They’re living in cars, they’re living in tents, they’re living in campers.

They’re crashing in churches.

They’re going from couch to couch, trying to get by and get through school.

“And those are only the kids we know about,” Lori Cavender of Langley said Monday. “We assume there are more out there. They’re really good at hiding it.”

She’s talking about teenagers handicapped by distressing family situations who have ended up on their own, temporarily or permanently, without a place to stay.

Cavender’s goal is to provide that place to as many Whidbey teens as possible.

Her project, first envisioned when she was a youth minister at a church in Burien, began to take shape in 2003, when she and her family moved to Whidbey Island.

She created a business plan in 2009, and early this year put the plan into action.

The result is Ryan’s House, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to provide shelter for Whidbey teens who need it. A 10-member board of directors has been established, and an application for nonprofit status submitted. Fundraising will follow when nonprofit status is approved.

The ultimate goal is to provide shelter and a stable environment in the form of four houses, two each in the Coupeville and South Whidbey school districts, that would house as many as 12 teens each. Cavender would prefer to accommodate 16 in each.

But the group is expecting to start small, establishing an initial house somewhere around Greenbank, near the dividing line between the two districts.

Cavender said potential sites are being scouted, but nothing has been set in stone.

“Here on the island, we’re a rural setting and have to worry about bus lines, septic systems,” she said. “There are a lot of factors we need to look at that an urban site wouldn’t have as issues.”

Cavender said the group hopes to raise $410,000 for startup costs on its first house.

According to figures from the Island County Readiness to Learn Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting students and families in the county’s school districts, there were 67 youths between the ages of 13 and 18 identified as being on their own on Whidbey Island during the past school year.

Another 22 were classified as “unaccompanied” in the Stanwood-Camano area.

“And we don’t have the tallies of the dropouts,” Cavender said. “There’s the potential to be a very large number of former students we haven’t been able to pinpoint.”

Gail LaVassar, executive director of the Readiness to Learn Foundation, said rural homelessness is an understudied population.

“Regardless of where a youth resides, the causes that lead to homelessness are the same: family problems, economic problems and residential instability,” she said. “Disruptive family conditions are the main reason that young people leave home.”

“They have limited legal means to earn enough money to meet basic needs, and they face difficulties attending school,” LaVassar added. “As a community, I hope we will be able to step up and take action to provide more comprehensive supports for youths with no safe place to call home.”

Or as Ryan’s House board member Crystal Coglas of Langley put it:

“It’s a travesty to see children sleeping in places like park benches and bus stops, or in the woods, when we have one of the wealthiest communities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.”

Ryan’s House was named after Cavender’s god-brother, Ryan Busche of Olympia, who along with his wife Abby, died in his early 20s in the crash of an Alaska Airlines flight between Mexico and Seattle in 1999.

Cavender said that although Busche had an extremely supportive family — they endorsed his intent to join the homeless in the streets of Portland, Ore., for example, to see what poverty was really like — he was a young man of rigid independence, much like the teens she’s trying to help.

“Ryan wanted to do life on his own terms,” Cavender said. “Ryan would have wrapped his arms around this project.”

She said that sentiment extends to the other members of the Busche family; Ryan’s brother Brad is president of the Ryan’s House board.

Cavender said she’s excited to see how rapidly things are moving in the community with Ryan’s House, but a lot of work remains.

“There’s a huge population on the island that isn’t aware that this is an issue,” Cavender said of teen homelessness. “We hope to bring this problem out so the community realizes that there are a lot of really wonderful, talented, bright kids on the island who don’t have good family situations and aren’t able to do their best.”

She said her organization also plans to educate and encourage families to work on their differences and reunite with their wayward teens “so they can stay where they should be.”

“We hope to bridge the gap so these kids can stay at home,” Cavender said. “Then Ryan’s House would only be used in case of emergencies — that’s the goal.”

For more information, visit www.ryanshouse.org or Facebook, or e-mail Ryanshouse@juno.com. Donations can be sent to Ryan’s House, PO Box 551, Langley, WA 98260.