The building couldn’t have been less comforting: two stories and 6,000 square feet of concrete. The barbed wire fence that surrounded it angled out toward the top, a danger and a warning to anyone who wanted in. And Kari Whitney wasn’t sure she did. She stood on the sidewalk, a thin, 28-year-old woman in a business suit, and sized up the old Station 7 Firehouse. Kari planned most things well. Her lipstick and nail polish matched her amber hair. But right now, she couldn’t quite figure out what the plan was. The man and the woman standing with Kari wanted to hire her to start a youth shelter, to be housed, most probably, in this facility. It was June of 1995, and they wanted her to open it by July 1 of the same year. They’d offered Kari the job over the phone two days ago. But she’d hesitated. What, they had wondered, could be the problem?

“For example,” Kari had said, “I don’t know where it is going to be.” So here she was, staring at two stories of concrete, wondering if she was already too obligated to back out.

Kari had never started a shelter before, but her five years of experience in social work already made for an impressive resume. When she was 23 years old, Kari had started working in a residential treatment facility in Olympia, Washington. Three years later, she followed her husband to his new job in Eugene, Oregon, where she worked briefly in a nursing home and then contracted with the same agency in Olympia to start a program that helped members of Seattle gangs leave them safely. Her boss in Olympia, told the directors of Looking Glass, Eugene’s primary provider of services to adolescents, that Kari was the most competent social worker she had ever met. So, at age 28, she was offered a job starting and managing Eugene’s new homeless youth shelter.

Ten years later, Kari sits with twelve staff members at Station 7 Homeless and Runaway Youth shelter’s kitchen table. There are still traces of the old fire station in the building – still a pole in the middle of the living room and 3-story-high closets where firemen used to dry out hoses.  But there are also purple and blue curtains and linoleum and carpet on the floors. One closet is a place where youth might store garbage bags full of their belongings between stays in shelter. Another is full of cans and boxes of food from the local food bank, many of them expired items from old fad diets: bottles of “Hollywood Diet” fruit juice blend, boxes of “low-carb” granola bars and pounds of sugar-free candies.

Kari taps her fingernails, which she recently touched up in her car outside, on the glass mosaic table. “It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes,” she says. This is her mantra. “The worst mistake you can make with youth is to keep doing something that’s been done before and not worked.” Galen, one of the two people who originally hired Kari, moves back his green plastic chair and unplugs the double-sized metal refrigerator, which hums incessantly, so people can hear each other.  A man and a woman who just worked overnight shifts at the shelter hear Kari’s words as though on tape-delay, the way sounds reach people who haven’t slept in a long time. “Everything we do here,” says Kari, “is about opening doors for young people.” Everything we do, she likes to say, is done with an outcome in mind.

Back ten years ago, Kari figured the people trying to hire her had no idea what they were asking her to do. Galen said Looking Glass wanted her to open a youth shelter in two weeks.  He thought Looking Glass could acquire this old fire station, but not for a few months. In the meantime, Galen said he had the name of an apartment manager who might rent them temporary quarters. As director of this new facility, among others, Galen thought he could also give her maybe ten percent of his time. The Federal Government, United Way and the City of Eugene had funded the project – she would have a $250,000 facilities and operating budget. -- but no one seemed to have a job description. They wanted Kari to start a shelter, manage a program and do something about the kids who hung out downtown all night long.

Kari wondered if they understood how many different kinds of youth shelters there were. There were “mission-style” shelters like the one in Portland that had big rooms and slept a lot of people on cots. There were state-operated shelters, like the one Kari had worked at in Olympia, for youth in the foster care system whom the state couldn’t place into homes. Some shelters just provided warm food and a bed. Some provided case management to help young people get into school, find work, access health care and reconcile with family. 

Also, young people had different reasons for seeking shelter and different needs when they found it. Some lived on the streets with their families, others were in conflict with their parents. Some fled danger and others fled safety. Some left home for a little while, others permanently. Not all the kids who hung out around the fountain all night were even homeless.

After looking at the old fire station, Kari drove about twenty minutes to her two-story house in the little town of Coburg, where only crickets and the sounds of horses settling in their stables interrupted the quiet night hours.  Kari and her husband didn’t have kids, so she had her husband’s full attention when she told him she thought this job she was being offered might end her career in social work.  There were just so many ways the project could fail. But Kim, her boss from Olympia, had helped her get the job, and Kari didn’t feel good about turning it down. She also couldn’t get over the idea that someone actually thought she could do it, whatever it was. Maybe she could. Besides, not having many parameters was intriguing. And, she’d thought about ending her career to have children anyway. So she said yes.

A month later, Kari found out that, as a couple, she and her husband couldn’t conceive. The two started seeing a fertility specialist, but Kari didn’t think it would work. So she focused on other people’s children instead.