Every night, approximately 3,000 children in Dallas go to sleep with no place to call home. The trauma of homelessness can leave these children with long-lasting social, emotional, and educational deficits. The mission of the non-profit Vogel Alcove is to provide stability and a foundation of support for homeless children and their families, reversing the effects of homelessness before those deficits become permanent.
Karen Hughes is the CEO of Vogel Alcove. She gained her extensive knowledge and understanding of children as a childcare facilitator in Washington D.C. at the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
When she came to Vogel Alcove in Dallas in 2011, she was tasked with working with homeless children, something she had never experienced in her career. In addition to new territory, Ms. Hughes had no roadmap to develop the needed programs and services.
“We are so unique in what we do…there are very few programs in this country that do what Vogel does in terms of working with all children that are homeless or in the comprehensive nature of the services,” says Hughes. “It’s like you are creating it every single day and figuring out, ‘How we are going to do this?'”
Hughes tried calling other homeless centers across the country to find out how they were doing things, but had little success.
“They said ‘We don’t know, when you figure it out, you call us back.’ So we have been like pioneers [in the field]. There are not a lot of people doing the kind of work that we are doing.”
Though her work is challenging, she says, “I love challenges, so that is part of the fun, figuring out what else we can do to provide for these children.”
One of the innovative systems adopted under Hughes is the “two-generational” approach. “We believe in a two-generational approach because we know that we cannot help break the cycle of poverty if we are not working with the family and the child at the same time,” says Hughes.
“We have a team of five master-level social workers who work closely with the families individually. Wherever that family is moving, the social workers are there to help them move forward,” Hughes stated.
Vogel Alcove helps parents find sustainable housing, educational services such as GED and ESL programs, and careers that pay living wages.
“We had a mom that came here, and she had lost her nurse’s license — she was working at McDonald’s — and so we helped her regain her nurse’s degree,” says Hughes.
Other support programs Vogel provides for parents include financial literacy classes and a mini-grant program to fund things such as uniforms for work or a month of rent so they will not relapse into homelessness.
“Often people do not understand family homelessness because they only understand chronic homelessness … what they see on the side of the road or under the [over]pass. Family homelessness is very different, and the main cause of family homelessness is the lack of a support system,” explains Hughes.
“Life happens to all of us; when certain things happen to us, we are going to have family or friends or somebody that rallies around us to help us get through it. Our moms [at Vogel Alcove] do not have support systems, which is the number one cause of family homelessness, so what we try to do is help them build that support system back up,” Hughes explained.
For the children of Vogel Alcove, the help given is life-changing. According to FirstThingsFirst.org, 90% of a child’s brain develops before age 5, meaning the experiences they have in their early years can have a lasting effect on them. Many children come into the program with trauma that affects them socially, mentally, and emotionally.
Stephanie McGary, LPC, RPT, is Vogel Alcove’s Sensory Lab facilitator. She describes homelessness as “ongoing trauma” that the child is reminded of daily.
“That trauma rewires the brain as to how it develops, especially the part of the brain that senses a threat or fear, so that part of the brain gets super strong,” said McGary.
She explained that, because children do not have a lot of experience dealing with stress, the daily issues homeless children face can cause result in hyperarousal, where they become frustrated and angry, or hypoarousal, where they become sad and depressed.
“There is a myth that kids cannot get stressed out, that they can’t feel sadness or big worries, but they most definitely do, and they communicate that through their behaviors. What we do at Vogel Alcove is help to rewire the [child’s] brain in a way, so they know Vogel Alcove is a safe place for them. There will be consistency, something homeless children desperately need when they come here,” said McGary.
Vogel Alcove’s new sensory lab helps children deal with the trauma they experience. McGary says breakthroughs happen daily through play and classroom work.
Hughes explained how the lab helped one child overcome his fear of the stairs: “This little boy had come from an abusive situation where someone had thrown him down the stairs, and he broke his arm and his leg. Because he was fearful of the stairs, he would scream and have a tantrum. One day, the child was curious about the play stairs in the sensory lab and started climbing them. Now he is working through that trauma and learning to do the stairs again.”
Vogel Alcove also teaches children coping techniques, such as “the pretzel,” to help them deal with their stress.
Hughes related that a mother came in asking about “the pretzel.” A teacher showed the woman how the children clasp their hands at a reverse angle and hold them to their chest, resulting in a “pretzel.” The motion is said to help give a sense of calm.
“The teacher asked the mother if her daughter talked about the pretzel and the mother said, ‘Yes, I was yelling and screaming at her, and she told me I need to do the pretzel,'” Hughes recalled with a laugh.
Besides the work done at the center, Vogel Alcove pivoted to outreach at the height of the pandemic. Hughes says her team regrouped to lend extra support to the parents who had received housing but could not pay for food or essentials. Hughes and her team donated over 16,000 meals during the 6-week lockdown and provided other hard-to-find necessities.
“I made the statement in March of 2020 that we were going to get through this, and we were not going to let go of any staff,” says Hughes. “Not one parent placed in housing would slide back into homelessness, and to this date, we have kept that promise … to me, that was a big deal.”
A mighty significant promise, since only $2 million of Vogel Alcove’s $6 million dollar budget comes from federal Head Start and Early Head Start, The United Way, and The City of Dallas.
The other $4 million, Vogel Alcove raises annually through fundraising, in-kind donations, private and corporate donations, and their annual Arts Performance Event, which Clint and Lisa Hartman-Black will headline this year.
The City of Dallas has also undertaken an initiative to address homelessness within the city, and Vogel Alcove will actively participate in that mission. The center has partnered with Family Gateway to run the childcare center within a former North Dallas hotel, which was recently purchased for use as a homeless shelter.
The new initiative will be a challenge for Vogel Alcove.
“We have to un-program ourselves from the way we run the current Vogel Alcove program. The children within the new partnership with Family Gateway will all have trauma. They will be in an emergency shelter that only allows them to stay for 60 days, so how we do things will constantly change. There is not a road map for [the new initiative] either, so we will have to do what we have always done — create it, and develop it,” said Hughes.