Donna Rowe: Advocate for the unwanted

	Memorial A vigil to honor the life of Donna Rowe will be held at 6:30 p.m. Saturday near old YIT at 300 Charleston, by Zuni and Pennsylvania SE. Bring candles.

The kids no one else wanted, no one else could reach. The runaways, prostitutes, drug addicts and broken souls on the streets. The ones she helped through Youth in Transition, the agency and erstwhile drop-in center for homeless teens and young adults she founded in 1995 out of an old school bus.

The kids who called her Mama Donna.

“The fight is still on,” she would often tell people in her raspy-voiced pleas for donations to keep the always struggling Youth in Transition, or YIT, alive in some form. “Until I die, I’m not going to shut up.”

Rowe finally shut up and shut down Monday, her weathered lungs unable to draw breath, her last days spent in hospice care surrounded by family and friends. She was 57.

As word of her death spread on the street and social media, many of the “kids” she rescued fondly remembered her as the one adult willing to love them back from the brink.

Donna Rowe, founder of Youth in Transition, dedicated her life to homeless teens and young adults whom no one else could reach. She died Monday after a lengthy illness. (JOURNAL FILE)

“Thank you for saving my life more than once,” said one Facebook commenter. “I love you and am going to miss you.”

Rowe is also mourned by older community members who were both awed and exasperated by her intractable passion for the mission of YIT, despite dwindling finances, unconventional business practices and her failing health.

I am one of them.

I met Rowe in 2004 when I covered her arson and criminal solicitation trial. She had been accused of orchestrating the Thanksgiving 2002 fire that gutted the YIT shelter at 310 Washington SE. She was also accused of planning to have one loose-lipped arsonist killed.

She was found not guilty of all charges, but she still lost so much. Gone was YIT’s largest and most successful location, a place she had fought to keep open against pressure by the city’s nuisance abatement team and neighborhood associations to shut her down, unhappy with the kind of clients the shelter drew to the area and the nontraditional, boundary-less therapeutic practices Rowe employed.

“You can’t make an impact in the lives of these kids if you don’t get close,” she would explain. “My methods may be unorthodox, but they work.”

Although YIT eventually found a new location, at least briefly, at 300 Charleston SE, Rowe’s dream of sheltering homeless teens was never again realized. Money sources dried up, board members came and went.

In January 2006, the board announced that YIT was broke and that Rowe would no longer be paid her meager $800 monthly salary. Nine months later, the board announced that YIT was being restructured as an advocacy group.

Rowe kept working for free, driving around the city checking the haunts of the kids she knew well, offering advice, her shoulder, her ear, her heart.

She kept going, because she knew what it was like to be a teenager lost to the streets. She had been one herself.

“I can help these kids, because I know,” she said. “I know.”

In 2009, she made a run at the mayor’s office as a write-in choice, calling herself the “people’s candidate.” Not enough people voted for her.

In her last months, she continued to try to raise funds for YIT, still hoping to reopen a shelter for her kids.

I last saw Rowe in June when she posted a troubling comment on Facebook about her battle with the state of New Mexico over misfiling a year’s worth of YIT salary as self-employed income, which thus required her to pay more than $2,000 in overdue state gross receipts taxes – a sum she could not come close to paying, living as she was by then on a $700 monthly disability check.

The state, she said, was prepared to place a lien on her property – a dented, barely running $1,000 car – and garnish her disability checks.

By then, her health had worsened. She had been hospitalized several times, once with collapsed lungs. She had experienced seizures and fainting spells. She required a wheelchair.

So, if death was coming, she thought, she might as well go out with a meaningful bang.

Rowe’s Facebook message described how she planned to go to the state tax offices and, if the issue could not be resolved, roll her wheelchair to the front of the building, arm herself with posters explaining her predicament and blow her brains out.

“It will be better for me,” she wrote. “But hopefully it will serve as a warning to our government that acts like this will escalate if they don’t get their (expletive) together or maybe they will still continue not to care.”

I went with her, hoping I would not have an exclusive story.

As it turned out, the state played nice, an agreement was reached and Rowe lived to fight another day.

Weeks later, the agreement fell apart. But she never threatened to shoot herself again, and maybe that was because she knew there were better causes to die for. Maybe it was because she knew death was coming for her anyway.

So she said goodbye.

“I have been a lucky woman. I have had the honor of serving and loving countless people (and animals) in my lifetime and being loved back,” she wrote many of us. “When my time comes to go ‘home,’ do something special for someone and do not mourn but, rather, celebrate.”

She did not go out with a bang but a slow, ragged whisper. But, oh, how meaningful her life was, how passionate, how loud, how bold.

Let’s celebrate that.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A01 of the Albuquerque Journal