Escaping Neverland:
Finding their own happiliy ever after
Through inspirational stories of resilience, I share my journey of navigating mental health challenges, homelessness, addiction, incarceration, and ultimately, the faith-filled redemption that motivated me to not only survive—but thrive. Today, I am determined to use everything I have lived through to help those who are still living on the streets.
After reentering a society that had seemingly thrown me away, I began to understand the psychological and behavioral patterns that can keep people connected to chronic homelessness. I call this condition Outstitutionalization—the process of adapting to street life so deeply that freedom, adrenaline, familiarity, and a chosen family can make returning to the streets feel safer than leaving them.
Lost Boys: Found will be a long-term, wraparound-care rehabilitation sanctuary for survivors of chronic homelessness. Its purpose will be to address Outstitutionalization through stability, healing, community, mental health support, recovery, and meaningful connection.
Together, we can help people find their way out of downtown Neverland—and find their way back to themselves.
An unconventional look at homelessness gave me the lived experience needed to provide a viable solution to treat the growing number of unhoused individuals. Here you can find tales of my misadventures among the lost boys up to today. Stories of a foreign world in your own backyard where a bag lady can find happiness under a bridge. A unique, humorous look at a culture that stays ignored even when it's unsheltered in plain view.
Once upon a time...
Lost Boys: Found
Lost Boys: Found will be a long-term, wraparound-care, trauma-informed rehabilitation sanctuary created for people experiencing chronic homelessness. It will offer support for healing on every level—medical care, psychological and mental health services, addiction recovery, vocational training, higher education, life-skills development, and meaningful community connection. Most importantly, Lost Boys: Found will the only facility of its kind to address and truly treat a concept I call Outstitutionalization (see explanation below.) Lost Boys: Found will provide the stability, support, and sense of belonging people need to heal, grow, and create a life beyond survival.
Outstitutionalization
Outstitutionalization is the psychological and behavioral process that can occur when a person adapts to homelessness and begins to experience street life as familiar, freeing, and structured in its own way. Just as institutionalization can cause incarcerated people to become accustomed to control, rules, routines, and institutional structure—and sometimes return because it is what they know—outstitutionalization can pull people experiencing homelessness back to the streets after entering housing, treatment, or other structured environments. The streets can offer freedom from control, adrenaline, independence, survival-based purpose, and a chosen family. Over time, a person may become more comfortable with the life they learned to survive than with the expectations, restrictions, and responsibilities of traditional housing or society. Outstitutionalization is not simply refusing help or choosing homelessness. It is the powerful psychological and behavioral attachment to a life a person has adapted to—one that may be dangerous and unstable, but is also familiar, meaningful, and their own.
Lost Boys: Found exists to address this cycle by helping people build freedom, belonging, purpose, and community without having to return to the streets.
Become a Founder of Their Future
We are raising funds to open the first of it's kind, long-term wraparound, Trauma-informed care rehabilitation sanctuary to provide people who suffer from chronic homelessness reentry services and whole person treatment.
Your donation builds the beds, the kitchen, and the healing... the solution.