AUBURN — If you ever wonder about the work that New Beginnings does, look no further than Dianna Walters.

A few years ago, she was a homeless high school dropout with substance abuse problems and a bad attitude. She left foster care in Bangor, hitchhiked to Lewiston and found she had nowhere to go.

“Sometimes I had a couch to sleep on. Sometimes I was sleeping outdoors on Davis Mountain,” Walters says. “I think if you would have taken a snapshot of me at age 15, you would have thought, ‘Wow. This girl is a lost cause.'”

Fortunately, the people of New Beginnings don’t believe in that term, not when it comes to troubled kids.

As a teenager, Walters was a frazzled mess but on Thursday night, she dazzled nearly 200 people at the New Beginnings annual meeting.

Alternating between witty and intense, Walters, now 30, spoke of her transition from teenage wreck to success story. Her journey from the mean streets of Lewiston to keynote speaker was a rough one, with different forms of abuse and trauma. In between was New Beginnings, the Lewiston-based group she found in a phone book when she was at her most desperate.

As it turned out, the group was waiting just down the hill from where she had so often shivered in the night.

“When I found out where the shelter was, right below Davis Mountain, I was a little upset,” Walters told the rapt audience at Martindale Country Club.

Walters would go on to do a great many things. She interned with Sen. John Kerry in Washington, D.C., working to raise awareness about issues faced by kids in foster care. She got a bachelor’s degree in social and behavioral sciences from the University of Southern Maine and a master’s degree in public policy and management from their Muskie School of Public Service.

In 2011, Walters joined the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative and moved to St. Louis.

On Thursday night, she was back in Maine to speak on behalf of New Beginnings, and one thing was clear from the moment she stepped up to the microphone: Walters hasn’t forgotten where she’s been or who helped her along the way.

“New Beginnings gave me so many chances,” Walters said. “I just can’t thank them enough.”

It wasn’t a matter of simply finding help and turning things around, she said. Even after New Beginnings took her in, she had a bit of the bad attitude left. She got kicked out of school for smoking and ran into trouble at the shelter for the same reason.

But New Beginnings kept taking her back, she said, because they refused to believe in the lost-cause philosophy.

“New Beginnings looked at me as an individual,” she said. “No situation is the same. There is no one-size-fits-all.”

By no stretch of the imagination is Walters the only success story to come out of New Beginnings. For 35 years, they have been helping Maine youths stay off the streets. The number of kids they have helped — nights of housing, meals served, number of kids reunited with families — is staggering.

“Behind the numbers,” Executive Director Robert Rowe said, “is a caring group of people.”

Even so, the people who’ve spent good chunks of their lives working for New Beginnings remember Dianna very well. When she came in, they said, there was just something about her.

Shelter Director Marian Carney recalls seeing Walters cradling a tiny kitten in her hands, treating it with the kind of tenderness Walters had been craving for herself.

“She was so caring and compassionate,” Carney said. “I knew she was going to go places, and she did.”

That’s the nutshell version of Dianna Walters, all grown up, successful and happy. But for every Dianna, there are five kids still on the street and that’s why she stays involved: so she can offer the same kind of help she received when she was at her lowest.

“No young person is a lost cause,” Walters said, for the third or fourth time that night. “They all have a chance.”

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New Beginnings 2013 success by the numbers

15,650: Nights of housing when youths were safe and off the streets.

14,500: Meals served at the shelter and outreach drop-in center.

1,500: Contacts via street outreach in urban and rural communities

760: Youths and families served.

180: Youths from throughout Maine who stayed at the 24-hour shelter.

84: Percentage of youths reunited with family or acquired safe housing.

1: New pilot program launched to re-engage youths with education.

Source: New Beginnings

How you can help

Volunteer: Cook a meal or tutor a youth in need. Call Ethan at 207-795-4076.

Sponsor: Host a fundraiser or donate to the New Beginnings auction. Call Rachel at 207-795-4077.

Give: Make a secure online gift at newbeginmaine.org.