Shivering and somber, dozens of people gathered in a Manchester park Friday night to mourn people who’d died young, sleeping in shelters and cars, and on the street.
Lydia Ashline, 17, loved concerts, and was quick with a one-liner. Alexander Balkam, 20, had a talent for woodworking and mechanics. Blake Marsh wrote rap music and followed women’s basketball until he died at 21.
They were among the 12 young people known to have died in New Hampshire in the past four years without a stable place to live. Their experiences were at the center of Waypoint’s SleepOut, held annually to raise awareness on homeless youth, a population that’s growing.
Annually, an estimated 15,000 people between 12 and 25 are homeless in New Hampshire, according to Chapin Hall, a research center at the University of Chicago that has worked with Waypoint.
In its most recent count, the NH Coalition to End Homelessness saw almost a 41% increase among homeless children under 18 between 2022 to 2023, from 315 to 443. Among people 18 to 24, there was nearly a 37% increase. The organization tracks those trends by counting the number of homeless individuals in New Hampshire on a single day in January each year.
“The urgency of our work has never been greater,” said Mandy Lancaster, director of Waypoint’s serves to homeless youth, Friday night, before the audience departed to spend the night outside.
Those services include overnight shelters, street outreach, crisis intervention, and assistance finding stable housing. Young people who’ve relied on that assistance shared their stories in accounts read by the case managers and outreach workers who’ve helped them.
Some said they became homeless after aging out of foster care. Others before.
A 24-year-old man said his challenges began at age 5, when his mother took him from his father, who had custody. Physical abuse followed, he said in a written statement shared at Friday’s event.
The man said he spent his senior year of high school without housing. Graduating meant losing the shower and meals he relied on at school. He left a homeless shelter because of the physical and sexual abuse he encountered as a LGBTQ disabled person.
“The shelter was even one of the nicer and safer shelters in the region,” he said. “The streets, however, felt safer because at least I knew where I could hide.”
Another woman, now 22, said Waypoint gave her a safe space to sleep after she left foster care and lived two years without housing.
“I was able to save some money doing chores during foster care, but it was not nearly enough,” she said. “I was trapped in a cycle of poverty and struggling with lost time and a lost childhood.”
Franklin Dee Manning Jr., 20, of Barrington, shared his own story of working through the trauma he encountered as a child and the instability that brought even before he became homeless.
“Let's get the record straight. I am not a statistic,” he said. He closed with a request for the audience. “I urge you to look around, see our faces, and hear or learn our names.”
