you're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning christine cunningham and sherlock kristine cunningham is executive director of roots young adult shelter and sure lock is a soon to be former guest at roots young adults shelter that promotes gives you the place that is safe and where they can actually get supported they actually get a meal they get a you know a match for a bed but on top of that they talk about what that next step would be what is that program as well the next step was well and see if they they're used to being in a shelter and they felt like they stay there for a time i stayed there for about three years and say they will find more like more use of what they want to do like find a house or you know find a job they can do that here because they have the resources that they can actually utilize and find out like ok so here's this job and you know it pays you know this much money mean i've looked at people's faces and they look like they were like they're mine was out like neptune or something like that and i came to roots and i felt i  mean i go by atmosphere how they treat the people and everything with that and everything is like fell in the place and now when i took that next step i actually i now am a when people feel ready i did i mean they will they actually will get that support and they also will actually find a way to achieve their goal and one thing that's unique i mean he's talking about how the adult shelters are different than routes as a lot of people when they think of a shelter they think of oh it's just a temporary place to stay at night but young people even though they're looking for a temporary place to stay at night they're really thinking about what's next for them typically in terms of proving themselves to the world right and so like like sure like i said when you're ready to take that next step we want to have those resources available we have on site case managers six nights of the week we have these  straight into housing program kind of connections with youth care in the y m c a so so that when they're ready there should be hopefully anything in the way even though these guys are working up against some pretty big systemic barriers we did some data comparison with the adult shelters and we ask everybody at the adult shelters and at roads where did you sleep last night and the sad news is the young adults are five times more likely to answer places unfit for human ha so in other words we're doing a better job with people over eighteen having adult shelters for them like he's talking about the downtown folks those guys are going between shelter and shelter the young people would rather sleep outside than put up with all ages shelter they need shelter specific to their needs and eighteen percent of them currently have access to that shelter and why don't the the all age shelters  really support young people what's the problem there is the problem there is they don't have the proper resources for people that are eight you know youth eighteen twenty five they actually have like all other resources like veterans you know how much like i'm a put like thirty two like sixty five and they don't and they don't you know so they target that age group but they don't all the all  for you is that they're just like houses that were just how to really put this without getting you know that we were just like a number to them well and i have had i've had an adult child care providers tell me oh i'm so glad i can send my people there it's because we can't people your age and routes between the people who stay there and are college volunteers you're around people your age and it's like a giant young person's lumber party every night you're going to safety issues being in an adult stayed at the sea they gave me a bunk like i was way too small for me like i was i would literally go my head on one and my feet on the other end and it was pretty old so they're like oh great so if i point out there's like they it's like there's a really it's a really mixed atmosphere with people just staring at you it's like you get that awkward feeling it's like you know like you know like these sit there in the corner and all they do is just stare blossomed and what makes you what makes even better is that you know i mean i've tried leaving a positive impact for other young adults too to see is that they're also actually taking the initiative of actually trying to actually resources utilize what they have in front of them and to actually grow and blossom actually you know have better situation unlike you know the adult shelters where like they're like i mean i'll give an example of when i was trying to try to utilize resources at the sea and they're like oh you're just one thousand years old we don't have anything for you except for like you know know because i want to utilize and they gave me like a packet that dick was like oh wow that an inch thick yeah oh this is awesome because you know like most people don't see this in my case manager god bless her heart you do you i see she actually recommended me go to first art and that's where i've been starting to actually blossom there too so christine talk about some of the best the services rich provide and the some of the reasons that people would our youth young people are on the street in the first class right i mean i think ship sure liked it a great job on the services the only thing i had when i would throw in there is that we also do  showers and you know like he said kind of try to build relationships between the volunteers who help out there most of the most of the people who supervise rids our volunteers are very volunteer heavy organization which allows us to have a  very untypical ratio we have a lot like typically like a one to seven ratio between the people who stay there and the people who are helping run the place so you actually get to know folks roots and why folks have to come to roots  really varies we have people who are there because there are gay lesbian bisexual transgender questioning queer intersex we found that these guys are twice as likely to be out on the streets as their straight peers because of problems at home much more likely to get assaulted once they're on the streets so these these guys are definitely at risk they account for up to forty percent of our shelter at any given time we have folks who are graduates of foster care and  i used to work