The adult mental health system has recently focused on housing as being the key to stabilizing adults with serious mental health issues. This “housing-first” approach is built on the belief that maintaining stable housing is often more important than maintaining stable treatment. Many in the adolescent independent living field understand this line of thinking from experience. Be that as it may, establishing a housing-based ILP is easier said than done.

The child welfare field was created to protect and treat (“raise”) vulnerable children and youth and generally does a good job at this task. It also spends a lot of time and energy protecting itself from a host of regulations, allegations and potential problems. The process of transitioning youth from custodial situations to life outside of custody is in many ways, the opposite process. A process of “caring, letting go” needs to take place, a long period of trial and error in which the youth takes over more and more responsibilities and care-providers slowly back off. As we all know from our own transitions, mistakes will be made, rules will be broken, disasters can occur. This process now takes “normal” American families maybe a decade to accomplish. We have maybe a year or two to work with. Is it possible for the child welfare system to succeed at something that is statistically impossible?

If you think one or two parents have problems deciding how to do this transition thing, try adding a state licensing department, caseworkers, juvenile court, social workers, foster parents, dysfunctional family members, GALs, CASAs and others to the mix. I recently attended a team meeting in which 16 people showed up to discuss, with the youth, an optimal transition plan for him. After realizing that this was more intimidating than standing in front of the Jedi Council, the youth left the room, leaving the adults to discuss some options.

The current political climate, with daily news of cuts to housing and social services programs, is clearly heading in the opposite direction from where it needs to, in terms of
helping youth in transition. But there are a number of us who have been running housing programs for a while and I’d like to share some of the things we’ve learned. Look for the following topics to be covered in this column: getting the system to support housing, different types of living arrangements, supervision, risk-management, problems to expect, dealing with landlords, staff issues, case-examples, keeping your sanity and more.

Maybe ILP workers are like salmon and swimming against the current will make us stronger!