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# Young woman is a role model for homeless youth
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/young-woman-is-a-role-model-for-homeless-youth/
- Published: 2003-08-04T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T00:28:35.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Promenade, #archive-import, Homeless, Homelessness

*By Charles Springer*

Another angel has come to the streets of Santa Monica.

Her name is Alexandra “Alex” Khan and she is an 18-year-old woman with a heart as big as the Pacific Ocean.

She looks like all the other homeless youth out there on the Promenade with one exception: She is not homeless and has been clean and sober for more than a year.

She is on a mission to help other youth find their way off drugs and off the streets.

I met Alex when she was a 15-year-old rebellious, runaway kid. I had given her the “daddy talk,” telling her of the dangers of the street and that she should go home. But she did not listen and sank further and further into her addiction between here and Hollywood.

She did heroin and cocaine and stole injectable pharmaceutical drugs from the hospitals where her parents worked as doctors.

You might ask why I did not call the police to send her home. Well, I have spoken to many homeless youth over the years and most of the reasons for running away are serious ones, such as physical and/or mental and/or emotional abuse, molestation or just neglect.

Speaking to Alex now is like speaking to a totally different person than the shy girl I met years ago.

There is sparkle in her beautiful, large eyes today and her smile is like liquid sunshine. She is now a self-published writer with a book of poems called “Songs Burned Into My Mind,” which she wrote while in rehab. It is about her whole experience on the streets, her addiction and her salvation through her arrest and the intervention of her parents, who sent her to a lock-down facility in Utah.

When I read some of the poems in the book, my heart broke and tears came to my eyes.

She is also a very talented artist whose paintings of the female figure are as good as artists who have been painting for years longer than she has. I have apprenticed her to help her refine her talent.

Her major goal is to be a youth drug counselor. She wants to give back what God has given her. She wants to help her peers on the streets achieve their goals and dreams.

She is a role model for her age group and many of the kids have come to her for help in getting and staying sober. She does this and spends nights out here with her boyfriend, who is homeless, to help him stay sober, even though she can go home anytime she wishes.

What this young woman is doing proves to me that there is love out here on the streets. And once we learn to look past outer appearances, we will see that under the stereotype of homelessness, is a human being who has a heart and feelings like anyone who has a home or pays rent.

We will see that we, as human beings, owe it to our own humanity to have compassion for those who are less fortunate. We will see that the love and compassion Alex shows to her peers and her boyfriend is the love and compassion some have lost with age.

We will see that no matter what, this dilemma of homelessness will not just go away and cannot keep being swept under the proverbial carpet any longer without all of us tripping over the lump it is causing. We should all take example from this young woman and do our part to resolve homelessness once and for all. (Charles Springer is a freelance writer and freelance artist and homeless resident of Santa Monica. Alex Kahn)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 4, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/080403.pdf?ref=smdp.com)