What Happens to Youth Who Age Out of Foster Care? Interview with Maria Rolf

Have you ever wondered what happens to foster children after they turn 18? Do they graduate from high school? Move off to college with their friends? Start taking steps toward a future career path? For the average teenager, these are normal milestones that symbolize becoming an independent adult. But for teens who have grown up in the foster system, this new stage of life means being thrown into the real world with few resources, few positive relationships, and even fewer hopes of “making it”. Youth who are aging out of foster care instantly find themselves drowning in fears of poverty and homelessness, with little ability to see beyond the day-to-day. As new legal adults, these youth are primarily concerned with one thing: survival.

Current statistics for youth aging out of foster care are pretty grim:

• 25% become incarcerated within their first year of adulthood
• 1 out of every 5 are homeless before their 19th birthday
• 3 out of every 4 girls are pregnant before the age of 21
• Fewer than 4% graduate from college
• Only half are employed by the age of 24
• It doesn’t have to be this way

At Impact Living Services, we are dedicated to changing these outcomes. Our independent living program gives youth the opportunity to transition into adulthood in a safe, secure environment where all of their basic needs are met so they can focus

on succeeding and thriving as adults. We provide counseling, mentorship, and life skills coaching to make sure that by the time they turn 21, they are able to hold a steady job, have enough money saved to live on their own, and have a community of positive relationships that are going to be cheering them on for the long haul. We desire to help individuals, churches, and other organizations see the needs of this vulnerable population and come around them to help them succeed. This is an “eyes wide open” and “all hands on deck” vision, and we’d love to help you find your role in it.

After working in the academic world for over 10 years, Maria Rolf joined the Impact Living Services team in 2018 as a mentor and life skills coach to 17-20-year-old foster youth in an independent living program. She now serves as the Mission Advancement Officer, helping to engage and invite communities, churches, businesses, and other organizations to take part in changing outcomes for children and youth aging out of foster care.

 

Read the Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou: Greetings, everyone. Here we are for The Nonprofit Exchange. This edition, our guest Maria Rolf has a story to tell. It’s a story that is so important today: the work she is doing with this organization called Impact Living Services. Thank you for being with us. Put down your pen and paper and just listen. Listen to the story she is going to tell. See how you can step up to see how you want to provide value. We have a gentleman listening to this podcast, Bob Hopkins, who taught me about philanthropy. It’s the love of humankind. That’s what we do. We share our love with other people who need it the most. Maria, tell people about who you are and what is your passion.

Maria Rolf: Hi, I’m Maria Rolf. Currently my role is as the Mission Advancement Officer with Impact Living Services. Prior to that, my college and post-graduate work was in education and theology. Academia was my field. I love theology. I love studying God’s word. I love teaching. That was the field I was in. That was my zone. I am in a totally different field than I thought I would be or what I was doing four years ago. This role with Impact fell into my lap in a transition period of my life. It’s really changed everything for me.

Impact Living Services is an organization that started in 2012 to answer one problem: youth who age out of foster care have terrible outcomes. It started here in Lynchburg, Virginia and has since expanded to five different cities in Virginia. It started out as an independent living program, helping youth who are transitioning at 18 from foster care into adulthood. I started out signing up for a role that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I can tell you a little bit more about how I got interested in that.

Essentially, they were looking for someone who would teach life skills and mentor 18-20-year-olds aging out of foster care. I found out about that opportunity through a friend. I had an informal interview and found myself accepting a part-time job that I had no idea what I was doing but decided to say yes to something outside my box. It has been one of the most significant decisions I’ve ever made.  

Hugh: Give us some of the facts that got your attention and inspired you to want to do this.

Maria: Before I get into the nitty-gritty statistics, what got my attention on foster care in particular- My church has had a foster care initiative for the last 10 or so years. I had been around foster care conversations. I had friends who were fostering, and I knew that there were a lot of kids who have great needs and really felt like the church needed to be the ones to open up their homes and be safe families for these kids. I knew it was hard. I really did not realize how difficult the road after foster care is.

