At the time, efforts to help these young people were primarily local; few Federal resources existed to shelter runaway and homeless youth or reunite them with their families.
The 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (Public Law 93-415) changed all that.
Through Title III, the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, Congress provided for the creation of community shelters called basic centers that would provide emergency care to runaway young people who weren’t already receiving services from the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. In 1975, FYSB funded the first 66 basic centers