As youth age out of out-of-home care, receiving guidance and support when facing life’s challenges can help prepare them for self-sufficiency. SRCOFC’s Program, WeCare, offers assistance.
Young people leaving foster care face a number of disadvantages, ranging from low levels of education and employment, a high prevalence of mental health disorders, involvement in the juvenile justice, and high teen pregnancy rates. Significant efforts are made by policymakers at all levels to improve educational, social and economic outcomes for this at-risk group, but with mixed results.
Many foster youths and young adults are at high-risk due to ruptured, unsafe, and unhealthy family structures that led them to be in the child welfare system in the first place. From the moment foster youths enter the system, they are at a disadvantage. They enter the system with a relational deficit—by not being able to see the parents, relatives, and friends they once had. This lack of relational capacities might prevent some foster youths and young adults from developing relationships and strong connections as protective factors. Protective relationships are essential to any youth not only foster youths and especially for young adults. Relational deficiencies are often perpetuated in foster care due to the lack of supportive and consistent adults that can better prepare foster youth to transition into adulthood.
Solid Rock Cathedral of Faith Family Services provides: Classes teaching relationship building skills to foster youths and young adults to help to heal ruptured relationships and perhaps create and nurture new ones.
- Parenting classes (for teenage in foster care and single parents that have aged out of foster care under the age of 25 )
- Well-being classes (focus on skill building in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness)
- Food Baskets part of the Master’s Table @ the Rock