What really started getting me interested in this is for a couple of years after I got married, I lived in Texas with my husband. I had lunch with this extraordinary lady named Rebecca Jowers. She runs an anti-human trafficking organization in Dallas called Poiema. I picked her brain about some of the issues of human trafficking in the States. A lot of people know human trafficking exists. It’s a big issue around the world. The spotlight is on it, but a lot of people don’t know what it looks like or what is feeding this monster. I was asking her about the realities of that in the Dallas area where she has this ministry. I was blown away at how huge of a problem it is here in the States.

What is the main thing that’s feeding this? She said hands down it’s the foster care system. I asked, “What do you mean?” She said, “Honestly, Maria, there are more kids than can be kept up with properly, for one. There are unfortunately people who get into fostering with ulterior motives. There are parents who are drug addicted or name the addiction who will traffic their children to feed their own addiction. It is the thing that is feeding it here.” I was shocked. I hadn’t made that connection. It was really a direct pipeline into human trafficking. I could not shake this conversation. She gave me a lot of different ideas for how to help fight against it there.

As we were getting ready to make a transition back to Virginia, I was just praying that the Lord would give me some kind of opportunity to do something about that. It’s bigger than trafficking. It’s bigger than the foster system. We are talking about vulnerable people who need a lot of people to come around them and help them get out of their situation. That is what got me interested in working with foster kids. That is when I saw a friend post something about mentoring youth aging out of foster care. I thought I would check into that. So I did.

Hugh: You came here from Dallas.

Maria: Yep. Originally I was living here in Lynchburg for about 15 or 16 years. Then I moved to Dallas when I got married in 2016. I lived there for about two and a half years. Lynchburg always has a way of calling people back, so my husband and I ended up moving back here in 2018. That is when I started working with Impact.

Hugh: We think of human trafficking as being something that is a problem “over there,” wherever “over there” is, but it’s not here. It’s all around us. How big is this?

Maria: It’s massive. I think working with this population has made me realize how approximate it is to me. Let’s put the title “foster care” aside. These are kids. These are people. These kids come out of really hard families that live in really hard neighborhoods that exist in our own cities. It’s really easy not to see those communities. It’s really easy to live a life that is siloed apart from broken communities and communities where this kind of thing is getting perpetuated.

I started working with Impact. At the time, we had 10 or 11 youth in our program. As I’m getting acquainted with them and their stories, and understanding where they grew up, which was 10 minutes from my own home maybe, I’m finding stories of girls whose parents are drug-addicted and figured out that they can traffic their own children to help feed their addiction. I find out that there are kids whose parents don’t want the burden of raising their kid and kept them at an auto mechanic garage and raised them there. Kids who have endured every possible horrific form of abuse known to mankind. You read through their files and sit across them and see a real person. You realize that that person grew up that way 10 minutes from where you live, and you realize there are issues that I had no idea were so approximate and prevalent in my own pretty small comparatively, pretty safe community. You don’t see it until you see it. You can’t stop seeing it. It’s everywhere.

Hugh: Your work probably has several facets, but you mentioned helping the kids learn life skills. Are these girls only or boys and girls?

Maria: Boys and girls, ages 18-20 in our independent living program.

Hugh: They don’t necessarily get those skills in foster care.

Maria: Right.

Hugh: Or in school.

Maria: Right. A lot of them have bounced around from home to home, or group home. Occasionally we have youth who come to us from juvenile detention. That’s not as frequent. When we talk about aging out, we are talking about youth who are turning 18. For whatever reason, to no fault of their own, they did not get adopted. They were taken out of their home for reason XYZ. It was not safe. They did not get adopted. They are now “aging out.” Most of them have just bounced around. Very little consistency. Some of them went back and forth from their biological family to a foster family and so forth. Things that were normally modeled for someone who stayed with their parents most of their lives, even something as simple as learning how to use a thermostat or going to work. Things that were modeled for us were not modeled for them. Yes, we do life skills. We do mentoring. We help try to remove all the barriers that could keep them from succeeding. When they turn 21, they are really on their own. We want to make sure they have everything they need to succeed and thrive.

