Just in Time for Foster Youth

For most young people who have experienced foster care, the system that was intended to protect them has failed. In their young lives, they faced the abuse and or neglect that caused them to be removed from their homes, but also the significant barriers to critical necessities like stable housing, reliable healthcare, food security, and consistent access to education. Then, when they leave the system at a stage in life when every young person needs someone they can rely on who can buffer the powerful changes they are going through and model healthy coping strategies, most transition age youth are socially isolated with no stable relationship to an adult, no trusted community, and no safety net. And, when they have children that they are not prepared to care for, the cycle continues.

Traditional solutions and conventional thinking about services for youth who ‘age out’ of foster care without permanent families has not broken the cycle because it only addresses the current “presenting problem” with a focus on resources to create “self-sufficiency.” This has resulted in “solving” immediate deficits by providing transitional housing for a limited period, access to college scholarships, and job and life skills training. This program-focused approach has largely ignored the underlying roots of marginalization of foster youth populations and the impacts of the high levels of toxic stress that most foster youth have experienced that create the critical need for positive relationships and a reliable community of support combined with access to resources.

Just in Time for Foster Youth’s (JIT) model disrupts the “Programs/Systems” mindset and replaces it with a “Youth-Centric/Community” framework that broadens the scope of issues to be tackled in a unique and more effective way. People thrive in healthy communities that they create, not systems that act on them. This shift in focus honors relationships, allows individualized support, respects the participants’ empowered role in their own transformation, and encourages an interconnected/collaborative approach to achieve lasting impact. Resources offered in the context of supportive relationships are more effective and more likely to have durable impact.

The JIT mission is to engage a caring community to help transition age youth (18-26) achieve self-sufficiency and well-being. Over the last 16 years, JIT’s model has combined a wide variety of resources with the opportunity to develop close personal relationships with adult volunteers and lived experience youth. We meet youth where they are and empower them to learn and grow into confident, capable, connected adults. By making connection to community the foundation of the solution, JIT ensures a more sustainable and durable change in the lives of those we serve.

As a general rule, our society allows young people ample time to finish school, begin a career and build a support network prior to expecting them to be on their own. Yet, we expect 18-21 year old foster youth to fend for themselves with no familial safety net, limited success in post-secondary education, no financial security and a system filled with critical barriers, unaddressed gaps in resources, and low expectations for change.

JIT is uniquely focused on developing a new model for durable change for former foster youth by mobilizing the community as an extended family for young people in transition, providing the consistent authentic relationships and emergency resources they need to achieve productive lives. This means managing hundreds of engaged volunteers for an effective model for relationship based service. Although our service area is San Diego County, we intend to create a model for change that can be exported to other communities.

JIT services meet the expressed needs of our youth by providing resources for both short-term stabilization and long-term capacity building.

• Emergency Basic Needs/Healthy Practices: Knowledge of and access to support systems, including housing, employment support, educational options, life planning, and health care
• My First Home: Home furnishings to establish a safe, stable, supportive place to live
• Career Horizons/Financial Horizons: Opportunity for female participants to build confidence and connect with a network of coaches
• Bridges to Success: Opportunity for male participants to build skills and connect to resources in a supportive environment of success
• Financial Fitness: Individualized financial planning assistance and resources, including match savings up to $4,500
• College Bound: Opportunity and resources to continue and meet higher education goals, including Study Abroad and post-graduate school
• Changing Lanes: Empowers youth to become good drivers and purchase reliable transportation
• Pathways to Financial Power/NEXTjobs: Provides comprehensive guidance to achieve financial security through strategies that lead to meaningful work and smart money management
• Rise to Resilience: Committed to help participants thrive on the same level as young people without a history of toxic stress. R2R focuses on six key strategies to manage and lessen the consequences of toxic stress: nutrition, exercise, sleep, healthy relationships, mindfulness, and trauma-informed therapy.

JIT currently serves approximately 800 transition age youth annually, 18-26, majority female (65%). The ethnic backgrounds served are Hispanic (34%), African-American (26%) Caucasian (25%), Native Americans (2%) and other identified (13%).

