With your help, we can offer employment and resources to aged out foster youth. Our Hope Dealers support us with monthly giving that we can use for planning purposes, which helps to maximize your impact on the lives of these phenomenal women.
A Hope for the Future
Think back to when you were seventeen. Your birthday is approaching. Eighteen, FINALLY! No more curfews. Your parents will give you more freedom. Perhaps you have a move to a college dorm coming up. Or you plan to go straight into a full-time job, and your parents are warning you that you’ll be expected to cover your own car insurance or phone bill.
But you have no doubt that when you fail in some way, when you realize how very much you don’t know, your parents will be right there. To catch you, to help you, to pick you up and keep an eye on you as you try again.
Now imagine you’re a seventeen-year-old foster youth. Your eighteenth birthday is approaching. You’re already packing your meager belongings because you know you’ll wake up the morning of your next birthday and be expected to move out. Maybe you’ve lived with a foster family for the last couple of years. Maybe in a residential home with a handful of other foster teens. But all that ends when you turn eighteen.
Regardless, they weren’t your family. You weren’t their child. And you are about to be on your own.
The Reality
This is the reality for far too many kids who have been raised in the foster care system. They often don’t have any relationship with their birth parents, or the relationship is tumultuous. They were bounced around, never in one place long enough to get their bearings. Their emotional, mental, and educational development has been stunted. What was expected from them in one home or classroom changed with every single move. And, often, they were punished for not being able to keep up.
Yet, now, they are expected to go from behind-in-school, behind-in-maturity, behind-in-skills to full-fledged, productive adults who take care of themselves and their responsibilities. Who know how to navigate and access the limited government resources that may be available. IF they qualify. IF they don’t miss a deadline. IF they don’t make any wrong decisions.
(Because we all made the right decisions at eighteen, didn’t we?)
Support and Safety
If you can’t imagine yourself or your own child being in this situation—with no support and no safety net, at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, or even now—you should have just as hard a time imagining it making sense for aged-out foster youth to be on their own.
Through the help and generosity of our donors, Hope + Vine is on a mission to equip aged-out foster women. Not just with employment but by offering supportive resources for long-term success. Resources such as mentoring, connection to community, mental health services, and financial coaching.
Will you stand in the gap with us? On behalf of the woman-child you used to be. The teenager who messed up. Who didn’t know better. Who was still learning about life, and had the opportunity to do so. For the young adult you once were who had parents to catch you when you inevitably fell.
Be a Hope Dealer
Will you join Hope + Vine in our mission to offer these young women a chance to be their best selves?
Everyone deserves the opportunity to live with purpose.
To live free from being trapped in a past they never asked for.
Will you invest in hope?
We are excited to offer you the chance to join us by becoming a Hope Dealer! With your help, we can offer employment and resources to aged out foster youth. Our Hope Dealers support us with monthly giving that we can use for planning purposes, which helps to maximize your impact on the lives of these phenomenal women.
They can go so far and accomplish so much. They just need someone like you to believe in them!
Written by: Jessica Stone, Fundraising + Development Coordinator
Items seen in picture: Hope Earrings, Abide Necklace