Cynthia Lira-Martinez was just 13 when she first became homeless. She moved in and out of foster homes or stayed with her friends. But some nights she had no place to stay and would fall asleep at school the next day.
“I was going through something that I had no choice but to go through,” Lira-Martinez said. “I wasn’t homeless because I wanted to be homeless. I was homeless because my mom left us.”
By the end of her freshman year, Lira-Martinez dropped out of high school and became a teen mother of a baby girl.
“A month after I had her, I separated from her dad because I was going through domestic violence, and leaving her dad meant I had nowhere to go because I was living with her dad’s family,” she said. “Although they didn’t kick me out, because I was trying to get away from him, I had to leave.”
Lira-Martinez said foster homes were unwilling to take her and her newborn in at the same time. Her biggest fear was to be separated from her daughter, but she did not want her to end up on the streets. She would spend time with her daughter during the day, but in the evenings, she would leave her with her grandmother.
“If I would have had more people reach out and offer help, then my situation could have changed a lot sooner,” Lira-Martinez said. “It for sure wasn’t something that was easy.”
Today, Lira-Martinez is 24 years old and serves as co-chair of the The Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative’s Youth Action Board, a committee of transition-age youth – ages 18-24 – who have experienced homelessness and provide recommendations on ways to help young people stabilize their lives.
“Having resources where you can go and you can feel welcome, you know that there’s people that are going to understand you, and there’s people that are working with people your age that are going through the exact same thing, it’s very helpful and beneficial,” she said.
Across Kern County, the number of homeless youth has spiked in recent years. Some couch surf with friends or stay in shelters. Some sleep on the streets. According to the county’s 2025 Point in Time Count, 225 transition-age youth were living without stable housing. That number is up from 147 in 2024.
During the 2023-24 school year, more than 6,515 homeless students, including 421 unaccompanied minors, were enrolled in Kern County schools, according to the California Department of Education. That number is up from 4,946 homeless students, including 268 unaccompanied minors, enrolled during the 2019-20 school year.
Now, with new federal funding, local agencies and service providers are taking steps to bring those numbers down.
Last October, Kern County received a $5.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to create and implement a plan to prevent youth homelessness. The grant funds housing and support services to improve health and wellness among homeless youth over the next two years.
The Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative, an organization responsible for implementing local homeless systems, policy and funding in Kern County, will use the grant to serve transition-age youth, unaccompanied minors and youth-headed households.
Christopher Vargas, the collaborative’s executive director, said Kern County has lacked adequate resources for youth transitioning out of foster care, including programs that support education, employment and trauma-informed care. The collaborative also identified safety concerns for homeless youth when accessing services.
“Youth could have reservations about going into an all adult shelter where there’s older adults,” Vargas said.
Allyson Baptiste, program coordinator of the Kern County Superintendent of Schools Homeless and Foster Youth Services department, helped write the grant proposal. She said the grant is competitive nationwide and that receiving it demonstrates the local community’s commitment to supporting homeless youth.
“Since 2017, we’ve made an intentional effort in our community to really expand services and serve homeless youth as best as we can, and part of that included writing and receiving, finally, the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program Grant,” said Baptiste, who is also the chair of the collaborative’s Homeless Youth Subcommittee.
The collaborative will partner with Flood Ministries, a street outreach organization that provides the homeless community with housing and services, and the Kern County Department of Human Services to implement transitional housing for homeless youth. Flood Ministries will also provide rental assistance for 18 to 34 months to households experiencing homelessness.
“The entire community just has to really make an effort and come together to try to support our youth experiencing homelessness as early as possible,” Baptiste said. “So, one thing that we try to advocate for is that education is a pathway out of homelessness.”
Hopester, a local nonprofit, and the Kern County Superintendent of Schools will support homeless youth working toward certificates and degrees and provide clinical services and referrals to treat substance-use disorders and mental health conditions.
The collaborative also plans to connect youth with CalWORKS and CalFresh benefits, provide domestic violence support services and help young people with chronic health issues or physical disabilities apply for Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance.
The partners providing supportive and housing services are expected to begin their projects in October 2025.
Efforts related to the grant are part of the collaborative’s broader Strategic Action Plan to reduce the number of homeless individuals and families flowing into systems of care, and increase the number of people moving into permanent housing.
According to the Strategic Action Plan, about one-third of the people receiving local homeless services in Kern County are youth and young adults. Data show that they experience anywhere from nine to 1,236 days of homeless living. On average they spend about 307 days and nights without a stable place to live.
When applying for the grant, the collaborative wanted to identify goals, strategies and methods to address youth homelessness by working with its Homeless Youth Subcommittee and Youth Action Board, Vargas said, adding that the Youth Action Board played a key role in developing the projects and identifying gaps in services.
“There’s a variety of reasons that these youth are struggling with homelessness,” said Lira-Martinez. “Some have fallen between the cracks and weren’t really guided in the way that they needed to be guided. Some of them didn’t know all of their resources. Some of them are struggling with substance abuse. Some of them are struggling with mental health.”
Vargas described the grant as an opportunity to seriously deal with such issues and said the collaborative’s hopes for the projects are big.
“We’re really hoping, with this YHDP program, that we’re able to significantly decrease youth homelessness, and even hope to obtain functional zero,” he said. “So, with the functional zero, it doesn’t mean that we fully eradicate youth homelessness. There will always be individuals falling into homelessness, but we’re really wanting to put systems in place to prevent the inflow and create a sustainable infrastructure to address the individuals who are [homeless] at this current time.”
Haydee Barahona is The Intersection’s reporting intern from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She covers health equity in Bakersfield and Kern County.
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