Three years ago, funding from the KidsPeace Senior Leadership Team (SLT) supported launching a new project from the Kingston Foster Care and Community Programs office for supporting our teen population. Through collaboration with departments throughout KidsPeace and our internal clinical staff, a group for supporting the growth of Independent Living Skills in teenagers was born, and named “Adulting 101.” (Healing Magazine, Fall/Winter 2022)
2024 was our third year of Adulting 101 programming, and we continue to grow, expand, and improve upon the curriculum we have created.
Youth who have experienced foster care programming in their lifetime also experience higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, substance abuse, and poor mental health outcomes. According to data extracted from the Children’s Bureau Report of 2021, high school dropout rates are three times higher for foster youth than other low-income children. Other statistics show that 20% of those surveyed report incarcerations from 17 to 21 and 10% report becoming a parent from 17 to 19. The takeaway is that children who spend time in foster care are often thrust into adult responsibilities and concerns just as they are just becoming adults themselves. Our goal is to support these youth with understanding of the obstacles that stand in their way and learning how to navigate around those issues. Our curriculum encourages exploration into the barriers clients may face in adulthood and supports the development of skills to face these problems head on.
Adulting 101 continues as a weekly evening group for teenagers 13 to 19 years old who have had experience within the foster care system. The program includes nine months of structured activities, including lectures, guest speakers, hands-on demonstrations, and field trips. (One of my favorite lessons included a local mechanic coming to the office parking lot and showing teenagers how to change a tire. Several weeks later, a staff member was out with one of those clients when the staff’s tire popped and the client was able to support the staff in the necessary process.)
Clients have been exposed to many different community aspects: a local substance abuse support program, yoga teachers, a domestic violence shelter program manager, LGBTQ staff members, Planned Parenthood, previous foster youth, homelessness advocates, members of our local government, and bankers, to name a few. Each of these agencies and speakers come prepared with a lecture to share what they feel our clients may gain information from. Throughout these experiences’ clients are given the option to network within their local community. It is a foundational belief within the Adulting 101 group that if one of our clients is connected to their community, and can navigate the resources that are available to them, they will have a higher chance of success in adulthood. Similarly, many of the clients in our group have had some intersection of utilizing supportive resources at one point or another in their life, and these interactions and conversations allow for another layer for processing group members’ experiences as teenagers.
We continue to utilize Casey Life Skills Programming to guide the curriculum, category of needs, and assessment of our goal setting and progress. The Casey Life Skills Tool Kit includes a bar graph of areas of weaknesses and competencies based upon the clients’ answers to several pages of questions in several different domains (Self Care, Relationship and Communication, Housing Money Management & Transportation, Career and Education, Work and Study Life, and Navigating the Child Welfare System). This bar graph allows clients to visually experience areas that can use improvement as they advance towards becoming a thriving adult.
Several grants have helped this group to continue to exist and thrive:
- In 2024, a grant from Ulster Savings Bank Foundation paid for renting a local kitchen and buying food to teach the kids how to cook. The clients have now worked with several different chefs from our community and have learned how to make both power-oat balls and spaghetti and meat balls, alongside many other dishes. A cookbook is in the making for the teens to walk away with this year!
- Stewarts Shops, a local New York state gas station and ice cream shop, donated funding to support the teens’ visit to New York City and attend a Broadway show. Trips to the Big Apple included multiple pathways of public transportation (train, bus, subway, and ferry) and seeing Hell’s Kitchen, a coming-of-age story of the famous entertainer Alicia Keys, dramatizing how she was able to use music to heal and mature through her teenage strife. This was the first time for many of the clients experiencing the city, theatre, and public transportation!
The future of the Adulting 101 group is expected to be strong. We continue to look for ongoing financial resources, to establish data to prove its efficacy, and to improve upon our curriculum to cater to the needs of each group we work with and their identified goals.
