Nevaeh’s Project: Street Leaders

WE ALL KNOW THAT YOUTH SHOULD BE LEADING THE REVOLUTION.

And now is their time.

Nevaeh’s Project: Street Leaders is a revolutionary outreach program built on the belief that youth who have experienced homelessness in their communities are best equipped to support their peers in navigating the same struggle.

Street Leaders is a team of eight fierce advocates (18 - 28) with lived experience in homelessness, who are serving as navigators, advocates, and outreach experts to their peers in Sacramento. Street Leaders will partner with various community organizations and will be placed at schools, drop-in centers, juvenile justice programs, shelters, and street encampments around Sacramento. Within these spaces, Street Leaders will meet youth where they are at to assist in connections with shelter, housing, mental health, education, employment, and survival supply resources.

An Outreach Specialist will work closely alongside the team to train Street Leaders in various skills, such as Trauma Informed Care, Harm Reduction Philosophy, Street Outreach 101, Motivational Interviewing, Crisis Prevention Intervention and more.

Street Leaders are comrades, researchers, navigators, advocates, analysts, hope-givers, and path-finders. Street Leaders create light and distill barriers wherever they go. When they don’t know the way, they find one. When they can’t find a way, they create one.

In loving memory of Nevaeh Hernandez (1999 - 2023) a founding members of Sacramento’s first youth led street outreach team created in 2016. Nevaeh spent many years navigating the complexity of housing insecurity in Sacramento, while also ensuring that her community and peers were well supported and loved through it all. She passed in 2023, but her legacy will live on as a Street Leader forever.