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Amber Matthews is a senior youth advocate at The Detroit Phoenix Center, an asset-based, youth-driven services provider helping teenagers and young adults transition from homelessness and poverty.
Amber Matthews tries to stay rosy and upbeat as she prepares for an upcoming event. Her nine-month-old nephew’s relentless cries had kept her up late into the quiet hours of a snowless January night. All too soon the sunrise had arrived.
She throws on a loose-fitting, light brown blazer, dark brown dress pants, and mahogany loafers with maize and blue stripes. Matthews knows clothes can make the woman, so she hopes to exude an image of budding professionalism. Her apparel choices — aiming to impress impressionable youth — show off the woman she aspires to become, an approachable authority figure, yet still preserve her girlish charm. “I want to give off, like, a big sister vibe,” she says. Half of her hair is dyed a funky and luminous pea green shade, which she processed herself. She styles her locks back into French braids, pulled away from her cherub-like face. Her big brown eyes show the strength of her soul.
Around 8:30 a.m., Matthews leaves the two-bedroom apartment on Detroit’s west side she shares with her older sister Danielle Spratt and Spratt’s three sons to go to work. She begins her commute by riding two city buses for an hour and a half — luckily enough, the wait times aren’t too long. She arrives at The Detroit Phoenix Center, situated inside a stocky building with a silvery facade on a nondescript stretch of Woodward Avenue. Established as a nonprofit organization in 2017, the center is an asset-based, youth-driven services provider helping teenagers and young adults transition out of homelessness and poverty. They also help build power among young people to drive systems change.
After losing some sleep, Matthews is sapped of the energy she needs for the day. The days before already felt heavier and more burdensome. The 24-year-old is a senior youth advocate — the best job she’s ever had. She earned the position after working as a peer support specialist through AmeriCorps and serving as the president of the Youth Action Board, a coalition of young leaders-in-training who advocate for policy and reform of systems which combat homelessness and poverty. Matthews took advantage of the center’s resources and services, such as the food pantry, housing support, leadership workshops, and a life skills coaching program, as she couch-surfed and slept on the floor of a shelter just a few years ago. Now she’s held the job for almost a year.
She knows — so do her co-workers, her sister, and her boyfriend — how far she’s come. She has finally begun to blossom. But lately, Matthews has been growing tired for reasons that aren’t the fault of a weepy infant. A tension gnaws at her heart. She worries about burning out, knowing she can’t be everything for everyone all the time. She’s always been a furnace of compassion, laboring in care ever since her mother began drinking wine like medicine while growing up in rural Mississippi.
At the center, commotion erupts over the next few hours, during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration Matthews helped organize and plan with current Youth Action Board members: donation drop-offs of essentials like toothbrushes, toothpaste, and clothes; a workshop on leadership and advocacy that imparted the necessity of lifting one’s voice on behalf of another.
The youth were coming and would benefit from inspiring speeches on a day annually reserved for that kind of inspiration to flourish. And when they come, they often blitz Matthews with questions about what high school was like, what college would be like, and the next chapter, and the next.
In her role, Matthews is more than a mentor, advisor, and connector of resources. She sees herself as the keeper of dozens of little flames. She’s there to light the match, start a fire within them, she says, so one day they can stand on their own.
How much more could she give them so they could have another chance toward some semblance of stability? Some semblance of a life? They remind her, as they scurry to her knees, again and again, of the child she once was.
“There are a lot of homeless youth that I’ve come across that have so much potential and drive, and they really want and have aspirations,” says Matthews, who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian as a little girl. “But their living situation, sometimes it’s so bad that they have to put their aspirations and dreams to the side just to try to survive. After a while, they don’t care for their dreams anymore.”
Her eyes were watching the streets
The precarity of their lifestyles makes youth experiencing homelessness elusive, so Matthews often relies on her intuition to guide her to where she thinks their hangouts and pit stops are as they roam the city: gas stations, Starbucks cafes, liquor stores, anywhere with Wi-Fi.
