Founder and executive director Lauri Burns is in awe of her luck
It happened by chance when The Teen Project Founder/Executive Director Lauri Burns ran into a longtime supporter, who always said he was going to leave $1 million for TTP in his will. He changed his mind.
“Peter said that he might as well give me $1 million now to save the kids,” Lauri says.
A short while later, Lauri got a call from real estate developer Gregg Stone, who had purchased 80 acres in Silverado Canyon, which included five vacant Boys Town houses. He was donating the 15-acre Boys Town property to charity and wanted to take bids from interested nonprofits. Stone liked Lauri and The Teen Project and encouraged her to bid on the property.
“I couldn’t see how we could do it,” Lauri says, but then remembered the $1 million in the bank. She contacted Peter.
“He actually said, ‘Spencer Tracy thinks it’s a good idea, I think it’s a good idea, and George Burns took a puff of his cigar and says it’s a swell idea,” Lauri relates.
She explained why Peter said what he said.
“When I first got sober, they told me I could believe in anything as a God as long as it wasn’t me. I had seen Oh God! Book II with George Burns as God and thought he was a cool God, so I started praying to George Burns.”
Lauri still can’t believe she won the bid, but admits it might have something to do with her obsession with the 1938 classic, Boys Town, with Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, founder of the real Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska. Burns, herself a runaway from 23 group homes and juvenile halls growing up in the 1970s, saw the movie for the first time and couldn’t believe a place like that existed.
Later on, after she turned her life around and began fostering girls herself, she enrolled in a course on Boys Town’s family focus, where couples live in the house with the children, and she also began fostering girls from the Canyon Boys Town location. When she started The Teen Project in 2007, she found a house in Lake Forest and began taking in young women who were either on the streets or just emancipated from foster care with nowhere to go. She later opened Freehab, a 74-bed drug treatment/vocational training home in Los Angeles that has helped nearly 1,000 girls.
Which brings us to her new project. Lauri has had many volunteers helping get the houses and property in order, and many businesses have donated paint and furnishings, which will provide 30 bedrooms for 30 young women, ages 15 to 21. Lauri is calling it Vera’s Sanctuary for Women, in honor of Peter’s mother, who died when he was young and left him an orphan.
She is also looking forward to the fundraiser Table for Ten, scheduled for March 3rd at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort. All the proceeds from the event go to The Teen Project, thanks to event founder, Kristin Martin, who totally believes in Burns’ mission. TableForTen.org
The Teen Project Founder and Executive Director Lauri Burns with her girls at the nonprofit’s first Orange County home in Lake Forest
“Table for Ten is lifesaving,” Lauri says. “It connects us with people in the community who care about the kids. It is truly transformational!
Lauri is expecting the girls to be in by mid-February and is thinking the whole thing will finally hit her when everything is done, and the kids are there.
“I couldn’t have imagined, hoped for or dreamed for anything this big,” she admits. “I don’t sleep well because I can’t wait to get back to the property to convince myself it’s mine. It’s kind of like Christmas every day.”
TheTeenProject.com/TableForTen.org
Vera’s Sanctuary is the first residential site in Orange County dedicated to sex trafficking victims.