in foster care actually that's one of the things that first attracted me to homeless youth because i just saw how messed up our foster care system was i was i was the lady that drove around in a car and would pick up the  rejected foster kids and take them to a new foster home and my job was to show up like you know with a bunch of trash bags pack up their stuff in the trash bags and take them to another home to a family they had never met them before knew nothing about them and vice versa the young person knew nothing about this family and it was it was a painful job and we have doubted that basically suggests that if you hit your eighteenth birthday while a ward of the state you have a forty percent chance of homelessness in the next three years and that's just us it's not ok that we're doing this to or to our young people other reasons people find us there they are survivors of abusive or very negligent parents  one study suggests that fifty percent of the people who are homeless as young people had parents who either didn't care or were just pretty dismissive of that person i get a phone call every now and then from a parent can you take my daughter and i just you know as a parent it's very hard for me to be sympathetic i try to steer them to resources that will help keep the family together but ultimately the answer is yes we'll take your kid if that's what we need to do  and describe the because i got to watch this describe the typical evening when people are lining up to get a bed so there's one of two ways you can call in we usually just stand there and kneel and you know and we start talking out outside you know like you know hey how's your day you know everything that and you know start feeling the reporter for relationship you know for  a singer friend saying we have seen him during the day and usually a list comes out you know people say you know their name and or if the program coordinator knows the person well know that they can look at the face like oh ok you're here so i'll just write that already and usually on top of that they decide to you know than last night there was a there was no lotto lottery you know you we take chips with numbers we throw them into an old butter container they are not go country rock and we actually mix them up and we pick john numbers to see who does not get in and i really throw the emphasis on the not because they're like ok so i mean for instance this actually happened to me they picked out my number also next thing i know is i goes for fourth person in lotto sherlock i was like no so i like but usually i got lucky because i stayed after second call and i counted four saw like yes i'm getting in and so on top of that so most people that do get in there are grateful that most don't get in there i've seen the worst reactions like i've seen people how to put this literally blow up like having a fit because they did naming get to because they didn't work they were expecting to get in and yeah i mean all but the thing is we trip the routes try to accommodate by giving them a meal a bus ticket and a blanket and recommendations to get you shelters which is the landing and also ryan center and what's sad is roots is the largest of the of the young adult shelters so those other places are typically full well we will call them and say hey we've got some people to send over they'll be no no we're already full last year for every five times a young person trying to get into our shelter there was one of those times that we had to turn them away i mean that was the ratio last year so far this year we're at one out of ten because we have been growing and adding more capacity so like you said we're going to go up to forty five guests by the end of the year and i'm really looking forward to getting a lot of public support to make that possible because you know that that kind of makes our expense our pro expenses go up a little bit to help those extra guess you're almost trite right and says sixty five percent capacity in greece and how many you just said there's so there's three you shelters for the greater seattle area burger king county to county yeah yeah that's it yeah yeah that's it there's only the auburn is trying to open one last i heard but again if you look at the one night count that they did just for youth and young adults in may we are only helping out eighteen percent of the people who are unstable housed with our shelter system currently so basically we're doing a better job with the adults than we are with the young people for some strange reason we really need more beds although are not particularly doing a great job with adults no no unfortunately our share our shelters have become a little bit of a warehousing system for the adults so can you i meant to ask you about this before can you talk about the back to law and the effect that has had on our homeless situation yeah let me give you a background for people who haven't heard of becca before a thirteen year old was tragically killed in spokane who was a runaway and her parents were so outraged of around how they had no rights to track down errant daughter that this law was put into effect that basically gave the parents and the police the right to say hey this is a runaway you're harboring a runaway and and you need to contact c p s or the parents when the law was written the these secure centers to send these troubled young people to so that there could be some support for the young person and some family mediation well those secure crisis centers weren't funded so now we just have the law that says hey if you're under eighteen you're considered a runaway you know the state or the or the parents could come after a shelter who takes their manners service provider who has them in their care for more than twenty four hours i could be held liable for harboring a runaway and so what it what we've trained people under eighteen to do is we've trained them to rely on sexual predators and friends and anybody who's not affiliated with the legal system right who's a mandated reporter and they can actually come to a shelter like roots until they're eighteen so it's really sad and i know a young man who actually grew up in a while oh well i had a great support system there i had a lot of friends his you know he's kind of light on family support his mom adopted him when he was quite young and when he was away at summer camp i think he must have been like