Most of us have a place to call home. To us, home means comfort, safety, warmth, love, laughter and rest. We can be ourselves at home, so we can thrive, grow and learn.

Young people who live in foster care, relative care or another impermanent situation do not have a place to truly call home. Can you imagine? Even a great foster home is not a permanent home. These kids spend their energy and focus on survival and acceptance rather than growth and learning. If they make it through high school successfully and want a college degree, what happens next?

A few of these teens now have a home for their college years because of the generous 2021 IMPACT 100 Pensacola Bay Area grant that allowed Embrace Florida Kids to purchase its first-ever Higher Education Home.

For those wondering who we are, Embrace Florida Kids and Embrace Alabama Kids began in 1890 as the United Methodist Children’s Home, an orphanage. During the past 130 years, we have changed with the needs of our communities, and we now provide a much wider range of services to the vulnerable, including foster care, family preservation, and group homes in Northwest Florida and Alabama.

IMPACT 100 Pensacola Bay Area is a volunteer group of philanthropic women who pool their gifts of $1000 each to provide grants of $100,000 or more to nonprofit organizations, which makes a significant impact on the organization, the individuals it serves, and the community. For Embrace, that grant began to change the course of a few high school graduates’ lives forever.

We are thrilled that so many of our Embrace kids do successfully complete high school, but we know that foster children nationwide tend to have worse outcomes as adults than their peers. Even with a tuition scholarship, the cost of college – books, labs, food, housing, and transportation – seems impossible to a teenager who does not have a continuing support system.

Some teens who have experienced periods of instability have been fully funded for college through scholarships, work, grants, and loans, but they still struggle because they have gaps in their social and behavioral skills. Sometimes, they have not gained skills that kids in a stable home environment have developed through consistent teaching of parents and family.

Embrace’s Higher Ed Homes in Alabama have been successful in bridging this gap with group homes in college towns, so plans were made to begin a similar program in Northwest Florida. A grant from the amazing women of IMPACT 100 allowed us to purchase a home much faster than we expected, so we now have students who are enjoying college, studying hard and growing together with a resident advisor. We especially love the moments when they are laughing together while doing chores, watching movies or having dinner!  

 We celebrated our first Embrace Florida Kids Higher Ed scholarship recipient in December. She lived in a dorm while we worked to secure a house and funding, and because of the IMPACT 100 grant, she was able to live in the new home for two semesters, which was a dream come true for her. She was thrilled that so many people from her Embrace family showed up for her graduation. These kids have not always been celebrated, and they are incredible.

Embrace is providing not just a house, but a home. Our goal is to cultivate growth, with a focus on academic, spiritual, and social development. Laura Ingalls Wilder said that home is the nicest word there is. I am sure our Higher Ed Home residents would agree. We are so thankful to be able to say, “Welcome home” to these young adults. Visit our website at https://embraceflkids.org/ to learn more.