The nonprofit is one of the top 10 companies by votes in Columbus CEO’s 2020 Best of Business readers’ poll.
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Every year in the Columbus region, 3,000 youths, ages 12 to 24, are homeless. “These are youths who belong to all of us, if we are truly going to be a community,” says Sonya Thesing, executive director of Huckleberry House, a nonprofit that provides homeless teens and young adults with critical housing and support.
Couple that harrowing statistic with the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, and you’ve got one busy nonprofit. “Stay-at-home orders have been challenging, to say the least, for the average among us,” Thesing says. “But when ‘home’ is a car, or an overpass over the railroad tracks, or an alley—that’s not a place to be in a Covid lockdown.”
Through its crisis center, transitional living, counseling center, and other outreach programs, “Huck House” has provided solutions to homelessness since 1970. “Homelessness isn’t always income-driven,” Thesing explains. “The underlying commonality is a breakdown in relationships,” she says.
For Thesing, there’s a social justice element to the work done at Huckleberry House. “This work matters so much because, somewhere down the line, [these youths] didn’t get something that they needed, that other people did get,” Thesing says. “Our work is not nearly done.”
Original story appeared in Columbus CEO Magazine/October 2020 as a part of the Best of Business Series:
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