Hugh: We take so much for granted that people are going to learn. Let’s delve further. You studied theology. You didn’t study what you’re doing. We have a crisis in our nonprofits in that people are doing things they really don’t know how to do. My degrees are in music; I am a musical conductor. I was in music ministry for 40 years. I ran big programs. It was learning by default. You had to learn how to do it because you had hundreds of people to move around and get to places. Fortunately, I had run a business and knew how to do some structure and had studied some of the things I had to do. I had to transition from leading a choir to leading programs and working on some of the soft skills which may be part of what you do, but they have a hard impact on people’s lives. Talk about your journey of personal development and growth to be able to work in this different space.

Maria: That’s a really great question. Even though my job was in the academic world, my heart has always been for people because God’s heart is for people. Any theologian worth his salt better love people because God loves people. My outlet for doing that had mostly been through mentoring and discipling in my local church. I love discipleship. I love investing in others. I walked through life with a group of kindergarten girls all the way up until they were in high school because I believe in mentorship and love of life. That’s what Jesus came to do. For a lot of reasons, that was just a big part of who I was, an expression of who God is. All that said, investment in others was a way in ministry that God gave me to live out my theology.

What I didn’t realize is that most of my life, even the parts where I was living that out in mentoring, it was all still within a faith-based context or a church context or a Christian context, which is good. That is not a bad thing. Nothing about my life was touching anybody who grew up radically differently than I did. Nothing about my life was rubbing shoulders with the kind of communities that some of our youth are coming out of.

I’ll tell you a quick story of what really rattled that whole concept for me. The conversation that I had with Rebecca from Poiema, the anti-human trafficking organization, she told me this story. One of the things they do is courtroom advocacy. They find these kids who are being trafficked. Obviously, it’s a criminal offense, so they have to go to trial. It’s more trauma. A lot of these kids who are being found and have been trafficked are just brainwashed, and they have nobody. One of the things they do is provide courtroom advocates for these mostly girls so that these girls have someone in the courtroom who is on their team with them. They know this person has my back, and I can stand up to this person who has been exploiting me.

She was telling me this story of a courtroom advocate for this girl who had come out of foster care. The guy who had been pimping her out basically, who had been exploiting her, was a classmate. He was a boy in her own class who had figured out that this girl was super vulnerable and did not have a whole lot of eyes on her. He had figured out that she could be sold to people that he knew would pay money. He figured out that he could get away with that and no one would notice.

So she is telling me this story. The boy in the story who had been her pimp showed zero remorse for what he had gotten caught doing. The prosecution was there. The whole time, he has this smug look on his face. He was proud of what he had accomplished. They bring his mom up as a witness. She makes excuses for him. Even when he got his sentence, he had this smug smirk on his face like he was proud of the work he had done.

Rebecca is telling me this story. The whole time I am getting so angry at this kid. I am hating this boy for ruining this girl’s life and not even feeling the slightest bit sorry. Rebecca tells me he gets 10 or 15 years in jail. I said, “Good, I’m so glad he’s going to get what he deserves.” I will never forget Rebecca’s response because she looked at me with tears in her eyes. You have to understand that this woman has seen the absolute worst coming out of human trafficking. She has seen the worst. Her compassion I would assume would be completely centered on this girl who has been victimized by this kid.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and her compassion was for that boy who had just had his life sentenced to jail. She said, “Yes, it is good that justice is served, but the thing is, that boy was mentored by somebody. He didn’t just become a pimp because he thought it up. Somebody got in his life and taught him how to do that. Somebody got in his life, saw his potential to become that way, and mentored him to figure out how to do that to girls like this.”

It is so unfortunate that there are more people stepping up to the plate to mentor for that kind of evil than there are people who will open their eyes and see the vulnerable in their own cities and see the vulnerable in their own communities and say, “No, not on my watch.” I see that boy, and I see his leadership potential, and I see his charismatic personality, and I see the world of good that he could do. I am going to get in his life and help him beat the odds. It blew my mind that mentoring the vulnerable has to come from both ends of that. Both the victims and the victimizers need mentors, people who are going to get in their life and say, “Not on my watch.”

Hugh: It’s almost a mandate of our faith. We do have a community representing multiple faiths: Jews, Muslims, Christians. Most likely some others, but those are the three dominant Abrahamic religions. We do fall short sometimes with our institutions. Right now, some churches and synagogues are trying to stay open. They are working on their own structure. I do find that the organizations that are outwardly focused, working to help others, and giving, are doing a lot better today. How do people of faith, no matter what their faith is, work together? Does Impact Living Services work alone, or do you work in collaboration with other entities?

Maria: We are big on collaboration. We want a community around these youth. It can’t just be us and our programming and our staff, and then kick them out of the nest. We want people who will be in their lives for the long haul. Some of that is on professional levels. We have professional counselors and mentors and case workers, but we collaborate with other nonprofits, other organizations.

For instance, we have another organization here in town that does an amazing job of caring for underprivileged or vulnerable at-risk families. It’s called The Healthy Families Program. With our youth, the stats are three out of four girls are single moms by the time they turn 19. We’ve got several girls who all had babies during COVID. We are really happy to link arms with The Healthy Families Program because they are helping our girls understand how to use WIC and all the resources that our hospital system has for girls like them. They are helping make sure that their babies are going to all their appointments and that they get a community of other young moms around them. We love partnering with other like-minded organizations.

Personally, I am looking for mentors. It is not rocket science to teach a kid life skills. More importantly, just be their community. You do not have to have a degree in social work to invite a 19-year-old who has grown up bouncing around from home to home to home to come enjoy a meal with you or go to your kid’s soccer game or spend Christmas with your family or take them out for ice cream. Just be a person who invests in their life and knows their story and is a person they can call when they pop their tire in a couple years, or they just need someone to talk to when they are on the brink. We need people who are going to invest in their lives for the long haul. That can be anybody.

Hugh: Love it. *Sponsored by Wordsprint*

I’m going to open up the floor to our audience members, and then we will talk more about how the organization runs and any thoughts you might have. Mr. Rash from Bedford, do you have a question or comment for our guest today?

J.E. Rash: Hello. I am very happy to hear about the work you’re doing locally. You remind me of Mitzi Perdue’s interview that Hugh had. I want to commend you on your work and say to you that if there are any young people who come across your organization from the local Muslim community who might need the services of our staff, we have a lot of things we offer through Legacy International globally, but we have a community education center with counselors and mentors here in Bedford. I want to offer that to you and thank you very much for the work you’re doing. I’m not surprised because a lot of our people get educated in one area and become controllers or trainers in a different area. It’s a calling from God to bring you to where you have to be to be most effective in helping people transform their lives. Congratulations.

Maria: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that encouragement.

Hugh: Legacy International does great work with people around the globe, not only in Bedford, but certainly in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Speaking of youth and philanthropy, Bob Hopkins was talking today about young people that he teaches in the local colleges saying, “Geez, I need some help getting a leg up in education.” Bob, do you have a question or comment for our guest?

Bob Hopkins: I’m from Dallas. You were here in Dallas. I cannot believe what you are involved in. It was amazing that four years ago, who knew you would be doing what you are doing. That is the case with most of us here. Thank God for the nonprofit sector that is able to attempt to solve some of these problems. No, I had no idea this was going on. I do know the foster system in Texas is broken. I heard that all the time, but I had no idea that there were people who were taking foster children and making money off of them in trafficking them. I do know trafficking is huge in Texas. I have something on my ears that I’m not listening or seeing it, but I am hearing about it. I actually have access to students because I teach college and high school students in dual credit. Obviously we need a bunch of people involved in this topic. Can I get high school students to be involved in this in some way or another by giving them messages of the problem and trying to find solutions?

Maria: That’s a great question. You have to cast a vision for anybody to see something that they aren’t necessarily inclined to see. I think you being a professor or teacher gives you a platform to do that. Since you are in the Dallas area, I highly recommend checking out the Poiema Foundation. They are doing amazing work and multi-faceted work. It’s a Greek word. If you are wanting to have any kind of training specifically for human trafficking, but even as far as mentoring or courtroom advocacy, especially for younger people, learning the signs, learning what to look for. The human trafficking thing is a moving target. You can’t ever learn enough and you got it down. Getting education on what to look for.

