CFCS Awarded $255,000 Grant from Liberty Mutual to End Youth Homelessness

From left: Mayor Marty Walsh, CFCS Executive Director Bob Gittens, Liberty Mutual CEO David Long and Liberty Mutual Foundation President Melissa MacDonnell

We’re excited to announce that CFCS has been awarded a grant of $255,000 from Liberty Mutual to support our permanency efforts! This grant will support the residents in our group homes and the young parents we work with in our Young Parents Support (YPS) program. A long-time supporter of CFCS and our permanency work, with this latest grant Liberty Mutual is becoming an important partner in increasing opportunities for stable housing for youth aging out of foster care and for parents under the age of 23 in Greater Boston.

We work hard at our group homes to prepare our residents to live independently and successfully as adults. We provide them with Life Skills Training, support them as they pursue their educational and vocational goals and set them up with mental and physical healthcare. Since 2017, we have incorporated our permanency priority into our group home practice, encouraging and guiding our residents as they cultivate and strengthen safe, healthy relationships with members of their biological family and other supportive adults. There is overwhelming evidence that youth are significantly more likely to have safe housing, meaningful employment and a successful future when they age out of foster care with a strong, stable network of supportive adults and family members.

In 2018, we began our YPS program, serving pregnant and/or parenting young adults under the age of 23 living in Boston. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the young parents we work with don't have stable housing situations. In addition to supporting their physical and mental well-being, a great deal of the support we provide these young parents is to help them prepare to do the work of re-establishing and strengthening their often-frayed relationships with their families. This lack of familial support often directly influences these young parents’ housing instability. We also connect our YPS clients to housing resources, assist them in completing resource applications and provide them with financial planning services.

With this grant, we expect to see many more youth and young parents leave our care with stable housing and strong, safe, healthy family relationships that will support them throughout their lives. We never want a youth or young parent to have to worry about whether they have a safe place to spend the night. With this grant from Liberty Mutual, that worry will hopefully be eradicated for the youth we serve.

This grant is part of a $5 million philanthropic effort by Liberty Mutual to support organizations working to reduce and end youth homelessness in greater Boston. On Friday, January 10, our Executive Director Bob Gittens joined Liberty Mutual, Mayor Marty Walsh and 18 of our peer organizations with whom Liberty Mutual is also partnering, to celebrate this important effort. You can read more about that event and Liberty Mutual’s vision to end youth homelessness in Greater Boston on their website.