Building a Way Home:
Escaping Neverland
We provide innovative, trauma-informed solutions that turn stories of street survival into lives of lasting stability.
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.
Your Support Opens the Gate to Healing
Join us as a founder. Your donation directly builds the beds, community space, and rehabilitation tools needed to launch Lost Boys: Found.