Angela's Bus Ride Home Essay

For the final project of this course, I decided to create a children's story book on the website "storyjumper" that depicts the issue of youth homelessness titled "Angela's Bus Ride Home." This story is about a girl named Angela who comes from a middle-class family that consists of her father, Bob, and mother, Emily, and is the only child, so she is very privileged. She is a middle schooler as she is in grade 7 and is very outgoing and liked by everyone in her class. She is a social butterfly and talks to everyone, except for one person. There is one outcast in the class, that is a boy named Justin, who is known to eat people's food, and steal items such as extra clothes and school supplies from others' bags when unattended, and always manages

This being said, I thought that this would be a suitable audience for my book because they are the most capable of being influenced and a message like this needs to be exposed to them. The story takes place in a setting that these adolescents are familiar with, has characters such as Angela or even Justin, that are relatable. A lot of people are quite extroverted or have similar personality traits like Angela, such as caring, sympathetic, and courageous, and have the same or similar living conditions as her as well, and others may have personality traits similar to Justin such as introverted and innocent, and some may even relate to him being gay or even being homeless. In fact, "youth homelessness is an urgent issue given that approximately 20% of all Canadians experiencing homelessness are between the ages of 13 and 24. This means that over the course of the year there are 35-40,000 young people who experience homelessness, and on any given night at least 6,000. There are no indications that these numbers are declining. To tackle the problem, we must begin by recognizing that youth homelessness is distinct from adult homelessness in terms of its causes and solutions" (Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, 2016). There are way more homeless youth than people think there are, which is why I wrote about this issue specifically. As stated in the quote, if we distinguish adult and youth homelessness and the youth becomes more aware of the issues that they could one day experience or even know someone who experiences them, we are one step closer to