After Derek Chairs was evicted from an apartment in California at 18, he bounced around from couch to couch across the country.
“I just traveled by bus, state to state, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Indiana,” he said. Then at 20 he landed in Chicago, where, for the first time in his adult life, he received stable housing for almost a year, through a youth homeless program called Ignite.
“That time that I see is little, they really make it matter,” Chairs said. He jump-started the process of getting his high school equivalency certificate and now has a job at Ignite’s drop-in center…
