On any Monday or Wednesday after school, on West Cass Street in downtown Tampa, in an inconspicuous white concrete building, there are 15 teenagers learning skills to carry them through life. What sets these students apart is that they come from low income families who can’t support themselves, or are without a home.
That is where Starting Right, Now (SRN) comes in, a nonprofit organization that gives these teens a home and access to resources any child should have. Vicki Sokolik founded SRN over 15 years ago at the insistence of Mayor Pam Iorio, and for 15 years SRN has been giving underprivileged children the opportunity to succeed in life.
Vicki Sokolik, CEO and founder of Starting Right, Now, was actually raised in the opposite conditions of those she now strives to help. “But once I understood the hurdles that a youth in poverty must overcome, I could not put my head in the sand. I had to help make changes,” Sokolik said.
It all started in 2005 when Vicki was mentoring a homeless high school student of Hillsborough County. “I helped this student secure housing, gain employment, learn financial literacy, graduate high school, and complete college applications and scholarships,” Sokolik said. “Today, eighteen years later, this student has a graduate degree and is gainfully employed with benefits.”
After years of dedicated work to helping individual teenagers, “ “The Mayor of Tampa, Mayor Iorio, pushed me to help youth city-wide,” Sokolik said. Thus, SRN was born.
“Starting Right, Now empowers unaccompanied homeless youth to become self-sufficient citizens, breaking the cycle of generational homelessness and poverty,” Sokolik said. “This includes long-term housing for homeless independent minors as well as holistic and personalized care for each young person to ensure they do not become chronically homeless adults.”
However it isn’t easy to take care of over a dozen teenagers, and in the beginning Sokolik found it hard to secure funding for a fresh organization.
“Until we got established and proved we could empower youth, no one really wanted to help fund the program. And everyone is skeptical about giving money to a new program,” Sokolik said. “So we had to start with very few youth in order to be able to afford everything they needed.”
Despite all the hurdles, 15 years later SRN has become a full fledged non profit organization, with full time staff and multiple houses throughout the Tampa Bay area. That inconspicuous building on Cass Street is the hub of SRN, where the students come to take life skills classes, get help with homework, and receive all sorts of other support. The 6-8 office staff who work there come from all walks of life, some young, some older, some with teaching backgrounds and others who previously worked in business.
They are in charge of academic support, social services, financial planning and fundraising. In addition, there are up to a dozen or more staff who live at the two houses acting as house managers overseeing the day to day supervision of the students.
Throughout the process of growing the organization, Sokolik encountered various roadblocks in her ability to help unhoused youth. She combated this by consulting Florida’s legislature over the problems that the homeless youth face, and helped write legislation to solve them.
“Starting Right, Now performs extensive community outreach to raise awareness about young people facing life alone without the care of a reliable adult, and with no institutional safety-net,” according to SRN’s website. “SRN has assisted in amending ten laws in Florida to reduce barriers faced by unaccompanied youth.”
When asked to share some of the most memorable students they have worked with, the staff had no shortage of stories about troubled youth battling the odds.
“He was let down by everyone. He has tattoos all over his body and on his face, so he was labeled by everyone. No one took the time to understand him,” Sokolik said. “And, when he finally started trusting me, I was really able to help him shift his thought process and look at the world differently.”
Dominique Griffin, assistant executive director at SRN, and Jill Proto, academic team lead at SRN, both shared that in their time at SRN, there was no shortage of teenagers with heart melting stories.
“There was a girl who was very mean and nasty for a long time, and she finally revealed in a class I did with the students that her dad had been sexually abusing her from a really young age, she had been raised in a church, and the folks from the church didn’t believe her, her mom didn’t believe her, and so she had to come up with a lot of survival tactics” Griffin said. “It gave me some insight into why she was being the way she was, and now we’re very close and she’s pretty successful in her life, and I think she’s done a lot of work to help heal her past traumas.”
“I have seen plenty of kids go through either certification programs or get their associates, or be very close to earning their bachelors degree, and it’s made very clear how important the college program is, because you can do very well in high school, but college is a completely different animal,” Proto said. “So seeing these kids overcome those hurdles has been very impressive, considering they don’t really have mom and dad like a lot of kids do, they’re doing it pretty much on their own, with just us as their support system.”
Looking back, Sokolik never expected her life to turn out the way it has. “When I started helping youth, I never thought about a nonprofit,” Sokolik said.
“I don’t care for politics and I hate bureaucracy, so I never envisioned myself working with the government. And, it all happened serendipitously,” Sokolik said. “What I have found in my life is if you do the right thing, doors open that you never imagined.”
Sokolik is often praised by her coworkers as an understanding, creative and hard working boss who is always working to help homeless teenagers. Among the high praise shared for Sokolik, she is known for never taking no for an answer.
“Working with Vicki has taught me a lot, she really has taught me to become a solution oriented person…being creative with problem solving,” Proto said. “I also feel like her and the program in general are very insistent to the idea that everyone is an individual, so the path towards success is going to look different for every kid, and in academics although we have one standard that they’re supposed to meet, not every kid’s journey is going to look the same. Just being understanding and being patient, and not taking no for an answer.”
“I have learned to be really creative in how I resolve things, and Vicki has really taught me not to accept no from anyone,” Griffin said. “I think you’re taught that, when someone of authority or power says no that that’s the answer, and she is always figuring out, even if it’s years later, on how to get what she wants done, and that has impacted my professional life and my personal life, but she definitely is a go getter.”
Throughout her time fighting to end the child homelessness crisis, Sokolik says that the story of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, has influenced her to follow what she believes.
“When he was in office, he was one of the most hated politicians. Everyone was against him for trying to abolish slavery. But he believed that slavery was morally wrong and instead of folding, he stuck to what he thought was right,” Sokolik said. “Today he is heralded as an amazing president. I always think of him when I am making a hard decision that I know is right but not favored by the majority. To be a strong leader, you can’t always be liked.”
For Sokolik and the workers at SRN, every kid’s story matters, and everyday they dedicate hours of time to helping end the generational homelessness these kids face. Through the years of time spent with the youth, each and every staff member at SRN creates life long bonds that stay strong into the adult years of the once hopeless teenagers.
“My last job was recruiting because we recruited health care professionals, our company’s saying was ‘we help people who help people’, but at the end of the day it was really like a sales job…While you may have loved a candidate, you to them are just one of many recruiters calling to offer them jobs,” Proto said. “But here, on a daily basis you see the immediate impact of the work you’re doing, so there is a lot of joy in that.”
“A lot non profits will say that they can see change in their clientele, but because we really do offer wrap around services, I think it’s why we have such high success, and why we really do end the cycle of homelessness, because we stay with them until that last goal is complete,” Griffin said. “Even sometimes when they go off the grid and have to come back and start over, we really try to be as involved in their life as possible to help these kids have stability in their life.”
“On a larger picture, everytime a student graduates from their goal and gets into their career is an incredible moment for me,” Sokolik said. “I know that I have helped end the cycle of generational poverty and they now have a life of freedom of choice!”
On the 13th of February, 2024, the book If You See Them: Young, Unhoused, and Alone in America, authored by Vicki Sokolik, will be released to shelves around the world, exploring the unrecognized crisis of youth homelessness in America through the eyes of those working on the front lines.
