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As a former volunteer for a clearinghouse outreach site The Invisible Youth I discovered that Russell, Founder and Creator of The Invisible Youth created a place of help for youths to find answers. Why?

He was a homeless youth, abandoned by his parents, and the system punished him for his 'crime'. He then became the very criminal they formed and deprived him into being. In the forty-four years that he was incarcerated, he discovered why he survived the cruel irony of his childhood. He survived to stop homeless youths from becoming the 'feeder' for the all too profitable business of the prison systems.

Ninety percent of those placed in our Juvenile Justice Systems come from the Child Protection Systems. Ninety percent of those juveniles become the adults who populate our Criminal Justice Systems in prisons. Child Protection Services and Child Welfare obviously are not protecting our children. And though they are a large part of that inefficiency, so are we as a community. No matter what our excuses are, we take no notice of a child that is being abused. We don't want to get involved or if we decide to make that call, we are not taken seriously, or worse; the child is placed into the system and there they stay.

They are institutionalized and abused by the system. No love or compassion are they offered. Nor do they ask for it. Instead they learn that there is no power in being a child. Some never make it out of the hell we put them through. Some only make it to the larger, more overwhelming criminal element of prison.

I have to ask myself and now ask you; how difficult is it to take compassion on a homeless or abused child and offer them a meal, a kind word, a warm and safe place to sleep? Or offer a listening ear and an empathic response to their cry for help? How difficult is it to offer their single parent a break for the night or a chance to rest between work and raising their family? How can we turn away and pretend they just do not exist?

How can we allow our neighbors and friends to starve and go without heat in the winter, when we know they are laid off or are out of work and have no resources to take care of their family? How can we do not one damn thing, when we listen to a man verbally and physically abuse his wife, night after night, and not offer her and her children a safe haven or give her help when she asks? How can we look at ourselves in the mirror or sleep at night when we know that we are abusing these people, these children, just as much as

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