fifteen years old she married some guy he had never met he came back from summer camp like here's her new stepdad and it didn't go well needless to say but she still wanted to control his life she still wanted to have sayso over him so she called up all of his friends and said if you let my son sleep on your couch and the parents too she  told them all of this i will call the cops on you and so basically he could no longer live in his town he could no longer go to his school he was either needing to be under the the rules under the roof accept legislation entirely either that or we need to have more support for families in crisis so that the young person has a safe place to stay while there's some investigation about if if their home is a safe and welcoming environment for them expression with young people who are coming out for the first time as sexual minorities i mean we need we need more places for those young people to go what support are you getting  from our government if any we are actually the proud beneficiaries city of seattle funding the human services department provides about forty percent of our operating budget before we grew were growing it's that number is getting smaller and we get a little bit of county funds for the meal programs and we also just recently received some state funds for this a y m c a housing project the state just committed a one million dollar grant to a two year pilot project that is basically half of that's going to subsidizing housing so that you have two years of has seen in that first year rent is completely paid for and by the end of the two years you have a larger fraction that your pain  so that's really a great great partnership that we have with the y m c a to have their case managers come to our shelter and help folks find housing directly out of our shelter but otherwise the rest of your support comes from individuals have an individual have just kind of like the station you know people like you know so talk about in addition to when making let's say a monetary contribution to your organization what other ways can people support roots we would love to have more volunteers as as you hear from sure like it's really important when you come in the door to have people greet you people who are interested in getting to know you and spend time with you so we have a lot of different volunteer positions both in the evening and in the morning people can go to our web site click on the volunteer tab it w w w dot roots info r o o t s i n f o dot org find out all about volunteering it's it's a life changing know these young people they're pretty amazing other things that they could do is you know they could help us by donating materials we always need more body wash and shampoo and right now are out of deodorant razors i believe you know it's really supportive to help people be clean as they go out to their days so and you have a list of those items on your website that's also on our website so you're looking for new  toiletries toiletries what about like clothing anything like that well our space is really limited on clothes right now because we felt it was more important to grow the shelter than to grow our clothing bank so what we mostly need for clothes right now  socks brand new socks socks can ever have too many their socks and then the volunteers do they go through any training yes we do not only into our volunteer orientation so they understand shelter operations but we also do a three hour conflict escalation training so that they know how to break up fights violently something we could all use actually i went through those both the volunteer information and the conflict behavior like and these you hint to me like hey we have new people so would you mind going to greet them and see what happens like that's fine so i come over here i actually you know i just walk safety and they have right to be i mean if they don't make it into a safe place they are very likely to be victimized specially as young women young women who hit the streets for the first time have a forty percent assault chance and then the next few weeks it's just awful so  them warm greeting is just really critical as you know it's ok you're in a safe place we're going to take care of you here this is a really important and needed message it is very needed i mean and what i want to talk to new people i where you've been in everything that i've heard so many horrible things like actually there was one of and i was actually who actually decided to get out of trafficking sex trafficking and hugh she just said she said you know blank you just left and she ran and she found roots and i was like well i'm happy that you're here because you because he just let you know this place is not just a shelter it's also sanctuary because here you know you can actually make friends and she i have actually seen her grow like crazy i mean i've seen her like make plenty of friends yes so many very i vaguely remember her name but i remember she's she went from like being scared like you know like a man to actually having friends that are male and female i was like that is awesome i was so happy when i saw that because it we actually i mean it was i mean granted i was a slow process but i mean it's a great example of how you can grow and also get over the fears where is we only got about a minute left so people who aren't familiar where is roots located how can they find out more about harry we are in the district in the in a church basement right next to the post office we would love to have volunteers come by we would also love to show people the shelter we're really proud of that we just put a half a million dollars into making it bigger and better and have more showers and lockers for people so i would love to show folks around is there a phone number because some of our listeners do not have internet access ok sure thanks thanks for that mike it's two of six six three two one six three five that's the that's the ritz landline again that's two hundred six six three two one six three five or well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you both very much for coming and spending time with us  we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning taryn touched paul paul is a journalist publisher and novelist in march two thousand he co founded to help a news organization that has earned a global reputation for its aggressive public interest