Mum’s tweet linked families with students who need a place to stay
WASHINGTON: For a while she tried to ignore it. To avoid the notifications overwhelming her Twitter account, the inquiries coming from around the world.
She had sent the tweet to her 30 followers in a moment of buoyancy, never thinking it would amount to much. Before she knew it, it had been shared more than 1,400 times.
“As a DC resident and mother of a high schooler, I’ll help to find free lodging for kids and their families coming to this March,” Elizabeth Andrews, a lawyer, tweeted Feb 18.
Without even realising it, Andrews had found a need that was growing by the day: Students planning to descend on Washington this weekend to participate in the March for Our Lives needed a place to stay.
If they are under 18, booking a hotel suite or a room on Airbnb is out of the question. For those who are of age, those options can be cost prohibitive. Couch surfing or staying with friends would work if they know someone in the area, but many do not.
So, Andrews, who has never so much as volunteered to lead a committee on the Parent Teachers Association at her teen daughter’s school, got to work trying to find housing for what could be thousands of students.
Less than two weeks later, she and a group of seven other mothers had started a fullfledged organisation.
They had a website, infrastructure, roles. The group, dubbed March for Our Lives Lodging, is one of several efforts in the Washington area with a singular goal: To provide out-oftown students with a free place to sleep and a community to help them feel welcome.
George Washington University students will host other college students in their dorm rooms. Half a dozen students from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, signed up 250 of their peers across the country to stay in local homes though a group called DC Area Teens Action. Faith
A lot of these kids are minors who have no adults coming, whose mums are putting them on a bus or a plane, and we want to make sure we place them in a home where they feel like they’re going to be taken care of.
organisations have paired members of synagogues and churches from outside the region with local families.
“When we looked at reasons why students might not be coming to the (March for Our Lives), we noticed there were really two big ones: Transportation and lodging,” said Gabrielle Zwi, 17, one of the founders of the Teens Action group and a senior at Walter Johnson High. “We don’t have much we can do about transportation, but we live here, and we have homes here, so, we thought, we can offer those.”
Andrews and her team signed up more than 330 families outside the Washington area to stay with local hosts. They have more than 2,500 beds still available.
Every person who wants to host or be hosted is subject to a vetting process that involves social-media background checks and a phone call to make sure everyone has similar expectations. For those under 18 travelling alone, parental consent is required.
Julie Stewart, former president of criminal-justice reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, runs what she calls the “match making process.”
“When we first started this, we thought we’ll just match beds and heads, so you have three kids and a home with three beds? Put them together, and you’ve got a match,” Stewart said.
“But as I started going through people’s social media pages to verify that they are who they say they are, I thought, ‘Well, this person has two teenagers so I don’t just want them in a place that has two beds. I want them in a place that actually has a teenager at home for them to bond with and relate to.’ I wanted to make this event memorable not just for what happens down on Pennsylvania Avenue, but for the whole experience, and that includes where they’re staying.”
Sometimes, she said, that means splitting up groups - like a group of six teenagers coming into town together, because, Stewart said, six teenagers in one house is a lot to ask of one family.
Instead, the teens might be split into groups of three, staying next door to each other.
“A lot of these kids are minors who have no adults coming, whose mums are putting them on a bus or a plane, and we want to make sure we place them in a home where they feel like they’re going to be taken care of,” Stewart said. “Part of it is coming from me because I’m a mum, and I do what I’d like done for my kids in terms of safety.”
Among those who have been placed in various homes in and around the District are several students and alumni from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman fatally shot 17 people on Feb 14. That same day, two Maryland high schools were evacuated over a bomb threat.
“It’s scary,” said Deanna Troust, whose daughter’s northwest Washington school was locked down earlier this month when authorities reported that a man at a nearby hotel was seen with a gun. — WP-Bloomberg
Julie Stewart, former president of criminal-justice reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums