Supportive Independent Living Home Helps Young Adult Women Moving from Foster Care into Society

Inside a 1,600-square-foot, furnished one-story house, three young adult women will learn how to face adulthood challenges in an advantageous arrangement few of their peers are granted.

But, yet the advantage of living rent-free, with conditions, has been devised to serve as a level playing field for the women abruptly moving out of foster care.

Statistically, foster-care children struggle in the transition out of it: many eventually become homeless, data has found.

And the pressures often prove to yield generational poverty. “This is an equalizer,” said Mark Bouie about the Mid-South’s first and only Supportive Independent Living Home designated only for women.

Bouie is senior vice president for Meritan. He, along with other Meritan officials and guests that included Shelby County Commissioner Charlie Caswell Jr. and Frank Mix, an executive from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, attended a ribbon-cutting July 22 at the renovated Memphis home.

Kathy Swinny, vice president for Meritan, said the house will enable its future occupants to ease into understanding how to be a responsible adult, like finding employment, taking college courses, or both, while paying for bills outside of rent.

Frank Mix, with the Tennessee Dept. of Children’s Services, and Meritan, Inc. President/CEO Melanie Keller, cut the ribbon during a July Grand Opening of the home, which will house three women acclimating to sudden independence after foster care.

“This will be an education in itself,” she said. “Life is hard and tasks like getting a car tag and handling mail - necessities they may not be aware of at all - can be discovered and met.”

Perhaps the most important opportunity for the women, permitted to live in the home up to three years, will be meeting the learning curve of balancing a budget, paying bills and savings. Add grocery shopping and cooking meals to the list as well as learning to co-habitat with strangers, at first.

Both Kathy and Mark said the women will continue to receive help from mentors, but more conveniently as they can meet them at the house.

The home’s interior design includes three bedrooms – each with its own vanity – a great room and garage. There’s a shared large bathroom, and outside there’s a porch swing, privacy fence and plenty of yard.

The home is situated near a bus stop, a park and is not far from a library and the interstate.

The initiative was formulated when Meritan, which obtained the property around 2012, approached DHS last year.

“It all started with, ‘What more can we do to help?’” from Meritan, Mix said. "This is a great investment in a big need, and I like the fact that the home’s setting will encourage the women to engage in the surrounding community.”