journalism and where he remains editor in chief and publisher he is author of the alchemy of desire and he is here to talk about his new book the story of my assassins turned tench paul thank you very much and spending time with us this morning pleasure to be here so start out tell us what was the motivation in writing the story of my assassins you know when the book came to me at the time when i was going through a very difficult phase in my life we had standing outside and i asked him what he wanted and he said he was there who got me so i gave him with chelsea at the door and he sat down on the chair and he had a ninety nine m rule tucked into his pants and every time would step out he would follow me was every time i stepped all these these people these guys these cops would follow me around and then a few days later it was a sunday morning and i've gone into officer since some emails and i was sitting in the office sending my emails ten o'clock in the morning and my phone rang my mobile  picked it was a friend of mine from bombay and he said are you a life it was a question mark at the end of the sentence and i said what are you talking about he said turn on the television set turned on the television set and there was breaking news on every courts in india and since then i've always said that if you haven't been to a lower court in india you have no idea when in democracy you have to visit a lower court to begin to understand the true nature of in the limo christian how complex it is so someone to the lower court for an identification parade left the courtroom which was a really surreal experience when i left the courtroom the whole literally side of me kicked in and this concept of exploring the narrative on the story of my killers  brew inside my head and the first explore a tree not that struck me in my head was what is it that brings a mind to a point where he's willing to take a few rupees and murder a man he knows nothing about you know and so what was the journey that these boys had taken to have reached a point where they were willing to take money and take a hit on on me who they knew nothing about and that began to sort of slowly grew in my head but it took me a long time to nature of and in democracy the plight of the underclass in india the complexity of spirituality in india and the nature of power so it became many many different themes those who read the book now and i have to say that it's been very is actually very dislikable guy it's only when i found it highly dislikable war is that the material began to open itself up and i got i could start writing and this was almost four years after the book had come to me and then of course i wrote it without pause because that war is that the very is just opened up the whole material to me and i ended up writing and talking about not just the mystery of the killers and why they wish to kill the complex mystery of that but also it allowed me that whole framework to actually talk a lot about about pressing issues which i feel very strongly about is that why you made it in a novel rather than let's say a memoir you are feeling the thing about i do journalism on a problem is the indian elite inhabits if you have a class divided society i mean the indian elite which is the english speaking elite inhabits a completely removed world from everybody else even though we live cheek by jowl the stories of the underclass of before the world happens to you we are all innocent and so in the telling of the stories from the time to the children i was able to establish that perhaps perhaps before they began to wrong the world they had been wronged by the world so they're probably more wrong was a long stemmed hammer to kill so it's called the brain carry man and all these were drawn from things i'd read about or known in my life all my characters and the last one is a muslim boy young boy who is devastated and destroyed by the english language because he has no means of coping with it and so i looked at five very very different assassin with different backgrounds and then try to one construct a story and then try to bring the whole plot into into a kind of co even through the great opacity there was there was a kind of coherence and at the end of the coherence there are still questions which which is really how like very often ends up being you know we answer many questions and when we finish answering those questions we find we are faced with come from it was impossible to do that you know it was impossible to do that what i do know today is that one of the assassins is dead and the other four four out on bail this is eleven years later what is the mind who took the contract is a very very famous guy from from the east eastern part of india he's part is a mafia don and a bit of a political leader and he's actually in is also arraigned in court on the on the murder case for having taken the contract heroes everybody from the bus driver on the road to two to the high and mighty of india knew of us and we had we got a lot of accolades for the work we've done but the other thing was that the government just hit back with a very extra constitution way the government of the day and we were pretty much shut down we had dozens of false cases put against us three of my colleagues were restaurant trumped up cases investors were hounded we were locked into a really dubious com we did that actually but you know that itself was a great challenge because even though everybody admired us and some maybe loved us everyone was terrified of being formally associated with us because nobody wanted the states i or on the back so nobody would back us with any kind of money or investment you know but i had become almost universally well known in india everybody knew about it and finally i traveled for nine months up and down india in two thousand and three trying to raise money to restar camp and i did that by addressing groups of citizens and any friend of mine who would sort of a meeting meeting of five people ten people five hundred people i would go then i would addressed and remind them of what we had done and what had happened to us it was public knowledge benignly every now and then just five days before i was to launch the first edition and i only enough money for two editions first week and second week this young couple walked into my office they didn't do my sister works with me saying they really admired me and