When Marla Morgan was aged out of the foster care system, she said she was completely on her own, not knowing about any resources that might be able to help someone in her situation – but that’s because there aren’t many.
According to Finally Family Homes – a local nonprofit that hosted a fundraiser at Lucky Luke Brewing last week – 20% of foster youth become homeless immediately after aging out. FFH stated that in Los Angeles, something that happens too often is when a foster youth ages out (anywhere between the ages of 18 to 21), they’re immediately picked up by a social worker and taken to a homeless shelter.
Morgan now serves as FFH’s head of recruitment and development and said part of the work is preventing this. While this never happened to her, she said the transition out of a foster home was still a struggle.
“When I first aged out of foster care, I didn’t know about any resources available to me,” said Morgan. “I had to kind of feel my way out there. But to know that something like this is here to help – It’s like one of a kind, you just can’t find it anywhere.”
One of the ways FFH aims to prevent transitioning foster youth from becoming homeless is by helping them become owners of a mobile tiny home. This is a cornerstone project of theirs. As housing prices continue to grow in L.A. County, FFH says assisting transitioning foster youth in building and owning a tiny home allows them to have the benefits of owning property and avoids having them being forced to live in less than ideal conditions when renting.
“They participate in construction, they get the skills, and then they’re able to also like pay towards it and then own their own tiny house, which you can put in L.A. city backyards as a legal guesthouse and it also counts towards the affordable housing according to the state of California,” said Christina Dronen, executive director and founder of FFH. “So we’re creating affordable housing, we’re creating ownership, which is there’s nobody else doing that, to my knowledge, and so we really wanted to get back to how we were founded.”
While these tiny homes can be legally parked on some streets, the organization also aims to help find families with houses that will allow them to live in their yard or driveway. This also connects them with families that can help support them – which they also do outside of their tiny homes project – so kids coming out of the foster care system can have a family there for them, something they may have not previously had.
“We’re standing in the gap for the kids who are aging out of foster care so 18- to 24-year-olds who never got a forever family, maybe their parents passed away and they didn’t get to go back home or they didn’t get adopted,” said Dronen. “Seventy to 90% of human trafficking victims who are arrested are youth, young adult human trafficking victims [that] came from foster care. So it’s a human trafficking issue. It’s a housing issue, homelessness issue. And the thing is that these kids, it’s not like they did anything to get there. They just need some extra support. They need the support that a family would give any other young adult, [but] they don’t have that family.”
When Morgan met Dronen, she said she immediately saw her vision and shared it. Morgan was able to avoid situations that many other foster children fall victim to – she was able to go to school and earn her master’s degree. But for her, helping those whose stories didn’t go the way hers did is a priceless opportunity.
“It feels awesome. It’s like one of those things that’s so good, money can buy it, in the sense of being able to give back, being able to help, being able to pour into the lives of foster youth,” said Morgan. “And to be quite honest, it’s also at a cost, right? You need the money to be able to provide them with [an] opportunity of homeownership, which is a tiny home.”
Their fundraiser came in the form of a cornhole tournament, and event organizers thanked all who participated.
Unrelated to the fundraiser, but at the same place and time, was the handing off of the Chili Cook-Off check to ‘Fix’n Fidos – a nonprofit that helps spay and neuter cats and dogs. The check total was $45,500.
