Consider the following:  

Police officers are all too often thrown into the world of social services with little or no support. Consider what we want the officer to do....

Make them go away!
This is often the frustrated cry of business individuals trying to run their businesses. They are within their rights and their business taxes are vital to our communities.

Where do we send them?

What if they don’t want to go or have a place to go?

Do we arrest and criminalize them just to make them go away?

Now consider the question: Go where? In front of who’s business/home. All too often officers are forced to employ Curb Pushing  tactics to accomplish this goal.

Curb Pushing  is the tactic of moving homeless youth along the curb to the neighboring city, town and there the cycle begins again. The cost to our communities in officer time and resources is staggering. Most importantly, it accomplishes nothing towards solving the problem. How we treat young people today will have lasting effects on their lives and ours. As these individuals fall further from our conscious thought these become statistics that affect us all in the future.

How do you get your arms around such a BIG issue when we are always looking within for a solution? We search out funding sources and when those searches fail, we try and “push” the problem off to another just as we do our youth. “Who owns this problem”? Well, in reality, we ALL own it and should be working together towards a solution. 

The Solution… Imagine a homeless or runaway youth makes contact with you, you call someone who comes and picks them up, gets them to a shelter and starts the process of help. This program could be called SafePlace. Well, the reality is that there is such a program!  SafePlace is a low cost, high impact solution that works and has helped thousands of runaways nationally. The cost is minimal. Imagine you host a Safe Place site at a pledged amount of say, .70 cents per day!

Tumbleweed Center for Youth Development will host the FIRST EVER valley wide Curb Pushing  conference.  On September 23rd, 2009 at the Black Canyon Conference Center in Phoenix, we will meet with city managers, fire and police chiefs, hospital social services administrators from all communities across the valley.  We will present our attendees with this new and dynamic program Safe Place which is based on: The needs of youth. Getting help fast. Reducing cost to our cities and the tax payers. Safe Place - Where Kids get help FAST!