JIT’s services increase true equity and inclusion. They are based on the recognition that if lifelong disparities in access to safety, resources and positive connections are not addressed, simply giving someone temporary housing, a scholarship to college, and job training can actually further traumatize a young person and reinforce a sense of failure when they don’t have the basic foundational skills necessary for them to succeed.

Our consistent, durable vision is for JIT youth to attain self-sufficiency levels significantly higher than the unacceptable national averages by providing essential resources and crucial relationships at critical junctures delivered by a caring family of volunteers. Our core belief is that disconnection remains the central, lingering "gap" for foster youth once they are removed from their parents, a void that continues through multiple placements and after the date of emancipation.

All of JIT’s services are designed and delivered with this fundamental understanding. Each one is adaptable to individual and specific self-identified needs. Youth Services coordinators, all with lived experienced in foster care, are the leads in providing the appropriate resources and experiences from participants’ introduction to the JIT community until they turn 27, an extended window of service that recognizes the need to build capacity over time to overcome past inequities. Working with JIT staff, long-term volunteer coaches, peer mentors and a stable community they remain connected to even beyond service eligibility, the gaps in development caused by childhood toxic stress are closed.

In FY2019, JIT’s community of 28 team members and over 600 volunteers served almost 800 unduplicated transition age foster youth by providing resources and connections across multiple services to move the needle significantly for every young person who eligible for our assistance. We employ former foster youth as staff in leadership roles and service delivery. There is tremendous power in seeing yourself in the person you reach out to when you must share your story and vulnerability. And more power in being able to see your possible success in theirs.

A life of uncertainty and disconnection is the core obstacle for transition age foster youth; therefore, consistent connection is the core solution. Engaging youth in consistent relationships with volunteers is a foundational element of our mission. Timely intervention at a critical juncture is the difference between hope and despair.

Our focus is on individual empowerment, earned trust, and consistent, proactive response to youth in need. We believe that every young person has the power to create his/her own success, and our individualized service views participants as our collaborative partners.

When we talk about achieving significantly higher self-sufficiency levels than the “unacceptable national averages”, we are referring to changing the traditional snapshots of negative outcomes for youth post-foster care that have been reported from various studies over many years such as:
• Approximately 25% of former foster youth reported being homeless within 2 to 4 years
• Foster youth are 14 times more likely drop out of college than the general population
• 1 in 4 were involved in the criminal justice system within 2 years of leaving care.
• 7 out of 10 girls who age out of foster care will become pregnant before the age of 21

Our goal is to both preventative and proactive, meaning our services are designed to help youth with the knowledge, resources and relationships to become Confident, Capable and Connected, changing the current picture for our participants and predicting future success. For example, for approximately 800 youth served in the last fiscal year, some participant results were:
• 237 received emergency Basic Needs assistance, including rent to avoid homelessness
• 125 had My First Home set-ups to allow resources to be prioritized for other purposes
• 96% of 2018 College Bound students were still enrolled after the first year
• The enrollment/graduation rate for all College Bound participants (2007-2018) is 80%
• Less that 0.5% of active participants have any reported criminal justice involvement
• Only 40 of the our participants 21 and under are parents

Other JIT outcomes are gathered around four essential factors that help transform the lives of the young people we serve. Each of our services is designed to achieve and track those factors over time through multiple intended impacts. For example:

1) Fills Gaps In Knowledge & Experience
Pathways to Financial Power participants learn and practice effective financial management, including budgeting, savings and establishing strong credit
% of Youth saving money each month
22% Before Pathways
70% After Pathways

2) Identify Self-Limiting Beliefs & Real Personal Strengths
After College Bound, 47.5% fewer participants felt academically limited because of past foster care experience and 100% stated they had the necessary resources to achieve their academic goals

3) Take Ownership of Their Stories & Authentic Voice
89% of Walk the Talk participants were confident their stories has value
80% of participants believe their story deserves to be shared

4) Connections to Trusted Relationships with Supportive Adults/Positive Peers.
Post- Bridges to Success for Youth Men participants have someone they can talk to about their problems
Before B2S: 30% After B2S: 82%

5) Launched our Lasting Impact Fulfillment Tracking (LIFT) project in 2020 to track specific impact outcomes post-JIT, by surveying past participants age 27-35. This tool enhances our capacity to achieve lasting impact for the young people we serve and set new standards of service for all transition age youth.