Shaping Street-Children Organizations Across the Americas: The Influence of Political, Social, and Cultural Contexts on Covenant House and Casa Alianza.

The article presents information about Covenant House, a non-governmental, social action organization assisting homeless children in the United States, which is compared and contrasted with its Latin American counterpart organization, Casa Alianza, which services street-living and street-working children throughout Mexico and Central America. These reflections by children living on the streets across the Americas illustrate some of the diverse micro and macro push-pull factors that contribute to the migration of children to the streets as well as to their difficulty in exiting the streets and reintegrating back into their family and community environments. The social, cultural, economic and political factors that propel children into a life on the streets largely differ with each child and within each country. However, these children throughout urban cities in both North and Latin America share the reality of struggle, hardship and exclusion in their homes as well as in the streets. This paper aims to portray how a social action organization, Covenant House, has emerged and developed over the past three decades in response to the homeless and street-living children populations within both the United States and Latin America.