The statistics are sobering. 20% of foster children immediately become homeless after aging out of the system. 40% become homeless within their first 18 months of emancipation. For children who are unable to live with their biological families, foster care can be a “highway to homelessness.”

Atlanta Mission knows that our clients bring with them a wide variety of life experiences and deep wounds in need of care. Statistics tell us that 50% of those experiencing homelessness have spent time in the child welfare system. For many we serve, foster care — and its accompanying complexities — is part of their story. We offer an exit from that highway, an off-ramp to a better life. For others, our services offer preventative care, strengthening families to keep them together even when times are tough.

Serving the Wounded

Each year, approximately 5% of Georgia’s foster children are within a year of emancipation. Separated from their birth families for a variety of reasons, these children experience a wide variety of disruptions in their young lives. Many struggle with the instability of family relationships, housing situations, school challenges and emotional struggles. While the word “emancipation” means freedom, for these children aging out of the system, leaving foster care can feel disorienting and scary instead. For many, the streets become their new home. 

All of our care focuses on cultivating healthy, whole individuals who can function independently and fruitfully. Regardless of a person’s life journey up to the moment, we believe that wholeness and flourishing are possible. Atlanta Mission offers stable relationships, life skills training, spiritual support, and counseling services to those with difficult childhood experiences. 

For many who have experienced the disruption of foster care, Atlanta Mission offers a first taste of unconditional love and support. We build accountability into one-on-one relationships through our Ambassadors program, and we teach new healthy rhythms in our residential services. Atlanta Mission seeks to offer the family encouragement that former foster children need to build new lives upon.

Preventative Care

While much of our work relates to the individual needs of those exiting foster care and homelessness, our family care empowers mothers and fathers to build healthy family systems, offering them tools to avoid the child welfare system altogether. By investing in parents, Atlanta Mission is on the front lines of preventative work.

In our residential services, clients learn critical skills that help them to be better parents — more aware of their children’s needs, more attentive to the relationships that surround them. Parents learn conflict management and healthy eating habits; and, thanks to our recovery services, they experience the joy of becoming addiction free. Every meal we serve, every counseling session and prayer meeting we offer builds into the lives of vulnerable families, strengthening them to face the challenges life delivers.

Atlanta Mission is grateful for Georgia’s child welfare system. Each year, it offers vital services to endangered children. We’d also love to see the day when foster care no longer needs to exist. As we work to transform homelessness with hope, we’re working toward this goal too.