21,000 kids countywide are sheltered homeless, San Diego County says

Data from San Diego County shows thousands of local children live with their families in sheltered homelessness, with no place to call their own. Some of them enter the foster care system, which can open the door to becoming homeless again.

For Vanessa Brunetta, stability has always been hard to find.

"I actually was born into severe homelessness when I was little," said Brunetta. "For the first four years of my life, my family was homeless due to a lack of resources."

By the time she was four, they had found places to stay with family and friends, but it was never their own.

"It wasn't guaranteed," said Brunetta. "Or we would be in hotels, where my father would work during the day and pay for it at night. It was always day-to-day if not week-to-week."

The San Diego County Office of Education says about 21,000 kids countywide live like that at some point in the school year. It's called sheltered homelessness.

The rising cost of living has kept that number high over the past few years.

That instability took its toll on Brunetta's family, and by the time she was eight years old, she was in foster care.

"I went through 12 placements and five different schools up until I was 18," said Brunetta.

The National Foster Youth Institute says one out of every five former foster kids becomes homeless immediately after aging out of the foster care system.

When foster kids turn 18, they can receive a monthly stipend to help pay for housing; that help ends when they turn 21.

It's a hard reality Brunetta experienced a year ago. She was in the middle of getting her undergraduate degree from UCLA.

"When that ended and then my financial aid ended, it was hard for me to manage on my own," said Brunetta. "I would sleep in my car when I wasn't in school. Then, when I was in school, I would stay with friends up in Los Angeles or do remote classes from home, my car, or wherever I was."

Brunetta graduated with a degree in sociology this year and has her own apartment.

Now, she works as a peer-to-peer mentor with Promises2Kids, a San Diego nonprofit that gave her the mental and financial support she needed to leave homelessness behind for good.

"Promises2Kids focuses a lot on mentorship. But also encouraging in conversation healthy eating, saving, budgeting … the things children learn from their families," said Brunetta. "Just encouraging foster youth to be more than foster youth is what I aim to tell them now."

If you want to learn more about Promises2Kids, check out their website .