On her outreach quests, Matthews carries a stack of white and orange square cards in the pockets of her winter coat, which list The Detroit Phoenix Center’s programs, such as after-school enrichment clubs on college preparation and entrepreneurship, or resources such as showers, laundry, a food pantry, a hygiene closet. She drops these cards on the counters of stores and shops or on the seats of city buses, hoping they catch the youth’s eyes and hook their curiosity.
The popular stock images of homelessness show a person sporting tattered clothes and sleeping on a sidewalk alone or standing at the corner of an intersection, holding a makeshift cardboard sign asking for spare change or spare compassion and sometimes inches away from a stampede of cars beating the traffic lights. But youth and young adults often experience a form of homelessness that’s less recognizable.They are stuck in a cycle of transience, jumping from couch to couch, living in hotels or motels, camping grounds, cars, abandoned buildings.
People who are doubled up — meaning they live at someone else’s house — or pay for hotel or motel stays generally do not meet the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of homelessness, and they are not eligible to stay at a shelter and access any associated services, like job training, says Jennifer Erb-Downward, the director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, who studies youth homelessness across the state.
Even when they qualify, the majority of young adults tend to avoid shelters, making their plight largely unseen. All of this disconnection from the systems charged to support them amplifies their risk of harm. “The reality of couch surfing, a lot of these situations are not safe,” Erb-Downward says. “People are often forced to make this choice between having a place to stay and not be on the street, and maybe being in a situation that might put them in danger in some other way.”
And some of the reasons why youth become homeless are breathtaking in their severity. Their families, gripped by financial hardship, were forced out of their homes because of an eviction or the loss of stable jobs. They aged out of foster care and struggle to find their own footing. They were incarcerated as juveniles and once they returned as citizens, they lack the necessary skills to get work or have trouble finding a stable home so they can jumpstart their life again. They are ostracized by their families who’ve kicked them out of the house because they express their true gender that doesn’t match their birth certificate, or they fall in love with people no matter their gender at all.
These youth are among the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, who’ve escaped hostile homes and wallowed in broken systems. They’ve spent nights without a warm bed, a harrowing experience some in the city will never truly know or turn away from entirely. Many youth experiencing homelessness lack basic items: a birth certificate, a driver’s license or state ID card, a social security card, a phone.
If Matthews sees teens wandering during school hours or looking lonely or sullen, she’ll walk up to them, flash a smile, say her name. She’s perfected her spiel. “I’m not trying to pry,” she tells them. “I’m willing to be here [for you].” She’ll sell them on what they’ve been missing out on — a safe sanctuary — where she could become their surrogate guardian. She wants to teach them self-reliance when some of them didn’t grow up with much life guidance. She’ll cultivate their strengths, not their deficits. But she can only take them so far.
She already helped one young man polish his resume and prepare for a job interview at a Ford plant. He tanked the interview, Matthews says, but at least he tried. Matthews believes more employers need to meet young people where they are. Not having a mailing address shouldn’t prevent a young person from getting hired. She also offered feedback on a college application essay to another young woman, who then started her undergraduate degree in North Carolina, which Matthews quietly celebrated because so many youth who are homeless don’t make it that far. A 2019 national study revealed youth experiencing homelessness were less likely to enroll in a four-year college compared to peers who’ve had stable housing. They also have difficulty accessing financial aid and can’t afford to pay for their education, which may belong on a lower pillar among their hierarchy of needs.
Sometimes when Matthews talks to youth and young adults on the streets, they brush her off, assuring her they’re totally fine. Thanks, but no thanks. Matthews is never fazed by these gentle rejections. Other times, her pitches land, and the youths come to visit the center. Some come once and then never return. Others decide this is the place where they could mend the shattered parts of their lives. Even then, once she tries to get into the nitty gritty of problem-solving for what ails them, Matthews suspects they aren’t revealing the full story. That’s one of the toughest parts of the job, Matthews says — trying to unearth the truth.
“It’s always kind of hard because they’re not really comfortable speaking about everything that they’re going through,” she says. “So it’s like, you get little bits and pieces and you’re trying to see how you can help with the little information that you do get.” Matthews knows they’re out there, somewhere. A chance encounter with them could mean access to all of these lifelines. Because what are their chances to survive without them?
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