Robert Gitin
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Robert Gitin 1997 fellow
Bold Idea
At The Crossroads reaches out to homeless youth and young adults at their point of need, and works with them to build healthy and fulfilling lives. They focus on young people who are not otherwise accessing services. They accomplish their mission through a combination of nighttime street outreach, 1-to-1 counseling, and work with collaborators who provide opportunities for their clients. At The Crossroads aims to build healthy trusting relationships with their clients, through which they can identify goals and develop plans to accomplish them. They work with other agencies to ensure that there is an accessible, comfortable continuum of support that will provide their clients with realistic opportunities to achieve their goals.
Biography
Rob Gitin is the co-founder and Executive Director of At The Crossroads. At The Crossroads reaches out to homeless youth and young adults at their point of need, and works with them to build healthy and fulfilling lives. ATC accomplishes its mission through a combination of nighttime street outreach and one-on-one counseling, and collaboration with other service providers. He first became involved in working with homeless youth through an internship at Youth Outreach Program (YOP) in San Jose that was part of a service-learning course he took while he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1994. He continued to work full-time or volunteer at this drop-in center and homeless shelter for teenagers throughout his last two years at Stanford and for one year after graduating. As a senior, he wrote an honors thesis that provided a historical perspective and contemporary overview on homeless youth that included interviews with homeless teenagers he worked with at YOP. After graduating in 1996, in addition to working as a counselor at Youth Outreach Program, Rob was a teaching assistant for the service learning course he had taken as an undergraduate, “Poverty and Homelessness in America,” taught by Al Camarillo. In April 1997, he was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship to start-up At The Crossroads with his colleague Taj Mustapha, and has been working with At The Crossroads ever since. ATC began providing services in early 1998, and reaches 1,000 homeless youth and young adults in San Francisco every year.