I would also say think about foster kids growing up without any consistent family. But imagine how lonely and hard it is not to have consistent friends. As far as younger people go, modeling and teaching compassion. Principles like these can definitely be instilled in teenagers. If you can start teaching teens to see the vulnerable in their communities now, they are going to be some really influential adults. There are all kinds of opportunities for serving, inner-city ministry, that kind of thing. You can’t get involved in that too soon. It’s so important to put yourself in situations that are counter to what your normal life looks like. That sort of thing would be valuable for the kids you’re teaching.

Bob: Are the national headquarters here in Dallas, did you say?

Maria: The Poiema Foundation is in Dallas, yes.

Hugh: Bob, it would occur to me. Bob hosted an event for Bob’s network, Youth in Philanthropy. We are cueing up to do another in two or three months, a youth in philanthropy conference. Some of these folks would maybe like to dip their toe into the philanthropy world. If you can start focusing on how you can give to other people, it has a remarkable impact on your own life. It’s a conference led by youth. They are people who Bob has mentored over the years. Bob, what do you think of that idea, spreading it out through Impact Living Services as participants?

Bob: How can you not get involved after hearing what’s in front of you in your own city, and everywhere? Absolutely. I will jump in 100%. I will contact Poiema and see what we can do. All the programs I am involved with in youth, we will talk about it and see if we can’t do something.

Maria: That’s really encouraging, Bob. I think you are gonna be grateful. That connection with Poiema will be invaluable.

Hugh: I have known Bob for a little over a year. He has one book, but he should cue up for about 10 more. I have learned about philanthropy from Bob. Thank you for being here. Jeffrey, do you have a question or comment?

Jeffrey Fulgham: Maria, I would echo Mr. Rash’s comments. Thank you for what you’re doing and the heart you have for the age-outs. I am real familiar with them, having lived in the neighborhood and worked in the neighborhood where your headquarters are. I know Paul and several folks there. I am well aware of the work that you’re doing and how important it is. What I really appreciate you doing is getting this information out so that people understand. The number of people who are aware of the statistics for these kids and youth who are aging out of foster care, I don’t think anybody understands the number of pregnancies and trafficking and incarcerations and homelessness, all of these horrible outcomes for these youth who didn’t ask for any of this. They are basically 18-year-old orphans, and they have no family when they turn 18. The outcomes are just awful. I’m grateful for Impact and all you are doing to try to step in and give them not necessarily a family, but hope and becoming a substitute family for them and interjecting and making a difference in their lives. It’s beyond critical.

Maria: Thank you for that encouragement and for being a good neighbor to them.

Hugh: Thank you for your comments. Maria, talk about the organization and what makes it thrive. What about the organization makes it work? You work in middle management; you’re not the top leader of the organization, but you know the structure. I have seen a lot of organizations that don’t work well, and this one obviously does work well. Speak about what makes this one work well.

Maria: Sure. There has to be partnership on both sides. What I mean by that is you can have the best programming and system in place, but if you don’t have somebody who also wants to do their fair share and work and strive for independence and success for themselves, it doesn’t work. But what we have, and I would say the thing that makes us distinctive, is we really focus on relationships. Their biggest issue is relational poverty. Like I said, most of them don’t have people. Everything we do is very holistic and relational.

Practically speaking, one of the most unfortunate outcomes for youth who age out is homelessness. One out of every five is homeless before they’re 19. We try to remove barriers that lead to failure. One of those is we provide a home in a safe neighborhood. What that looks like is usually a youth who is aging out of foster care, their social services worker will contact us if they think they’d be a good candidate for our program. Then they will move into an apartment in a safe neighborhood where we have case workers who live on site. They don’t actually live with the youth; it’s not a compound. They have their own apartments in the neighborhood, so they are accessible to our youth for emergencies and proximity. These youth live in a normal neighborhood that is safe and close to opportunities for education and entry level work.

