Photos line the wall near the front door of the center in downtown Birmingham, each one memorializing a homeless young person killed on the city’s streets.

“Each one on the wall suffered a horrific death and that’s part of the violence youth come in contact with,” said Marilyn Jones, the director of the Project Hope drop-in center.

Some died from gun violence, which kills an average of 244 people in suicides, homicides and accidents each year in Birmingham. Others overdosed — in 2023 alone, 456 people in Jefferson County died from an opioid overdose.

“These are kids out here trying to survive on the street,” Jones told AL.com. “They’re not living on the street, they’re just trying to survive.”

[Read more: Their parents died during COVID. Now, a Birmingham nonprofit is helping them out of homelessness]

Signs sit on tables and file cabinets at Project Hope displaying the grim statistic that 5,000 youth die on the streets in America every year.

Homeless young people, usually aged 17-21, stop in at Project Hope to do their laundry, get food or escape bad weather. The drop-in center also offers family counseling and group therapy sessions. There‘s a large living room where young people can safely get some rest. But as it‘s not a shelter, they can’t spend the night.

Many of the teens are runaways or have been kicked out of their homes or lost their parents. On the street, they are at higher risk of falling victim to human trafficking, survival sex or gun violence.

Volunteers help young people access resources and government services.

“You have young people who are out on their own and don’t know how to navigate systems and a lot of what the staff does is assist young people with basic things, like getting their license, social security cards or signing up for Medicaid benefits,” said Jennifer Ellison, the executive director of Family Connection.

Family Connection is a nonprofit that supports homeless and at-risk youth in Jefferson County. In addition to the drop-in center, the organization also runs a shelter for homeless kids in Alabaster and hands out food, medical supplies and hygiene kits.

Ellison said they handed out about 3,000 hygiene kits last year alone.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that there are 89 kids younger than 18 who are homeless in Birmingham, though some of those may be with their parents. There are another 50 people between 18-24 who are unaccompanied, according to the federal estimates.

Across Alabama, there are 685 unaccompanied homeless kids enrolled in public schools, according to Family Connection.

“Homelessness is not a situation that’s easily fixed overnight, so youth might come for a few weeks, or they might come for a couple months until they can get into a stable situation, some youth we might only encounter once – when they walk through the door, we meet their needs, and then we never see them again,” said Ellison.

In Alabama, service providers say they have seen a rise in LGBTQ youth who are homeless since the legislature passed a slate of laws targeting the group in 2022. Nationwide, LGBTQ youth have a 120% higher risk of experiencing homelessness compared to their peers, according to the National Network for Youth.

“I’ve seen several cases of LGBTQIA plus kids coming through who had to leave their home or have been forced out of their homes just in the first six months of this year,” said Ellison.

Nationwide, the number of young people who are homeless has been growing since COVID. From 2022 to 2023 alone, there was a 15% increase in the number of unaccompanied homeless youth.

There are organizations that provide services for homeless young people, including Youth Towers, which tries to quickly put them into their own homes. But many organizations say they struggle with being under-resourced.

“There’s never enough money,” said Ellison, who added that there are even fewer resources available for the younger kids who run away.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of options because people don’t necessarily think that there is a need. You don’t think about youth, age 12 to 17, potentially being runaway or homeless. But unfortunately, it does happen quite a bit.”

Family Connection receives funding from a partnership with United Way, as well as grants from the federal government and the city of Birmingham. They also receive donations and support from the community, including through food and clothing drives.

The organization is hoping to expand its services to provide outreach to more neighborhoods in Jefferson County. They are also focused on prevention and awareness work, like distributing information in Birmingham schools and partnering with law enforcement.

Along with stories of tragedy, like those memorialized on the wall at the drop-in center, the organization also boasts successes.

One young woman struggled at her job waiting tables at Waffle House. Project Hope discovered that she couldn’t read and helped coordinate with her boss to set up a color coded system she could use to write down orders. Jones said the woman got to keep her job.

Another young woman first came through the program when she was sleeping in a tent with her boyfriend behind a building in downtown Birmingham. She worked with the organization’s outreach team to get clean and find stability.

She recently called Project Hope to report that she was doing well — working to support her family, taking care of a new baby and maintaining her sobriety.

“When I look at that wall, I definitely think, for me, it’s a reminder of why we’re doing what we do,” Ellison said of the memorial wall. “We want the youth that come through our program to be successful, and we want them to do well. We want to make sure to remember anyone that has come through the program that, unfortunately, have lost their lives. But I don’t want to hang any more pictures on that wall.”