A boost for kids
Concert aims to end child homelessness
Ending child homelessness is a goal CLNkids seeks to reach.
But it takes a village, so the community has come together to help with the Burque Niños Block Party on Saturday, Sept. 14. The event will feature performances by headliners Red Light Cameras with support from Def-I, The Riddims, The Porter Draw, The Ordinary Things, DJ Nicolatron and Mr. Mrvl. All the bands are local and are donating their time to support the cause. Art Nueva will be selling their artwork, and All Chola! will be selling items from its clothing line. They will be donating 20% of their earnings that day to the organization, which was formally known as Cuidando Los Niños. Food trucks Sancha’s Cocina and Oni Noodles will participate in the event. A beer garden run by the Launchpad also will be available. It is also dedicating its time to support the benefit.
“(They are) superamazing individuals,” said Ashley Martinez, development director for CLNkids. “This event is super-exciting. I’m
really excited for it and all the amazing feedback we got from everybody stepping up to put child homelessness in the forefront.”
CLNkids takes a dual approach to child homelessness. It assists children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old and their parents.
“Our kiddos are getting a five-star education on the day care side, and then on the other end, our parents we’re helping them either find a job or go to school,” Martinez
said. “So not only are we doing that, but we also have a housing program so we are literally pulling them out of homelessness into stability.”
CLNkids annually serves about 70 clients in its one-year program. It currently has 40 children in its program and puts a cap at 52 at a time to maintain its five-star accreditation.
Numbers fluctuate when people leave without completing the program. The organization monitors each child’s well-being by documenting such things as what the child ate that day, how long he or she slept, whom they interacted with and other information. It also offers on-site play therapy.
“About 70 percent of our moms that come in are single mothers fleeing from domestic violence situations,” Martinez said. “A lot of parents think that kiddos cannot hear or see what is taking place in the house, when, in fact, they can hear and see everything. And so what play therapy does is it connects them to their feelings and then how to react to those feelings, because in their particular situation, living in a shelter or living in a car, they’re not necessarily getting taught how to react, because it’s just survival mode for the parents, and they don’t mean to, but some of the attention goes elsewhere. And so we dive deep with these kiddos and we make sure that get up to par developmentally, whether it be walking, reading, anything cognitively that we can think of to get them back on the same page.”