- Home
- Business & Marketing (833)
- Editorials (671)
- Entertainment (2033)
- Fashion (1032)
- Highbrid (189)
- Honeys (2876)
- Humor (948)
- Music (5222)
- Need to Know (2224)
- News (2076)
- Podcasts (4)
- ARCHIVE
Thursday, May 1, 2008 | 12:24pm
Djimon Hounsou Petitions Senate to Reauthorize the Runaway & Homeless Youth Act
Is adolecent runaways even a problem in our communities?
Djimon “Give us Free” Hounsou was on Capitol Hill Tuesday to lobby for Congress to reauthorize the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, designed to fund organizations that reach out to over two million runaways across the country.
According to People.com, Hounsou, the former model, turned actor, turned Kimora Lee boy toy, spoke to Congress about being homeless in Paris during the early 1980s.
“I lived on the streets for some time – fighting for survival, searching out nothing more than my daily necessities for a meager existence,” Hounsou told a U.S. Senate panel. In the “wintertime, when I didn’t have enough warm clothes to sustain the harsh weather outside, I was sent to a juvenile prison to spend the night. It was three or four years before I was discovered on the street by a fashion designer [Thierry Mugler] and my life started to turn around, eventually.“
The Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs are comprised of three components: Street Outreach, Basic Centers, and Transitional Living.
You hear about many of these stories but I rarely see them. I’m sure they happen you know where kids hitchhike across the country to Hollywood to pursue the acting career their bible belt parents wouldn’t let them chase.  It just seems like such a fictitious subject matter to me. Is it just something that effects other ethnic backgrounds? Is there anyone out there in the Nation who can speak more intelligently about the subject than I? Please enlighten me…us. Â
Pingback: Djimon Hounsou Petitions Senate to Reauthorize the Runaway …