Elfenworks Foundation
In Harmony With Children of the Night
Lois Lee to receive Harmony with Hope Award, October 9, 2008
Nearly 30 years have passed since Lois Lee was working on her doctoral dissertation, but what she learned in 1979 has informed her life. Research for her dissertation, called “The Pimp and his Game,” led her to the streets of Hollywood, where she’d grown up. What she saw there compelled her to forego a planned career in social policy and begin a decades-long odyssey to get kids off the streets.
It began innocently enough. Lee brought home a teenaged girl she’d met—a young runaway who’d turned to prostitution as a means of supporting herself. That young girl was followed by another, and then another. Before she knew it, 215 kids had come to live in Lee’s home as they transitioned off the streets. For nearly three years, Lee’s home became a sanctuary for these frail and damaged children.
From the beginning, Lee knew this was her life’s calling. She began raising funds to open a drop-in center in Hollywood. Using her training in social policy, Lee developed a unique set of protocols for working with these children. Her findings, which became part of her dissertation, are in wide use today by the police and attorneys who direct the difficult treatment of children prostitutes. Lee is also an instructor at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Police Academy—providing training for detectives working with child prostitutes.
Called Children of the Night (COTN), the drop-in center and hotline opened for business in 1981. Twenty-seven years later, the hotline receives nearly 13,000 calls from desperate kids annually, and the COTN model has been replicated across the country by traditional service agencies that have come to Lee for guidance. “I’ve written 300 training manuals, filmed training videos, and been asked to speak at replication efforts around the world,” Lee says of her efforts to encourage duplication of her unique program.
Ten years of fundraising allowed Lee to realize the next goal of her dream in 1992: an in-home program that, each year, provides shelter and nurture for 50–100 girls—and a handful of boys—aged 11-17. They have found their way to the home by way of a probation officer, social worker or parent. They find their way out of the home thanks to the effectiveness of programs that support each child in a loving way and help them find solid footing, often for the first time.
Each child who enters the home is helped to develop his or her own “life plan.” Most leave the structured but homelike environment of COTN for their own homes, using their newfound skills to build a bridge back to their family. Others are ready to live on their own, and still others move on to a college dormitory. Leaving the COTN home is not a final farewell. COTN provides ongoing case management to close to 5,000 COTN alumni.
In 1996, Lee took and passed the California bar exam. It was yet another step along her life’s journey to advocate for child prostitutes. With a law degree under her belt, Lee can more actively pursue legal channels to help “her” kids.
One hundred and fifty volunteers have joined her crusade to help kids off the streets: in all, COTN has helped more than 10,000 children. Lee’s leadership is a shining example of intelligent compassion in action.
