For nearly three years Rochelle Ruffin crashed in the homes and apartments of various friends and family members while she continued to attend Rainier Beach High School.
While she always had a roof to shield her from Seattle's notoriously dark and damp weather, she was technically homeless during her couch-surfing days.
At one point, Ruffin sought help through King County Family Services, a program designed to find housing for foster children. It was here that she met Aaron Dixon, a committed community activist and Seattle native raised in the Central Area.
Unfortunately, the program had nothing to offer the young woman, and Dixon had to refer her away from King County Family Services.
"I saw kids that were falling through the cracks that didn't really fit in the [King County Family Services] profile," Dixon remembered. "[Ruffin's] case stuck in my mind."
In 2002, Dixon left King County Family Services to build on his vision of helping young adults constructively move from their rebellious and headstrong, late teenage years into the newfound freedoms and responsibilities of their early 20s.
Soon after his departure, Dixon marshaled his energy and local contacts to start the Central House Youth Association (CHYA), an organization dedicated to providing young people facing tough situations with a stable and supportive home environment.
Lifelong activist
Dixon first became inspired to organize and help yong people in 1976 while living in Oakland, Calif., when he was only 19 years old. A member of the Black Panther Party, Dixon started Oakland's first gang-intervention program.
On the tumultuous heels of the civil-rights movement, Dixon stayed in California for 10 years while he refined his compassionate social-work skills, helping out with maligned, disadvantaged and troubled youths in a notoriously rough-and-tumble urban setting.
Seeing an opportunity to move back to the Pacific Northwest, Dixon returned to Seattle in 1986 and worked for four years as a gang-intervention specialist for the city.
He moved into the private sector doing similar work for Southwest Youth and Family Services for three years and then for the South End's Sharples Alternative High School (currently Aki Kurose Middle School Academy) for four years until 1998.
"I spent a lot of time trying to find housing," Dixon remembered.
A man with a big heart and a good judge of character, the single father of two girls even opened his home to some of the people his day-job programs could not help out for various reasons. During the late 1990s, Dixon housed three young men, two of whom just finished doing some jail time, for a total of two and a half years, while his girls were in elementary school.
"I'm doing the same thing I was doing when I was with the [Black Panther] Party, but I don't have any involvement with guns," Dixon said. "I don't have to worry about the police trying to kill me. That's really the only difference to what I'm doing now as to what I was doing then."
A safe house
Shortly after the CHYA was founded, Dixon's organization came across a good bit of luck when they heard the Children's Home Society for the Mentally Ill was shutting down shop after four or five years in the social-work business up in North Seattle.
With the room to provide comfortable accommodations for eight people age 18 to 24, the North 85th Street and Wallingford Avenue North home became CHYA's Harder House.
Immediately, Dixon and his house coordinator, live-in resident manager and various volunteers began implementing their family-focused program with financial help from various private, federal, state, county and city organizations.
"One of the biggest obstacles most case managers and social workers face is the unstable housing, or an unsupportive environment, that a lot of our young people live in," Dixon asserted.
According to him, most of the people currently living at the Harder House have been there for more than a year and a half, and the program's existence is currently learned of by word-of-mouth.
Dixon observed that most of the Harder House residents come from a single-parent family where the parents didn't have the resources to help their young adult children transition from home to a healthy, independent-living situation. Dixon has seen young people faced with such poor home support and encouragement abandon their dreams and goals, feeling it's too difficult to accomplish them.
Taking action
Such a scenario was almost realized for two current Harder House residents: Leonetta Johnson and Shakala Tucker, both 20 years old.
During their junior years in high school (Johnson attended Franklin, then Cleveland; Tucker went to Rainier Beach), the girls found themselves skipping classes, at odds with their single mothers and eventually dropping out.
The women enrolled in the YWCA's alternative high school, became friends and heard about CHYA and the Harder House.
"We're 20, but it's still hard to find your way when you're young, especially when it's so much easier to do bad than good," Tucker noted. "I can say that when I first moved here, I didn't take it as serious as I do today. They're here to help us, but they're not going to baby-sit us, and they're not going to keep on trying to get me to do what I know that I need to be doing."
As with Johnson and Tucker, all Harder House residents are required to sit down with the staff, lay out their goals and become educated so they can take action to achieve these goals.
"I'd probably be stuck in my mom's house, laying down, not even going to school because my mom is not getting me to go to school," Johnson asserted. "Here, I have requirements that I have to do. I have to go to school, or I have to keep a job."
Along with the school and work expectations, Harder House residents can get experienced support with personal issues, solid advice on practical day-to-day stuff such as how to keep one's finances healthy, and even financial assistance with college.
"It's about family here," Dixon said. "I try to treat them the same way I treat my kids. When my kids go away to college and they need something, I'll send it to them because they're still part of the family. That's what I like the most: building this extended family and helping them to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve, irregardless of what obstacles are in their way."
To learn more about the Central House Youth Association and its volunteer opportunities, call 522-5412, or write to 1122 E. Pike St., P.O. Box 960, Seattle, WA 98122.[[In-content Ad]]
