Cut loose at 18 and struggling into adulthood

In 2023, Works turned 18 and voluntarily signed himself back into DCF care. Youths are able to do this until they are 22, and doing so for Works meant that he could continue to get assistance with things like finding housing and affording school. That’s when he was referred to HopeWell, a nonprofit that serves youths who are in or aging out of foster care. The organization helped Works find an apartment in Brighton, but, Works says, he had a tough time living on his own. He quit a job at a bakery over a wage dispute. He worked for a few weeks at a holiday market but spent most of the winter unemployed, struggling with anxiety and depression.

“It’s really messed with my head,” Works says. “I felt really stuck.”

Although 18 is an age when many young adults are venturing into independence, few can live entirely without support. Most teenagers need help earning and managing money, finding housing, applying to and paying for college, or job hunting. Some fall back on the safety net of returning to a parent’s house. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2023, 56.5 percent of those aged 18 to 24 were living at home. That’s some 17.2 million young adults returning to the nest.

But many of society’s most vulnerable youths — those aging out of foster care — have no such supports. While some, like Works, choose to sign themselves back into care, many are left scrambling, sometimes with help from a hodgepodge of nonprofits serving transition-age youths.

Each year, around 650 Massachusetts teenagers age out of care without having any kind of family — biological or foster — to help them, according to DCF. National data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that such young people are more likely than others to be incarcerated, to soon become a parent, or to wind up homeless.

This is why Massachusetts desperately needs a better, centralized system for helping young people in state care find stable, loving homes and, when they age out, obtain the type of mentoring, support, and financial assistance that luckier teens get from their parents.

DCF taps federal and state programs to give housing vouchers to young adults aging out of foster care. A spokesperson for DCF says the agency also gives one-time discharge payments averaging $2,500 per person to youths and offers stipends to those remaining in care but living on their own. As of April 2023, young adults still in care were receiving an average of $13,870 a year in support payments, putting a young person without additional financial support squarely at the federal poverty level.

The state agency also contracts with nonprofits to find housing and other help. Last year, 78 percent of 18-year-olds in state care signed up for such state-offered classes as life skills training and referrals to organizations that provide housing and employment support. But DCF does not provide other types of intensive hands-on guidance young adults often need to succeed.

Referring to DCF’s legal responsibilities, Elisabeth Jackson, president and CEO of Bridge Over Troubled Waters, which works with homeless youths, says, “You have a system that’s built to care and protect. It’s not built to teach and nurture.”

Some young people leaving foster care aren’t aware that DCF and nonprofit benefits and services exist. This was Works’s situation.

He had academic potential. In spite of the instability that plagued his growing-up years and his mental health challenges, he was the valedictorian of Boston’s McKinley Preparatory High School’s class of 2023 and the recipient of multiple scholarships that enabled him to enroll at Bunker Hill Community College to study information technology.

But he couldn’t afford the class fees and subscriptions for online coursework. Works experienced what many youths aging out of foster care do: He learned too late that DCF offers financial assistance for education and living expenses that could have helped him. Works says he didn’t know how to access benefits he was eligible for.

“Three to four months after I dropped out,” he says, “DCF wants to talk about how they could have helped me pay for stuff.” Compounding his disappointment and struggle, Works suffered the loss of a nephew he loved like a brother, causing him, he says, to “mentally shut down” and isolate himself.

One bright spot in Works’s life is the nonprofit Silver Lining Mentoring, which paired him with a dedicated volunteer mentor and which offers programs that pay stipends to complete online life skills courses in such areas as how to clean a house, communicate with a roommate, and compare prices while shopping. An in-person session taught Works how to answer interview questions that had previously stumped him. For example, when asked by prospective employers to “tell me about yourself,” Works says he used to hesitate and talk about middle school. “I just thought, I feel like a regular person,” Works says. “I’ve got a sense of humor. I’m loud.” Through the interview training, Works says, “I learned you want to talk about education and employment history.” He’s now working with another nonprofit, Breaktime, that provides job training and placement for at-risk young adults.

Works has goals: building credit, earning money, getting therapy. But the odds remain stacked against him.

Advocates who work for nonprofits that support teens like Works say while services exist, the system for steering kids to them is fragmented and inadequately resourced. To make matters worse, young people leaving state care can be difficult to find and engage, exacerbating the problem of transition-age youths getting overlooked because it’s assumed they can take care of themselves.

“For us to think they can do it by themselves is beyond me,” says Jackson of Bridge Over Troubled Waters. “That’s what’s wrong with our system.”

There is evidence that the type of support provided by some nonprofits can improve outcomes. The Home for Little Wanderers uses money from state and federal contracts and private philanthropy to operate supportive housing for transition-age youths. It operates a homeless shelter for 16 young adults, around half of whom have aged out of state care. The shelter’s waiting list is around 50 people long.

