NEWSBYTINA KELLEY

How many of us who work on the issue of homeless, or who work with homeless people directly, truly know them as well as we would like? If our understanding of their situation is only cursory, how can we be as effective as we need to be? And how can our efforts at getting better acquainted not feel one-sided and perhaps suspect?

To the rescue: a freshman at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Kathryn Baker took on the project of compiling an anthology of creative writing and artwork by homeless or formerly homeless people living in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"Voice for the Voiceless" has 16 contributors, including 13 writers and three artists, ranging in age from 20 to 57. They call it how they see it. One is a doctoral candidate, one is a qualified hospital worker, one was an accomplished boxer during his teens and one is eight months sober.

Reading the collection in some ways is more compelling than a meaty discussion of life over a cup of coffee with a client after the lights are turned down for the night — instead of politely answering questions from an outsider, the writers and artists describe the answers they have found to their questions, during lonely hours on the street, or sleepless nights spent on a sister's couch.

Violence against homeless young people is far too common. Each year, about 5,000 youth who are out on their own die from assaults, illnesses or suicide. A new fund created by Covenant House is trying to address the issue. The April Fund, commemorating April, a 19-year-old New York woman who was killed on the streets last August, aims to improve street outreach efforts, to get more young people in out of the cold and away from dangers like drugs, prostitution, hunger and despair.

When asked how best to remember April, someone wisely wrote on Covenant House's Facebook page: "Our children are really the ones that can drive the message home about what they are experiencing from having to live and survive on the streets. Who better to hear it from than the actual person (children) themselves?"

So we asked some Covenant House residents for their ideas. They discussed their fears, their ideas for improvements and a range of ways regular people could help. (Some preferred to remain anonymous, or to give only one name.)

A 22-year-old man who used to stay at Covenant House four years ago and was sitting at a picnic table outside the Newark shelter said he would like to see more monitoring of homeless shelters. Residents should log in and out, and leave word about where they are going.

His sister, he said, had been staying at a homeless shelter in the Bronx. When she left it briefly, she was raped, and he thinks she would have been safer if more people had known her whereabouts.

When the naked body of a 19-year-old woman was found behind a church in Times Square last August, no newspaper ran the story. No suspects have been named. Too few leads came in to the Crimestoppers.

Instead, April very quietly became another of the approximately 5,000 young people who die every year due to street violence, illnesses or suicide, according to Covenant House, the largest privately-funded provider of services to runaway and homeless young people. April had stayed at Covenant House several times before her death.

But when you look at the statistics, you can easily see the factors that put young people without a permanent address at risk of violence and death.

A recent study by the Covenant House Institute, which conducts research on issues affecting the agency's young people, traced the prevalence of violence in their lives before they ended up on the streets. It found that 41 percent of the young people had witnessed acts of violence in their homes, 19 percent were beaten with an object, the same percentage were sexually abused and 15 percent said someone close to them had been murdered. To these young people, physical danger is a constant companion.

And young people who are used to abuse at home may be at higher risk of bein