night, in the Greater Bangor area, there were between 200 and 250 youth without a safe, permanent, night-time residence.”
Shaw House then opened in 1991 to provide a haven for these youth. According to Tardiff, most of them arrive because of family conflict, physical or sexual abuse, drug abuse or poverty. For others, a stable home may not have ever existed.
Programs and services have been added over time. The shelter and drop-in day program provide 24-hour emergency services, counseling, case management and planning. The street outreach program, Streetlight, employs outreach workers who take to Greater Bangor to connect with youth. They pass out snacks and contact information for Shaw House and encourage the teens they meet to stop by for a visit.
Mason Place Transitional Living Program, also located at Shaw House, provides youth with a place to live during their transition into adulthood, and Shaw House’s youth health clinic provides check-ups and preventative care.
Finally, there’s the alternative education program at Shaw House, which is located within the building and works in collaboration with Presque Isle’s Carleton Project. It offers youth who may be behind in coursework or had negative educational experiences the opportunity to receive their diploma. The program employs an educator, Christopher Betts, who helps students achieve their goals.
At Shaw House, young people are given responsibilities. They have a curfew, schoolwork and chores. Last year, it served 8,186 meals, and the emergency shelter gave 106 different homeless youth a place to sleep. Five young people graduated from the school program, and Streetlight made more than 1,000 individual contacts.
Tardiff has watched kids come and go. He has seen success and failure, triumph and defeat.
“The public thinks that all the young people who stay here break into cars, shoplift and do drugs, and that’s not true,” he says. “They’re remarkable young people, these kids.”
Some of them have been hurt. Some have mental health problems. Sometimes substance abuse and alcoholism ravage their families, tearing apart their parents.
“It’s easy for us to say they’re throwaways. But then you upset people. But that’s not our intention to upset people,” Tardiff says. “We’ll work with anybody … to make things better for the young person.”
Some have left Shaw House to enter the military. But that doesn’t guarantee that they won’t struggle in the future.
“We had a few kids who ended up in the armed forces. One called us from … Korea because he had no one else to call — to tell us he was bored,” Tardiff says. “There was another one who called us from Iraq and says, ‘They’re shooting at us.’ And I say, ‘Why are you on the phone?’ … When he came back, he didn’t have anywhere to go. He didn’t have a home to go to when he came back.”
Though Tardiff lauds the success of many of those who have come through Shaw House, there are others who have struggled. Even those have had an effect on him.
“Even the bad ones are good,” he says. “They’re victims, too. People have to understand the ones that act out — ones that have anti-social behaviors — they didn’t get that for nothing.”
‘Shaw House is my home’
Peter’s story at Shaw House started, he says, when his mother kicked him out.
“She thought I was going to overdose on meds when I had my arm broken,” says Peter. “Me and my brother got into a fight, and I wanted to leave. And then I wanted to stay because I had nowhere else to go.”
Suzanne Flood, a case manager at Shaw House, has known Peter since he was 13. She, along with the other employees of Shaw House, have become his family and watched him grow up.
(Flood doesn’t like the phrase “case manager.” She prefers “go-to person.” “They’re not a case,” she says.)
“The damage that these guys have sustained from the situations they’ve been in … I can’t even begin to describe how damaged each kid is,” she says. “We try to help them get through it.”
Flood knows the details of many stories of the homeless youth who pass through Shaw House — the good and the bad. She has been there for the simple moments, and she has seen many Shaw House kids mature into adulthood.
“I don’t think the general public understands that homelessness is not a choice. … All these kids are survivors. They know so much about surviving mentally and physically. I’m amazed at them,” she says.
For instance, she watched as Peter started to shave. She watched him wear a tie for the first time.
“To see him grow to where he is,” Flood says before taking a pause. “He is such a respectable young man.”
Peter, for his part, gets upset when people talk about Shaw House negatively.
“Every day when I was at school people would make fun of me because I lived in a homeless shelter. … I know the truth about Shaw House and they don’t. That’s the best thing to know — the truth and the feeling of Shaw House. They don’t know because they’ve never been here,” Peter says.
And without it, Peter cannot say where he’d be.
“Shaw House is my home,” Peter says. “Shaw House was there for me. They helped me get on my feet. They gave me a job. When I lost my apartment they gave me a place to stay. If it wasn’t for them, I would probably be on the streets right now.”
