Pink Giraffe opens doors to homeless kids
City’s Belgian community helps fund new shelter
Agirl walked into a Harris County Precinct 7 Constable Office on a Wednesday in August.
“I’m 17 and I’m homeless,” she said. “What can I do?”
While hardly uncommon, options were slim for the girl, who asked that her name not be used because she’d run away from her mother, who she said prostituted her. That day, officers had a new resource to telephone: the Pink Giraffe House, a refuge for homeless youth funded by Houston’s Belgian community.
The two-story pink-andpurple wooden home in Montrose hosted an open house Saturday to officially kick off operations. Volunteers showed up to offer services in tutoring, counseling or simply talking to kids who never caught a break.
Gaétane Pauwels, the founder of Pink Giraffe House, said she picked the name because giraffes have the biggest heart of land animals.
The idea for this house took shape over years while Pauwels, a 54-year-old Belgian immigrant and drug abuse therapist, worked at the Harris County Juvenile Justice Center, which she called “a little jail for kids.” Youth who ran from wretched conditions at home or suffered abandonment tended to end up on the streets. More than 600 are homeless on any given night in Houston; most lack any safe place to seek guidance toward a stable life, she said.
“To me, that was not acceptable,” Pauwels said.
She hatched a dream to open a house. The story of how it became a sanctuary for marginalized youth started years earlier. Finding their calling
Sometime around 2008, said the Rev. Lura Groen, a group at the Grace Lutheran Church in Montrose decided it wanted to help the community but didn’t know how. So a task force spent a year interviewing nonprofit leaders, studying local publications and praying before they found their calling: homeless youth, especially nonstraight youth who stand a drastically higher chance of being rejected by their families and booted from homes.
Kids fall in a gap, unable to receive public benefits without an adult guardian. Laws strictly regulate how organizations can offer free shelter to children. Houston has just one facility, the Covenant House, with room and board for homeless youth, and it has 80 beds.
Groen knew she wouldn’t get resources to house and feed many kids. Besides, a sleeping space is only temporary shelter for kids who lack the family foundations to chart a prosperous path through life.
Groen and her group spent another year ruminating on a solution, before they concluded: “the biggest need (homeless kids) can’t meet themselves is safe accepting relation- ships with adults,” she said.
So the Montrose Grace Place was born. It was a secular organization that met in a room leased one day a week, where kids and volunteers held familystyle gatherings. The idea was to simulate a happy family setting that many of the children never knew. It started out with seven kids.
Through the years, the weekly donation-funded program for kids 13 to 21 grew. It served warm home-cooked meals. It accumulated a closet of supplies, like blankets and toiletries, to help kids survive on the streets. It became a source of guidance for kids who wanted to know how to get a job, an apartment, or an ID card.
And it provided a space for the overlooked youth to speak and be heard. And be respected.
“Kids would talk and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, people are listening to me,’ ” said Hazard Buck, program director for Montrose Grace Place.
She listed some reasons why kids she’s known have ended up on the streets: some ran away from sexual abuse, drug dealing or gang activity in their household, others had been prostituted for family income or were beaten at home; some had been abandoned when parents left the state, others were kicked out of home as teens so parents could afford their younger children; some got out of the foster system with no direction. Some fled persistent denigration by their caretakers.
But, Buck said, as much as the program tried to mimic a family setting, the room rented once weekly with fluorescent lights always felt more like a facility than a home. Enter Pauwels. Kids ‘danced with joy’
Long a proponent for homeless children, she met the Montrose Grace Place in 2015 through a friend of her daughter, and ideas immediately fell into place. Grace Place wanted a home. Pauwels wanted to start a home, and finally had reason to do it. But it would take money.
So Pauwels looked for support among her fellow country folk, Belgians.
According to Yves Dubus, the Belgian trade commissioner in Houston, who was at the Pink Giraffe House on Saturday, there’s a community of approxi- mately 500 Belgian-born people in Houston.
It was at a February 2016 meeting of that club at the Brussels Café near downtown that Pauwels pitched her plan to open a house.
“When Gaétane talked about this project, the Belgians saw an opportunity to give back to the community that welcomed them,” Dubus said. “They know they owe their wellbeing to the city of Houston.”
The funding flowed in. A few people pledged a thousand dollars or more per month. One donor bought the house at 2304 Mason and leased it to Pink Giraffe. The deal closed on Aug. 5.
On Sept. 1, Grace Place hosted its first weekly dinner meeting at the Pink Giraffe House. Almost 30 kids came by bus or walked like they had every week before, except this time they stepped into a real home. Buck, the program director, said she nearly cried watching them as they climbed the giant oak tree and “danced with joy” in the yard, surrounded by a fence enveloped in flowering vines.
The weekly meals will continue, but the house is open every day for kids to stop for peace, shelter, acceptance and support. Pauwels lives upstairs.
On Saturday, about 50 people, about half of them Belgian, showed up to tour the house and hear a representative from Mayor Sylvester Turner’s office proclaim Sept. 10, 2016, “Pink Giraffe House Day” in Houston.