Life Skills Program for Former Foster Kids Seeks Boost

When life skills coach Linda Liss’s most motivated client, a young First Nations woman who had aged out of foster care, joined a gang, Liss knew it was the child welfare system, not the young woman, that had really failed.

The former client had come to her “looking to ‘learn normal’” through a life skills program, Liss recalled. A survivor of childhood abuse and a recovering heroin addict, the young woman had recently lost her boyfriend to suicide and wanted to escape from her chaotic circumstances.

“Her whole focus was to take in as much as she could in that period of time,” said Liss, recalling the woman’s participation in the program. “Once she had some [skill], she used to say to me, ‘Okay, I have that, what’s next?’ She was trying to jam pack everything in there.” The woman was her first and only client to ask for help getting off methadone, Liss added.

By the end of the program, the young woman was living independently. But she had no supports. Nine months later, Liss found out her former client had joined a gang.

That was the day the Making Ourselves Matter Services Society (MOMSS) was born, Liss says. Since that day seven years ago, she has been working to get the post-foster care support program for young women off the ground.

The society is pioneering a proposed four-year life skills “apprenticeship” program for young women between 19 and 29 with experience in government care.

Liss said in her experience both as a former foster parent and as a life skills coach working with women from the child welfare system, she’s seen former foster kids fail again and again to make the transition to a healthy adulthood.

“It is very well recognized that there is a deficit of services providing a continuum of care in the community,” said Liss. “When you have a client that is very, very motivated, you also know their chances are very slim to be able to see that through.”

But Liss still needs to find another $75,000 before next February to make her program a reality, or nearly seven years of work goes down the drain.

The program, designed by Liss and two social workers, will see MOMSS house up to six young women on a rural property just outside Prince George. With staff support and supervision, the women will complete their high school educations, start post-secondary, gain work and volunteer experience and learn essential life skills foster kids often miss out on, like cooking, money management and driving a car.

“We’re not giving another handout, we’re really about self-sufficiency,” Liss said, adding women who join the program have to really want change in order to be successful.

“The women themselves [will] run the home and acreage, rather than us,” she said. A former farm girl, Liss credits early experiences working on the land for her work ethic and accountability, and that’s how the young women in MOMSS will learn, too — by doing.

After the initial learning period, the young women will spend their final two years in the program taking their “apprenticeship skills” and applying them to living independently, with staff support, as they continue their education, pursue a career and become role models for other vulnerable young people.

“We’re a new model that’s focusing on building up a group of women to go out into the community to make a difference amongst their peers and in the community,” said Liss.

Looking for last of needed funds

MOMSS has a lot of community support in Prince George.

The six-acre rural property, where participants will spend the first two years of the program, was donated. The labour required to gut and renovate the 2,200 square foot house on the property — now 3,850 square feet with new additions — was volunteered over five years by five classes of College of New Caledonia carpentry students and retired contractors.

Liss estimates more than 45,000 volunteer hours and more than $1 million in labour and supplies has been donated by supportive community members.

Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond — also the cabinet minister responsible for jobs — supports MOMSS, too. “I have been very impressed with their passion and drive to support women and provide them with important life skills to increase their chances of success in the labour market and in their communities,” she said in an emailed statement.

Bond was also responsible for telling staff at the Prince George school district’s Centre for Learning Alternatives, which works with adult learners and students who don’t like the regular school system, about MOMSS. The centre has since committed a teacher to deliver an adult ed program at the acreage when the program begins.

“The most important piece is just around self-esteem,” said centre vice-principal Peter Goudal about adult learners. Goudal has found adults “have a lot of self-defeating talk already.”

But programs targeting adult learners can make a difference, he said. “It’s just around breaking those things down and getting a person to change thinking patterns around, and it’s been quite successful.”

Churches and social workers working with young women formerly in foster care are already referring young women to the program. But taking the last steps to make the program a reality will cost another $75,000 in pledged donations. The society’s board wants at least one year’s budget, nearly $300,000, promised before the program starts.

Time is running out. For the past seven years, the Liss family has relied on her husband’s disability income while Linda Liss worked on MOMSS as a full-time unpaid volunteer. But when her husband turns 65 next March, that income runs out. The pressure is on to find the remaining $75,000 in time to start the program by next February at the latest.

Liss is reaching out to the media, Bond, the health ministry and anyone else she thinks will support the program to find those last dollars in time.

“Everybody knows somebody who wants that second chance,” said Liss.

But MOMSS needs more money fast if it’s going to have a first chance at helping vulnerable young women in Prince George.