ALBANY — Pop star Miley Cyrus has a message for Albany's "three men in a room": Listen to the guy from Greenwich Village.
Cyrus sent Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos a letter pushing them to include funding in the state budget for homeless youth, a campaign led by State Sen. Brad Hoylman.
“This money would have a direct impact — 1,000 new badly-needed beds to help make sure every young person has a place to sleep at night,” Cyrus wrote in her letter, which she posted on her Instagram account and wrote on letterhead from her nascent nonprofit, the Happy Hippie Foundation.
Cyrus explained to the legislators that she launched the foundation last year “to rally young people to fight injustice, starting with youth homelessness."
The letter was first reported by the New York Daily News.
Hoylman, with nonprofits Empire State Pride Agenda and Coalition for Homeless Youth, is asking for less than $5 million to be earmarked for 1,000 beds for homeless youth.
Cyrus cited an oft-mentioned statistic by Hoylman: According to the senator, the number of homeless kids turned away from New York youth shelters ballooned from 570 to more than 5,000 between 2009 and 2012.
“But it doesn’t have to be like this," Cyrus writes in her letter to Cuomo and his cronies. "And there’s a clear way to make an impact right now: more funding for homeless youth shelter beds.”
"I'm incredibly grateful to Miley Cyrus for her support of our campaign to restore funding for homeless youth shelters in our state budget," Hoylman said in a statement. "It's unconscionable that thousands of New York kids each year are turned away from homeless youth shelters because there aren't enough beds. We must act now to bring these kids in from the cold by increasing funding for homeless youth shelters."
Cuomo, Heastie and Skelos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The full letter, posted on Cyrus' Instagram account, is below.
A photo posted by Miley Cyrus (@mileycyrus) on