the work we' done and walked into my office and they took a small investment five percent of the company and they gave us you know money to last five months and that's all it's gone on by just going on finding money it's so so much fifty percent of my job in there is raising resources to do the journalism we know that works for me can you paint a picture of what media in india is like well it's actually very very energetic you know it's fairly free it's very energetic and there's a lot of it which is a good thing it's really a lot of it is also co opted  parties and corporate houses and so on but indians are very very news focused so this is we have probably close two hundred news channels national in all languages and we have dozens of newspapers and magazines and all of that is good because it shows the plurality on media and shows that it's impossible for anybody any political party or any corporate house to fundamentally monopolize all of indian media because there's so much of it and that's a good thing and so a lot of good work gets done and it's multi language you know everything left being just one of the dominant languages there at least two dozen other major languages which are very robust media operations with millions and millions of viewers and readers and i was surprised to hear from you before we started that in india there is no news on the radio that's a real feeling because you know i've always believed that the most democratic medium of all the mediums that there are mass mediums is actually radio because the cost of entry into radio is the lowest you know if you want to start a television channel or a newspaper you need hundreds of millions of dollars but you know in the radio can go into the million or two and you can start it so it's a mystery for me why the indian state has actually not legalized news radio in india i mean if they were to do it i think we would take people going to music videos straight away because and this argument is a very valid argument because what you do when you don't allow democratic media to flourish is you leave the entire space of media to large corporate houses so the only kind of persons who can actually enter that it was space the media today are very very large corporate houses with deep pockets you know because hundreds of millions to launch either a channel or a newspaper or a magazine yeah i think some of your content would be great on radio because don't you do a lot of hidden camera work with your investigation that's right you know and i know also we have a very strong current with the with the with the school last school scholar right thinker class of india so i mean it would also give us a chance to put delusion of content on television is very fast in newspapers are not everyone's cup of tea so radio in that sense if you could get a serious discourse going out there on radio i think it would have a huge impact can you tell us about democracy in india  world's largest democracy it's really complex indian democracy it's a miracle that a billion two hundred million people divided across across dozens of fault lines still managed to maintain a healthy functional electoral democracy it's an extraordinary thing but having said that it's plagued by a lot of crises so there are a lot of internal crises that that we face there is a run on resources we have two percent of the conflicting interests on a daily basis you know so it's a huge challenge the triumph of indian democracy is actually the triumph of the founding region the founding fathers of india are probably the most extraordinary group of men or women that have ever existed these these men shaped a kind of idea of a modern liberal democratic republic using extremely poor material at that time you know when we became independent in nine hundred forty seven we were ninety percent illiterate we had no manufacturing we were coming out of two hundred more than two hundred years of colonial rule our growth rates were less than one percent maybe been futile for almost six hundred years i mean the fact that the founding fathers took this material and decided that this country  documents and created such important institutions all of which were constructed to create a liberal fair tolerant society on the which were written and constructed to uplift the poorest of the poor you know every single document that it's that original founding contract and all these great men came from very very privileged backgrounds and all of them turn their back on the privilege to serve the larger good so in the for the founding of india is this clear notion of the social contract that if you have privilege you have to give back mean i'm all for the economic in florence that has come to us it's great the cars the planes the world it's all great that's fine we need that well we can't we can't just focus on that and forget the five maybe six hundred million people who  scrounging for two meals a day so there has to be a kind of sensitize ition among the elite that all decision making that takes place in india has to at all times keep within its you find that deprived of india all of it must in some way their two hundred million of them by the way that things have changed for them in all kinds of ways so all the all the all the seeds that founding fathers put into the ground have borne fruit in all kinds of ways but it also means that many of the seeds that have sprouted have also brought conflict with them and that conflict is coming out of the fact that there is a constant move towards becoming a more egalitarian society and so conflict occurs but that conflict is seen with the greatest alarm by the have the means for change within india within the political system or is it more of the grassroots you start in fact the political system that's enabling the grassroots to sprout and grow and you know in the story of my assassins actually any intelligent reader will be able to gauge know i mean we can't move we have tried the number of people europe africa has just in india you know so the complexities of this journey and also the fact that i believe that the indian journey is crucial to the rest of the world and by the world least read about and know it because it is in a sense of ultimate experiment of that i think if we succeed it's good news for the world all right well with that we are fortunately on a time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you