Video: Couch-surfing kids find a place to call home

A Ludlow woman takes in homeless teens from Springfield.

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Couch-surfing kids find a place to call home in Ludlow Posted: May 12, 2016 12:40 PM EDT Updated: May 12, 2016 7:20 PM EDT By Lynzi DeLucciaCONNECT LUDLOW, Vt. - They were on their own. "I was all by myself," Alex McDonough said. Alex McDonough says he was 12 when he first felt truly on his own. He came from a family of what he calls career criminals and moved to Vermont with his dad. "My dad got back onto the drugs, and that's when I knew he was on drugs, so I started hanging out with Jake and them," Alex said. "My family had their own issues and stuff, so they weren't really around," Jake Mitchell said. Alex and Jake lived in Springfield. They became friends through a bond-- their parents' addictions to drugs and alcohol. Jake found himself on his own at 14; he stopped going to school in order to take care of his younger siblings. By age 16, neither had a solid place to call home except for an abandoned house. "We were living in a no-power, just an abandoned old house for a while, just me and him making sure we ate every night, making sure everything is all good," Alex said. They often hung out in Riverside Park until Jake started going to Ludlow. "All my children had friends that had some type of need," Kelly Willard said. Kelly was raising three kids on her own, divorced from a man who had his own addiction struggles. "It became word-of-mouth that Kelly's house has an open-door policy, so if you needed a place to stay, you just showed up," she said. The guidance and support the teens were looking for-- they found in her. Willard saw nearly 40 teens-- between 14 and 18 years old-- in and out of her home over six years. Some stayed for a day, some for a year. But all were welcomed with some rules. "Make sure you always clean up after yourself, make sure you try to look for a job, try to go to school if you're able to," Alex said. Sometimes it was a matter of just needing food, clothes or references for a job. Other times, it was even simpler. "They just needed help or someone to listen," Kelly said. "She just pushed us to better ourselves," Alex said. Kelly says she's taken some kids to try to get help from the state before. "They were willing to give them food stamps, which I think is wonderful that you have those," she said, "but if you only have a cardboard box or no place to live, where would you cook them?" According to the Vermont Department for Children and Families, 648 youth in 2015 were served by the Vermont Coalition for Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs, including shelters like the one at Spectrum Services in Burlington. Spectrum's executive director Mark Redmond says he sees a pattern in family structure of the youth coming through their programs. "Either there is no functioning family left or their parents are in prison, or their parents are addicted to drugs and alcohol, and in a lot of ways, these kids could be at 18 or 19 and completely on their own," Redmond said. Advocates say the face of teen homelessness is not out on the streets, but couch surfing, night to night. "It is an overburdened system," said Bethany Pombar, the director of Vermont Coalition for Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs. "And I think it's particularly hard for older age youth and that older teen population that would be brought into the services but potentially age out in a year." The teens agree. All on their own between the ages of 15 and 18, they felt slighted by the system. "Some kids fall through that crack," said Dana Lawrence of DCF. He says this is the main problem: those falling through the cracks are teens nearing 18, aging out of the system. They have some help available for them until the age of 22, with new legislation. Lawrence says there's enough shelter statewide, but the outreach doesn't go far enough. "Is it bad information, do we have to push the providers a little bit harder, do they need to do a public information thing, we need to do something different," Lawrence said. For Jake, Alex and their friends, even if they'd known where to go, they say they probably wouldn't have. "We had each other's backs," Alex said. They say the shelters sometimes remind them of their parents' problems-- drugs and alcohol-- that led to their problems. "All of our friends always looked out for us and made sure we had somewhere to sleep," Jake said. Alex is now 20. He has his own home and a job, and now full custody of 18-month-old Jordan, the son of a friend of his who got in trouble with the law because of drugs. "I want to make sure his life is 10 times better than mine, he doesn't have to see the stuff I had to see or go through what I had to go through," Alex said. Alex still comes to Kelly's house, a place he feels will always be home. The teens we talked to say some could play a larger role, like schools, for example, working further to identify children from a young age who may be facing these issues that could result in homelessness.