One local church is doing its best to combat a foster-care problem that can leave older children in the lurch.
Love Church Ministries in downtown Fort Wayne has crafted a program it hopes will help older children coming out of the foster-care system without the support they need to thrive and succeed.
Each year, roughly 26,000 youngsters age out of the foster care system with “no place to go and no family to help them,” according to church leaders. By the time they reach ages 16 to 25, one in five of those kids will become homeless within four years; one in four will end up incarcerated; only 50% will be employed by the age of 24; only 3% will finish college; and 71% of the females will be pregnant by the time they turn 21.
“The statistics are just horrible for these kids,” said Pastor Wallace Butts, lead pastor of Love Church and one of the leaders of the program, “and when you think about it, where do these kids go?”
Love Church Ministries will hold a fundraiser, Build On Love: It Takes a Village, at 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 13, at Parkview Mirro Center. Tickets are $100; buy one, get one free. Visit secure.givelively.org/event/love-church-of-fort-wayne-inc/build-on-love-it-takes-a-village for details.
Butts recalls hearing the story of one such young lady on the radio a few years ago, and thinking his church had to do something different to combat the problem.
The answer? Help the youth psychologically with their problems, then train them for jobs they’re interested in. “The first year they’re in the program,” Butts said, “we focus on their heart and what we can do to make them mentally stronger. The second year, we seek out their unique abilities and get a glimpse of who that young person is, so we can begin their training.”
The program actually is based on a similar initiative in San Francisco called the Delancy Street Foundation, which has seen more than 25,000 graduates and a 90% success rate.
Love Church calls its mission FaMBET, or Forever-Family a Mission of Business and Entrepreneurial Training. Companies that have partnered with the church to train youngsters so far include a local insurance company and an area restaurant, Butts said.
“We have a two-pronged approach to this business,” he said. “First, we give the kids the opportunity to have hands-on, practical training, then we put them in business situations where they get real-world experience.”
One student was assigned to work at Brotherhood Mutual Insurance in that firm’s IT department, on its computer system. Another youth went to work at a Bob Evans restaurant in Warsaw, helping that business upgrade its point-of-sale cash register system.
“We want to make sure we don’t pigeonhole these kids,” said Butts, the 50-year-old church leader who’s been the executive director since 2012, “so that way, we allow them to try out different areas and find what suits them best.”
One of the church’s biggest successes so far has been with the program’s auto shop. Named Love Auto Repair and begun in 2010, the shop comprises all the amenities and professional tools of a normal mechanic’s workplace and is staffed mostly by youth in the program who are training to work in the automotive industry. In fact, the shop was named one of the top 18 auto-repair facilities in Fort Wayne last year by expertise.com. Prices for their work — according to Butts — fall right in line with other area shops, and all work at the shop is A.S.E.-certified.
The church, which is located in downtown Fort Wayne at 1331 E. Berry St., used to be the Wolf Mattress Factory. It became Love Church about 1997 when the church group purchased the 44,000-square-foot building for about $480,000, Butts said.
The building still offers expansive rooms and spaces for the church and its foster-care programs. Butts hopes to use one of the edifice’s upstairs rooms as a dorm for kids in the program, while he hopes to turn the building’s warehouse — once used to store the food and clothing the church used to donate to the needy — into a space it can lease to local businesses, including a pallet maker and an aerosol company, Butts said.
The church’s platform for helping these youth isn’t just helping their present-day problems, but preparing them for the future, as well, Butts said. “This just creates an opportunity for them to grow and have real-world experience when they leave,” he said.
Eventually, Butts hopes to have enough kids in the program that the church will be able to teach college classes in its building through Indiana Wesleyan University. “Once we get 10 students in the program, we’ll be able to hold classes,” Butts said.
Butts likened the foster-care problem to watching babies float down a river in baskets. It’s good to catch those infants already floating down the river; but the ultimate goal is to go to the source of the river, see why the babies are being put there, and stop the difficulty at its source.
“If these kids are in an environment that’s structured,” Butts said, “their success rate should shoot through the roof.”
“I think we can gain enough success to solve these problems,” he continued, “and work on lowering these (foster-care) statistics.”
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January 29, 2020 at 12:00PM
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