When Shirley Mendez was 14, she moved in with a “complete stranger.”
It was her mother, who had left their hometown of Amatitlán, Guatemala, when Mendez was just a toddler, leaving her in the care of her grandmother.
When she arrived in Seattle as a teen, she had no real memories of her mother and no relationship with her stepfather, whom she’d just met.
At 16, Mendez was put into foster care, living with a relative.
“I was just in a very vulnerable state,” she said. “I was lost. I didn’t know what the future held for me.”
She began to spend a lot of time at school. Mendez was paired with an education specialist through Treehouse — a Seattle-based nonprofit that supports young people in foster care and helps them transition to early adulthood — who not only encouraged her to go to college, but helped her apply first to South Seattle College and then the University of Washington, get financial aid and find a place of her own.
“I just felt that I was going to be alone,” said Mendez, now 26. “But I wasn’t.”
Each year, The Seattle Times Fund for Those in Need raises money for charities that help children, families and older adults. Throughout the season, we tell the stories of people and organizations who make a difference in the lives of thousands, and the impact donors can have.
The nonprofit — started in 1988 with a budget of $5,000 by a group of social workers committed to helping kids in foster care succeed at school and in life — gave Mendez the support she needed through its Launch Success program.
“I thought, I’m never going to get there because nobody in my family went to college,” Mendez said. “They said, ‘You may be the first one to break the cycle.'”
Treehouse is one of 13 nonprofits helped by reader donations to The Seattle Times Fund for Those in Need.
Last year, Treehouse helped 6,758 foster children and young adults like Mendez who have recently aged out of the foster system, with clothes and school supplies. It also provides counseling, mentoring and educational support.
“Our team are specialists in adult-ing,” said Amy Navarro, the director of Treehouse’s Launch Success program, which began in 2018 and helps former foster care youth navigate the “complicated, myriad systems” that define American life.
That includes help in filling out a FAFSA — the Free Application for Federal Student Aid familiar to most college students — or scheduling a medical appointment. Or it could be guidance in building a résumé and preparing for a job interview. It also entails applying for a rental home, opening a bank account and managing debt.
The help is available to people 21 and younger who were in foster care, and is unique to each person “because their paths are all so specialized.”
To tailor support, Treehouse relies on a team of nine Launch Success coaches. Each coach has experience with building relationships with young adults, Navarro said, and knowledge of child welfare systems.
“The number of different young people we see, that’s the amount of different circumstances we see,” Navarro said, noting that some coaches work with up to 50 people.
Currently, there are 460 young people in the program. Last year, Launch Success helped 525 former foster care youth. “We’ll probably serve even more than that this year, when all’s said and done,” Navarro said.
About 80% of the program’s participants seek help getting into, and through, college.
Reaching for the diploma
College is a tough hill to climb, no matter your circumstances, but foster youth have an especially steep trek.
Just 52% of students in foster care graduated from a public high school in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families. For non-foster youth, the proportion of high school grads is much higher, at 86%.
Those numbers don’t reflect the progress Treehouse has made helping foster kids get that first diploma. In 2013, foster kids in Washington public high school’s had a graduation rate of just 36%. The improvement is credited almost solely to Treehouse, which said that 75% of the students it mentors long-term graduate high school.
Translating that success to college will be difficult.
Nationwide, less than 5% of people who were in foster care ever graduate from a four-year college, according to the National Foster Youth Institute.
By contrast, 54% of Americans had a postsecondary degree in 2022, according to a recent report from the Lumina Foundation, a private group focused on increasing educational attainment that has given out $250 million in grants since 2000.
Providing long term, one-on-one help is key to foster kids’ success, Navarro said. But it takes money, and the program is underfunded.
Navarro said her staff and program participants “celebrate wins quite frequently,” and mentioned that her program has led to people getting their commercial driver’s licenses and “making good wages” with Amazon. Another works for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs “making more than we do. It’s fantastic.” One young woman took the leap and studied abroad in Italy. Others are entrepreneurs and artists.
“One said, ‘One of these days I’m going to have a farm and I need to know how to repair farm equipment.’ So they did,” Navarro said. “Young people are doing incredible things.”
And then there’s Mendez.
While working full time at a child care center, Mendez graduated from South Seattle College in 2021, and transferred to the University of Washington, receiving her bachelor’s degree in social work two years later.
Now, she’s a clinician with Catholic Community Services working with Hispanic youth in South King County who struggle with mental health, she’s married and has a young daughter.
She thinks about her grandmother often, and said it was her mentors — her grandmother, Catalina, and the people at Treehouse — who led her to where she is now.
“I always knew that education for me was a top priority, and it was always something I saw myself doing,” she said.
Mendez, of course, has plenty left to give. In January, she said, she’s going back to school again, this time to get her master’s in social work, at once contributing to her own future while helping others. That’s something she learned from Treehouse.
“I worked so hard and now I’m here. I just couldn’t believe it,” Mendez said. “People believed in me, but I didn’t believe in myself.”