Hi, I'm Amy Good. I'm the director of Alternatives for Girls. I was part of starting Alternatives for Girls, where in Southwest Detroit we serve homeless and high-risk girls and young women throughout the city and to some extent beyond. Alternatives for Girls began as an idea in 1985 when a group of people living around the neighborhood of where Tiger Stadium used to be Michigan and Trumble started noticing a dramatic increase in the number of girls and young women that were on the street in harm's way, homeless, involved in street based prostitution. There were no services for them and the reason was that there was no steady stream of funding for them. So one thing led to another... we came together. We decided we're going to apply for some money to open up a shelter. So we did that in the fall of 1987. 

We had a goal we were going to open a shelter by April of 1988... that was our goal. But the goal was interrupted in January in 1988 and a very, very cold... bitter cold day. A 16 year old girl came to the church where we had our offices and I spent a couple of hours with her. There was no safe place for her to go... and we decided we're opening up the shelter today. So we sent her home with a member of that church for the weekend. We ran around, set up beds, got friends to come. I spent the weekend calling people take a shift in the coming week. Just take a shift, bring the family, take Tuesday afternoon, you take Wednesday night. The pastor and I took turns filling in the gaps and spending the nights. She came back Sunday night. We were staffed around the clock with volunteers and by the end of the week we were full, which was five beds. Failure was not an option. We were and we remain too important to fail.