Three dozen people clustered together around fire pits, wrapped in sleeping bags and sitting on folded cardboard boxes laid across a paved basketball court.
They shared stories of their childhoods and how things could've ended up differently. They imagined what it would be like if they had to sleep outside for more than one night.
Sherry Bass recalls watching a similar group of people from her bedroom window last year, wondering why the heck they'd choose to sleep outside, unsheltered from the cold.
The event at Promise House, a nonprofit battling youth homelessness, aimed to show donors the reality for more than 1,200 homeless kids and teens on Dallas streets every night.
Some "couch surf," staying at different houses when they can. Some sleep in cars. Some are simply outside, tucked in an alleyway, trying to stay hidden.
Many have run away from home, some fleeing abusive families, and others have aged out of the foster care system.
It's a fate that Bass could've faced if she hadn't been taken in by Promise House. This year, instead of watching from across the street, she told her story.
Seventeen and pregnant, Bass couldn't stay in foster care anymore.
"I don't know if I'd be where I'd be without Promise House," she said Thursday night. "I don't know if I'd still have custody of my son."
Her voice cracked and she put her hands to her face. Ashley Lind, the CEO of Promise House, rushed over to hug her.
Bass paused and said, "Y'all, I'm sorry. This is harder than I thought it'd be."
It was the first time Bass had stood before an audience and told her story. She was taken from her drug-addicted parents when she was 13. She spent years in and out of foster homes and did a stint in a rehab center for her own drug use.
She started to stabilize at her last foster home, but when she got pregnant, she had to find somewhere else to live.
Bass moved to Promise House, which runs a housing program for pregnant and parenting girls ages 14 to 20. There, she learned how to care for her son, Jeremiah, finished high school and applied to college.
Her story isn't unusual. Many kids in the foster care system face homelessness when they turn 18 or become pregnant.
And once on the street, homeless youth are often preyed upon by pimps.
"Kids only have one commodity when they're out on the street, and that's their body," said Dallas police Detective Cathy De La Paz.
De La Paz works in the Dallas Police Department's high-risk victims unit and spoke at a seminar on youth homelessness earlier this month.
She said people often see a kid or teen on the street and assume it's because the child is delinquent, but often they are escaping terrible home lives.
"The truth of the matter is kids don't leave happy, stable homes," De La Paz said.
Many of the teens Dallas police help are chronic runaways and typically have a history in the CPS system. Homeless youths have trouble regularly attending school and tend to cluster around public transit areas, like the West End rail station downtown.
There are about 3,600 reported homeless students in Dallas ISD. Those kids may not be on the street every night, but they don't have stable homes to go to.
And 95 percent of students in DISD come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in a city that ranks second in the nation in child poverty rates. Advocates say they want to end youth homelessness before it turns into adult homelessness.
"If we don't take care of the youth, they're not going to take care of us later," said DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa at the youth homelessness event.
But it's difficult to intervene. Many kids don't tell their teachers they are homeless. And others simply stop going to school and hide on the streets.
"They don't want to be found. They're afraid," said Lind, the Promise House CEO. "Kids are afraid of everything. These are children who have not experienced a loving, caring adult relationship, in some cases ever."
Promise House typically serves about 500 youths every year in 97 transitional and emergency beds. The organization offers counseling to help the kids heal from the trauma of their home lives or life on the street.
"They have been beaten, raped. Any items that they have are stolen. It's quite a brutal world out there when you're sleeping alone on the street as a kid," Lind said.
Even if they haven't been on the street, many are tired of the system. Bass saw it among her peers. They didn't want to accept help.
"By the time kids get out of foster care, they're so burnt out. They're sick of the system," she said. "Some kids don't want to cooperate."
Bass is now a nursing student at Texas Woman's University in Denton, where she lives with her son in family housing. Her school is paid for by scholarships and federal grants for former foster kids.
She still talks to the counselors and caseworkers she met through Promise House, where she lived for more than a year. She sends pictures of Jeremiah, who is 19 months old now. She tells them about school.
"I just want positive people in my life and around my son because I don't want him to have to experience what I've experienced," she said.
Bass knows she could've been another statistic of a failed system. She knows her son could've ended up in the same system. She lamented that there's not enough room at Promise House for all the former foster kids like her and other homeless youths.
She encouraged the 36 people who slept outside at the event to donate as much as they could so "everyone would get the chance for that stability." The event raised more than $90,000 for the nonprofit, which had hoped to raise $125,000.
And the sleepers didn't seem deterred by a cold front moving in, bringing with it a cold mist.
They knew they had a home to go to in the morning.
