At Children's Village, Finding the WAY Home

It’s hard enough growing up in foster care.

It’s harder still to establish an independent adult life when you’re abruptly shifted from a residential care setting, like Dobbs Ferry’s Children’s Village, into an unstructured and untethered existence as you age out of the system. The statistics are sobering. According to a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future, nearly half of those who leave New York City’s foster care system are unemployed and are likely to remain chronically unemployed.

That’s where WAY Home comes in, an initiative Children’s Village developed to ease the transition and increase the likelihood its graduates will succeed. It’s an extension of the basic WAY program, which stands for Work Appreciation for Youth, and helps Children’s Village residents finish their education and have real-world work experience.

WAY Home, which provides a year of follow-up support for Children’s Home graduates, is like having emotional training wheels for those who can use all the back up they can get. The program gives these not-really-ready for adult life young adults someone who’ll be there for them.  “There’ s the involvement of a caring adult,” said  Richard Larson , director of the WAY program. “They know there’s somebody at the end of a phone. It’s all about human relationships. WAY Home is a continuation of services.”

He added, “The kids have so many problems. When they leave, “they have to function in the workplace, finish their education, manage their money. Most of that isn’t stuff that’s learned in the classroom. We thought if we could recreate some of those experiences with a professional mentor who stayed with them it would help.”

Think about it. No one expects middle-class 18-year-olds to manage on their own  (consider all those cell phone calls from college to ask for advice, or additional funds). So how realistic is it to expect kids who’ve been in residential foster care, with clear rules and expectations, to manage an independent adult life?

With WAY Home, Larson said, success has come easier. “85 percent of them are in school, graduated, or are working. Fewer than 5 percent had an adult arrest.” The program uses Children’s Village staff as mentors, with foundations and private donors paying for the program. “The issues our guys come up with are pretty complicated,” said Larson.

You can find some of their stories here.

Larson, who lives with his wife and two children in the village, is the fifth generation of his family to live in Dobbs Ferry (he and his wife actually bought his grandmother’s house), remembers when the Children’s Village campus was “always the mysterious place up on the hill,” and was, in fact, slightly menacing to the village. “It doesn’t help to see CV in the police blotter.”

He added, though, that the current director’s outreach to the local community –whether welcoming seniors to the pool, or inviting volunteers to help with the residents—has made the campus more integrated into the village.

Dobbs Ferry is clearly a place Larson cherishes. “Dobbs Ferry is still home,” he said. “It mostly feels like the place I grew up in.”