So Shines a Good Deed Mark Redmond

In December 1993 I was sitting at home early one morning, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper while still in my sweats, when my work phone rang. A teenage girl with a history of suicide attempts had just run from our residential program and was headed for the nearby train tracks. I slammed down the phone and bolted out the door, not quite sure exactly what I would do, but I ran as fast as I could.

Starting a charter school, from scratch, in about six month's time, seemed impossible to do. What one 11-year-old girl wrote on her application was what kept me going.

This is about one of the first young men I met at Spectrum Youth and Family Services who in one sentence revealed what so many of our young people believe and feel about themselves.

I've been director of Spectrum in Burlington, VT since 2003. We work with homeless, runaway and at-risk teenagers and young adults. This is the story of one young woman who had nowhere to live and asked to stay in our shelter. We almost didn't accept her due to a long history of serious mental illness. But we did. This is her story, and ours.

It was only my eighth day as the new director of a campus for at-risk teenagers. I walked to my car at the end of the day, ready to drive home, tired, when someone shoved a flyer in my hands that radically changed what would transpire for the rest of that day.

I was asked to direct a shelter for homeless teenage males in a high-crime section of New York City. At first I said no....