We give them a weekly grocery stipend, so they learn how to go get groceries for a week at a time. Take care of an apartment. We do life skills training. We have people come in, and we help them set up long-term goals and some short-term goals. We try to do everything we can to help them meet all of those goals so that by the time they turn 21, they are ready to launch on their own.

We also have a behavioral health team. We have professional counselors who are trained strategically to help with emotional and behavioral issues with youth like ours. We have people who specialize in addiction, sexualized behavior. Not all children, but it is very likely that children who experienced some form of sexual abuse will in turn eventually become a sexual abuser. That is not always the case, but it is likely, so we have counselors who specialize in helping children like that so they don’t repeat cycles of dysfunction.

We try to help them reach their education goals. For some of them, that means going to college. For some of them, that means trade school. For some of them, school isn’t their thing, but they have skillsets they can use in the work force. We do everything we can to get them education and get them in a steady job so they can succeed on their own.

We help them get their driver’s license because transportation is a major barrier to holding down a job. We help them by giving them no interest loans to purchase a car that they can have when they graduate from our program. We just try to remove all of the barriers to success so that when they turn 21, they have a team of people who are in it for the long haul, who know them, love them, and are cheering them on, and that they have everything they need to live successfully, hold down a job, and move forward from what they were pulled out of when they were children.

Hugh: That is so great. I know it’s a huge problem; do you want to share some of the statistics with us? It probably has not gotten better in the last year, is my guess. Some of the hard numbers were amazing, shocking to me.

Maria: 25% are incarcerated within their first year of adulthood.

Hugh: Out of foster care?

Maria: Those who are aging out. Before they turn 19, 25% of them are incarcerated. One out of every five is homeless by the time they are 19. Three out of four girls are pregnant by the age of 21. By that, I usually mean single moms who don’t have stable living conditions. Fewer than 4% are graduated from college. Only half are employed by the age of 24.

Conversely, if you develop a relationship with a person you’re feeding who is experiencing homelessness, and you should because they are your neighbors, the vast majority of them at some point in their childhood were in the system. When you are investing in the life of a foster child or a youth aging out, you are literally changing outcomes not just for them but for your city. You are taking on the homelessness issue in your city. You are taking on the unemployment rate in your city. It’s bigger than just one kid; it’s the outcome of an entire population and an entire city. The stats are stacked against them. We need a village to come around and change those statistics.

Hugh: Absolutely. Jeffrey says, “Virginia has the highest population of age-outs in the U.S.” The Commonwealth of Virginia is the worst of the 50 states; that’s quite amazing. It’s not that we’re ignorant. Most of us are just doing our everyday stuff, and this is invisible to us.

It’s fascinating: over seven years, we ‘ve had many types of guests here. Last week was hard points about how to be a better leader. This one is heart-centered about a story of a nonprofit that is making an impact, and a particular leader in there. We all need inspiration that yes, we make a difference. We have mostly nonprofit leaders and clergy listening, but we’re people, too. How do we, aside from our jobs but also with our jobs, who are not connected with the foster system or Impact, work in this space and make a difference?

Maria: Well, you can become a foster parent. You can do that through the Department of Social Services in any city. Here in Virginia, we have a foster care placement program through Impact Living Services. If you are local or live in Lynchburg, Roanoke, Harrison, Richmond, or Fairfax, we would love to invite you to consider becoming a foster parent through Impact. We provide a lot of support to our foster families. There are a lot of kids who need a lot of help. If any of this has resonated with you, and you think you might be able to become a foster parent, please check out our website and find out more because we need foster parents.

Outside of that, we need mentors. That could look like 100 different things. We need people who will regularly be in their lives, but we also need people who are going to potentially bring them in to teach them a trade, give them volunteer experience, give them work experience, or come talk to them about different careers.

One thing we do is we have a monthly mandatory training. It’s hard to get all their schedules together, but once a month, they all know they have to be at this training. We have a variety of topics and speakers. We welcome people who will tell them about different career opportunities or help them think about how they are wired as far as type of career work. Professionally even, giving them things to think about and pathways to pursue jobs and careers they may not have ever thought about or been exposed to. They just need people and relationships, people who will come and say, “I see you. I’m going to help however you can. Here is what I have to offer.”

