Lauri Burns, Founder of The Teen Project has partnered with Trumpia to raise the bar on reaching America's homeless youth. The newly released phone application allows youth all over the nation to text the word SHELTER with their ZIP code to the short code 99000 and receive a local shelter listing within 30 seconds.

The Teen Project national database of over 17,000 listings are now be available via a cell phone. Lauri and her team have also built applications for SOBER and ABUSED due to the diverse needs of our youth. While many youth are able to access cell phones, our research has shown that the most common problem, is not knowing "who to call."

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From his home on Ilalo Street, Banery Afituk can feel the breeze off Mamala Bay, two blocks away. Walking out his front door, to his right, he can make out the tops of the luxury ocean liners, and to his left, some of this city’s finer high rises. “I like it here,” he said, as his three children played around him.

Home for Mr. Afituk, his pregnant wife and their children is, in fact, a tattered tent rising low off the sidewalk, one of dozens that have sprung up in a colony of homelessness near the downtown of this tropical tourist getaway.

But all these tents, including Mr. Afituk’s, are about to disappear. Hawaii redevelopment officials told residents of this fetid colony that by Tuesday they would remove the estimated 75 remaining tents, lean-tos and other structures, forcing about 100 people who have called the area home to find somewhere else.

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Fifth-grader Nick Lara sleeps at night in a twin-size bed he shares with the 7-year-old daughter of his dad's girlfriend. Above the children, his honor roll report cards are proudly displayed, tacked to the walls of the motel they live in.

The family lives in a 150-square-foot room along Interstate 35E in northwest Dallas in one of several extended-stay motels with families who send their children to Arlington Park Community Learning Center.

A third of the school's students are considered homeless, children who live in motels, shelters or cars or who sleep on a borrowed couch.

With only nine children considered above the poverty mark, Arlington Park demonstrates the extra lengths schools must go to in meeting the needs of children whose families struggle to survive. It is also a startling reminder of homeless students, whom educators say they are seeing in greater numbers.

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