Newsletters & Reports

Click to read ATC's 2021 Impact Report. In it, we are excited to share our impact over the past year and our ambitious plans for the future.

Click to read ATC's first-ever Impact Report. In it, we are excited to share our impact over the past year and our ambitious plans for the future.

With this newsletter, we seek to shed light on the barriers, obstacles, and dead ends our clients face as they access services in order to meet their basic needs. Our goal is not to criticize or single out other providers or agencies, but to reflect our clients' diverse experiences and offer a deeper understanding of the unique challenges of navigating the social service landscape.

Many people are familiar with the term 'harm reduction,' but fewer are comfortable defining how it is practiced in social services. Because harm reduction strategies are a core part of ATC's work, we wanted to dive deep into the ways our clients use harm reduction and what harm-reduction-based services really look like.

In our Fall 2018 newsletter, ATC had the chance to look back over its first 20 years of providing services to youth on the streets. It features firsthand stories from the clients, staff, and community members who have helped make our work possible these last two decades.

In celebration of At The Crossroads’ 20th anniversary, we interviewed more than 30 clients, current and former staff, and members of our community who have played an important role in our story. Listen to their stories in their own words.

What does it mean to be resilient for yourself and others in the face of tremendous obstacles? This newsletter looks beyond the common definitions of “resilience” at the different ways that it manifests in our clients’ lives.

What does it feel like when the sun is going down, and you don’t know where you are going to sleep? What are the choices that young people have to make throughout the night when they are trying to balance safety, comfort, and the realities of survival?

How do you make the space to take care of yourself when you constantly have to prioritize food and shelter? How do you start to think about your long-term care? We explore how our youth develop self-care tools amidst the pressures of survival.

Who gets to define what success looks like? If people don’t meet these definitions, have they failed? How do expectations of success influence nonprofits and how they provide support? In turn, how does this affect service recipients? We explore these questions as they pertain to our youth.

Reentry is a minefield with no map. The struggle to avoid going back to jail or prison begins well before someone gets released, and it lasts for years. The fight to rebuild can be won, but it requires overcoming a system that creates hardship and obstacles instead of opportunities.

Long-term relationships are the core of ATC. We believe that unconditional support transforms lives, but we know it is not a quick or linear process. To build happy and fulfilling lives, our clients need to create sustainable communities and build strong, healthy relationships with a diverse range of people.

Just about every person we work with wants to be off of the streets. It has never been easy for our youth to move from homelessness to stable housing, but in the past few years, the high cost and limited availability of housing have made it exponentially harder.

Our clients cab have a complicated relationship with food – sometimes they take extreme measures just to get it, while other times they forsake it to prioritize other needs. Food can feel like a comfort, a luxury, or a burden. This newsletter explores the role that food plays in our work.

Helping our clients with their mental and emotional health needs is at the core of our work. In this newsletter, we explore how our clients’ emotional well-being affects their lives, how our staff supports clients during difficult moments, and how the landscape for mental health is changing.

In this special 15-year anniversary newsletter, we highlight 15 topics that are very important to At The Crossroads. It is a pleasure to celebrate 15 years of helping homeless youth build outstanding lives, getting to watch our clients overcome obstacles and pursue their dreams.

When our clients have no one they trust who believes in them, their sense of what the world has to offer can be severely limited. But when they feel connected, safe, and supported, they begin to see possibilities for themselves that were previously hidden.

How do you help people navigate all the transitions that go into building healthy and fulfilling lives? How do you help them move on from the painful transitions, and find the hope that they can experience positive changes in the future? We delve into these questions in this newsletter.

What do our clients do with their time? The answer for them varies as much as it does between you and your friends and family. This newsletter gives you a look at the day-to-day lives of four of our clients, as well as the daily reality of being a busy ATC counselor.

Money plays an important role in everyone’s lives, but it becomes a particularly complicated issue when you are homeless, or trying to move beyond the streets. The range of relationships with money on the streets is much more complex, and each individual has their own story to tell.

ATC's advocacy flows directly from the work with our clients, whose experiences inform our efforts to improve systems. We want to help prevent young people from becoming homeless, while ensuring that those youth who are on the streets receive the breadth and quality of support they deserve.

Many of the homeless youth in SF are not being adequately reached; often, this is because they do not fit the profile of “homeless youth” due to their race or survival activities. We discuss who is on the streets, how they are perceived, and how this affects whether or not their needs are getting met.

Making changes is the easy part; keeping them going is the greatest challenge. We explore this theme from the perspective of clients who have had ups and downs, as well as some individuals who have dedicated themselves to helping people on the streets create better lives.

People rarely think of homeless youth as being parents. This newsletter focuses on our clients who are parents, how we try to meet their needs, and the services that exist for homeless families in San Francisco.

Looking back on our 10-year anniversary, we have much to be grateful for. In this newsletter, we highlight some of the amazing things that happened this year, and two individuals who have made a big impact on ATC.

Since day one, a guiding principle for ATC has been that relationships are the fundamental building block for everything we do. They are central to every aspect of our work. For this 10-year anniversary newsletter, we focus on ten individuals whose relationships we genuinely cherish.

We have seen many of our clients take jobs with other nonprofit agencies and use their life experiences to help others from similar backgrounds. This newsletter looks at how this transition impacts both the clients and the organizations where they work.

The “Housing First” model for dealing with homelessness: first give people a roof over their heads, then focus on the other issues surrounding homelessness. Just as the name suggests, housing should be seen as the first step (of many) if homeless people are to succeed in building better lives.

Would you be surpised that 80% of our clients are people of color? That the majority are born in SF? That more than one-third have been employed in the last year? Street youth are an incredibly diverse population, and it is a challenge to reach them and serve their wide-ranging needs.

This newsletter focuses on the theme of talents and passions. We’re excited to share some of what inspires our clients, fulfills them, and keeps them optimistic about their future.

For this newsletter, At The Crossroads decided to focus on the theme of housing. In a city where finding housing is a challenge for almost everyone, it is particularly daunting for people who are homeless and trying to change their situation.

Street outreach is the cornerstone of our work with homeless youth and young adults. By going onto the streets, we are able to connect with young people who are overlooked by the social service system. Learn about what outreach is and why it's important.

"The criminal justice system directly impacts many of our clients. They get caught in a vicious cycle, with homelessness leading to jail, which leads to a criminal record that forces them to stay on the streets once they’re released. We asked clients to reflect on how this has affected their goals."

"Why don't you just get a job?" Misunderstandings about the root causes of homelessness and unemployment can cause larger attitudes of blame and shame.