Hugh: I’m a nonprofit leader. I’m clergy. I have a community. How can we step up as a community to support, collaborate with Impact?

Maria: We have a few different ways, where you can either volunteer or support financially. This is the first year that we have ever done fundraising. In our almost 10 years of existence, we have never done fundraising. We are doing that now because currently the majority of the population we serve is already in the system. They are receiving state services, and we are relationally helping them out, but we would really love to help vulnerable people. We want to widen our reach to families and individuals who aren’t yet needing state services but are on the brink. We’d really love to prevent foster care from having to be in the conversation and get on the front end of it, helping families to heal from the inside. We’d love to offer prevention.

We’d love to offer aftercare for some of the youth who have maybe completed our program, especially those who are new parents and are 21 years old and still maybe need a bit of extra help. We want to be able to continue to offer people and resources to help them live independently. Some of the ways people can get involved is financial.

If you go to ImpactLivingServices,org, you can find out how to sponsor a youth or help with an apartment set-up cost. These brand-new youth come with virtually nothing, so the first thing we do is go to the grocery store or Walmart and get them a bunch of essentials so they can live. Our apartments are furnished, but they need shampoo and towels and duct tape, things you don’t think about until you’re living on your own in an apartment. You can help sponsor through an apartment set-up. There are a variety of needs on there.

If you are someone who could see yourself mentoring and investing in the lives of these youth, please contact me through our website. I would be happy to talk to you and hear a little bit about your own heart and story and figure out how we can get you serving.

Hugh: Yes. Jeffrey says people who want to foster should do it through your organization. It’s much better working through your organization than the government.

At SynerVision, we help you define your vision. From where you sit, what is the vision for Impact? You’re doing a great job now. What is the vision for the future?

Maria: A little bit of what I just said. We are wanting to widen our reach. The foster care system is broken. You hear that all the time. My husband and I just became certified foster parents through our local Lynchburg DSS. Man, what an extraordinary team of people. The training we received, the heart of the social workers. It is a broken system, but there are so many people doing everything they can to try to help these families. I say all that to say it is a broken system, and every system is going to be broken to an extent. We want to get in front of the system, as much as we are capable of doing. We believe in family and relationships.

If we can get in front of the system needing to get involved, that would be a huge win. If we can prevent these statistics from even becoming a potential, that would be a huge win. If we can help families that are on the brink stay together because they had people getting into their lives and seeing them and meeting some of those needs and learning interdependence and then independence before the state has to come in, that would change a community.

Hugh: Really good vision. Thank you for being our guest today. It’s important work that more people need to know about. If you look at the news, you can get discouraged. Getting out in front of the problem, in front of the system.

We have been able to rethink systems in the pandemic. That is one of the blessings. I see churches reinventing church, and they know they shouldn’t have been doing this stuff anyway. Now that we haven’t done it, we are going to do things that are critical. We’re not having to put energy into things that aren’t productive and maybe aren’t our primary calling. It’s been a good time to rethink things. There is no going back to what it was. There is no normal, whatever normal means. It’s a good chance to be aggressive and assertive and move into a new space.

I commend you: it looks like you have worked through this whole pandemic, staying strong and relevant and maintaining the work. I know it’s a big problem out there, and I know you are making a difference. You singular and you plural. Our language is insufficient sometimes. It’s important. What do you want to leave people with today, a final thought?

Maria: Don’t be afraid. I think the foster care world scares a lot of people. I just want to say there are a lot of neighbors that you have who need help getting through the day. God absolutely can use you to help bring transformation to another person’s life. Trust Him with that. Ask Him for an opportunity to do just that. That is how I ended up at Impact: through prayers and God dropping the most unexpected gift in my lap. It’s radically changed my life. I am excited to encourage you all to ask that same kind of prayer of God. I think you’ll be surprised how He answers.

Hugh: Open up your mind. There is opportunity. Be aware of the call. Thank you for sharing your heart today.

Maria: Thank you.