In addition, at Home for Little Wanderers residences in Somerville and Roxbury, 23 young adults live rent-free as long as they are working or in school full time. Staff offer help getting identification cards, enrolling in school, finding a job, and learning to manage money. Joshua Grant, senior director of transition-age youth programs at the organization, says 85 percent of enrollees move from these units into permanent housing.

Grant got a call one evening from a young man who was threatening to punch his landlord because the landlord responded disrespectfully when the man asked for help operating his thermostat. Grant helped the young man navigate the situation calmly. “The basic idea is if you invest in young people to that extent, their chances increase astronomically,” Grant says.

Another organization serving former foster youths is the nonprofit Youth Villages, which has served 2,700 young adults since 2009 with state contracts to provide community-based support. Staff are on call 24/7 to help with anything from applying for financial aid to drafting a resume, finding a doctor, or providing gas money. Executive director Matt Stone says specialists meet with young adults two to three times a week for an average of eight months. “It’s walking side by side with them in every aspect of independent living, teaching them skills they need to make that successful transition into adulthood,” Stone says. The program found that 92 percent of participants were living either with a family or independently one year after discharge.

Eric James, 27, who works for the Boston mayor’s office, was raised by a single mother in Roxbury. After a fire in their house forced them to move, James says, he “had a fuse” and would argue and become angry in school, getting in trouble for being disruptive. He was caught shoplifting and spent time in juvenile detention. His mother, a nurse, struggled financially after being disabled in a car accident, and James says he skipped school and didn’t always have enough to eat. At 13, DCF took custody of James.

James says the goal was always to return to his mother. But DCF, James says, did not help his mother get the financial resources she needed to build a stable home. Such assistance might not fall under the agency’s purview, but James and many others think it should. “There’s a lot of focus on kids in foster care, but if the goal is reunification, there needs to be a focus on families,” James says.

Indeed, child welfare advocates say the best outcome is for foster children to be placed in a permanent family — whether through adoption or reunification with their biological family ― before they turn 18. In that measure, Massachusetts lags behind other states. According to data compiled by the Child Trends website, from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal year 2021, 14 percent of Massachusetts children in state care turned 18 without being adopted or reunified with family — compared with 8 percent of foster children in the United States overall.

When he was 18, James signed himself back into DCF care in order to receive young adult support payments that would help him pay for courses at Suffolk University. At the end of his first year of college, though, he owed more to Suffolk than he could pay. At 19, he dropped out and moved in with his mother, without realizing that doing so would mean his DCF payments would stop.

DCF policy doesn’t allow it to make the payments to youths living with a biological parent, even a disabled one. James and his mother were evicted and ended up homeless. James stayed with a series of friends, including former Suffolk classmates who occasionally sneaked him into dorms, and he slept outside. Eventually, he reached out to DCF, which referred him to a Boston homeless shelter, where he stayed for several months until his mother secured a new apartment for them in Brockton.

A year after James left Suffolk, Silver Lining Mentoring connected him to The Wily Network, which helps Boston-area students who are navigating college without family support. The nonprofit paid off his Suffolk balance and helped him apply to UMass Dartmouth. It supported James as he moved into on-campus housing and got settled, and for the next four years as he worked to complete a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice studies.

One can’t help wondering why the state agency that first took custody of James when he was 13 years old couldn’t do more than refer him to a homeless shelter.

Child welfare advocates say administrative bureaucracy within our state government can make it difficult to enroll transition-age youths in services, such as mental health treatment, that agencies in other states provide. In addition, DCF’s process for transitioning youths out of state care requires those young people to opt in to obtain additional DCF services. Some states, like California, require youths to opt out of receiving services, a default system that normalizes and even incentivizes remaining in care past 18. Research shows that young people who remain in care until they are 22 — or even just 19 — tend to have better outcomes than those who leave at 18.

So what to do? DCF needs better, more streamlined transition policies to help young people navigate the state agencies that can assist them in finding housing, jobs, and money for higher education, and can also steer them to the nonprofits that exist expressly for the benefit of this vulnerable population.

Works says when he needs help, he doesn’t call his DCF worker. He calls Silver Lining Mentoring. When his food stamps ran out, his volunteer mentor told him where to find a nearby food pantry. “I need support, they talk to me, try to figure out what I need for help,” Works says. The volunteers and staff there, he said, give advice. But more than that, he feels they truly care. They have become like family.

Because of inaccurate information provided to the reporter, this story originally misstated an aspect of Works’s medical history. The story was updated on April 5.

Shira Schoenberg can be reached at shira.schoenberg@globe.com. Follow her @shiraschoenberg.