Thomas Breen photo
Youth Continuum Director of Community Services Grega: “We knew the kids were out there.”
A local homeless youth support nonprofit has expanded its work to include a focus on helping sex and labor-trafficked minors, thanks to a newly received three-year, $495,000 federal grant.
Youth Continuum Director of Community Services Kathy Grega announced that new set of services Thursday morning during the regular weekly CompStat meeting on the fourth floor of the police department’s headquarters at 1 Union Ave.
Grega told the roughly 50 law enforcement representatives and community partners in the room that Youth Continuum received the $495,000 grant from the federal Department of Justice last October.
The grant is specifically for bulking up the Grand Avenue-based nonprofit’s support services for people under 18 who are or are suspected of having been transported and manipulated for reasons such as forced labor or sexual exploitation.
“We knew the kids were out there,” Grega said about the overlap between a local population of trafficked minors and the homeless youth population that Youth Continuum has helped in this city for decades.
She said the Grand Avenue-based nonprofit has hired two full-time “minor human trafficking street outreach case managers,” Taneisha Swindell and Dafina Naciadis.
Youth Continuum’s new trafficked minor support staffers will focus on providing immediate response and assessments for identified or suspected victims.
Their work will also include helping to identify victims, reconnect them with their families, coordinate legal help if necessary, distribute emergency harm reduction kits filled with everything from condoms to hand sanitizer to first aid supplies, and provide emergency shelter support without first having to go through the state Department of Children and Families (DCF). It is collaborating in those efforts with the New Haven-based international anti-trafficking organization Love146.
Thursday’s CompStat meeting.
Youth Continuum already operates four emergency shelter beds on Winthrop Avenue that are reserved for people under 18 years old, she said. There is usually a vacancy or two in those holdings.
That’s not the case for the 12 young adult emergency shelter beds that the nonprofit also operates on Winthrop, she added, which are almost always 90 percent full.
Youth Continuum is currently in the process of building out at its Grand Avenue site 12 to 20 new beds for homeless youth aged 18 to 24 as part of its collaboration with Y2Y.
“Young people, their level of trust is nonexistent,” Grega said about much of the youth homeless population the nonprofit already works with. She said one of the key challenges for the minor trafficking work that Youth Continuum is now taking on will be to win the trust of victims or suspected victims whom the nonprofit knows that it can help.
She said that in the past few weeks, the minor trafficking case workers have already spent a fair amount of time on the New Haven Green, where one person whom many trafficked youth have had contact with spends much of their time, Grega said.
Asst. Chief Karl Jacobson asked Grega and her team to meet with a sergeant from the narcotics unit immediately after the meeting so that the police department and the new minor trafficking case workers can begin to coordinate their efforts.