Summer Brenner: My name is Summer Brenner, and I'm the author of Ivy, Homeless in San Francisco. So, sometime some years ago I was volunteering at a homeless shelter in Berkeley, California where I live, just a drop-in center where women and their kids could come and have a place to stay during the day only, out of the elements, get a couple of hot meals, have an address in case they were seeking employment, needed a place to register to vote with an address. It provides all kinds of wonderful services. And one mother and her child really particularly impressed me. She was trying to make sure her daughter could continue her dance lessons while she was homeless. And there were just so many different stories and kinds of people that broke through any kind of preconception one might have about who is in this situation.

And I wanted to write a book that would help kids understand, especially if they're living in an urban area, that the people that they're seeing on the street that might seem ominous to them or threatening them, or they may already, at a very young age, be drawing conclusions about their own stereotypes of the homeless. That in fact, there was, at the time, and I doubt that this number has decreased, there were over a million children who were homeless in the United States. And so I set out to write a book of a father and his daughter. I chose her to be with her father, her mother was deceased in the story that I tell because they, at the time, had particularly a hard time, and I think it's true today too, finding shelter that was really appropriate for a father and daughter.

So ,they were living in San Francisco and they were living in a park. And I know that services for homeless kids and recognition of that population in schools is really much more apparent than it was when I wrote this book. But nonetheless, it still exists that a homeless child does not want to be visible, does not maybe even want to seek those services, that there's a stigma and a shame that's attached to a situation. Plus, along with the precariousness of the living situation, there's also the difficulty of maintaining or sustaining one's school year in one place. So, moving around a lot is actually a very critical part and problem of this population of youth. So, Ivy and her dad are living in a park, and the book has a kind of serendipity in it. It's not a book about a hopeless situation. And it turns out that some of the people who might be expected to help them don't help them, and some people who they didn't know, strangers, in fact, come to help them quite a bit.