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Jan 25, 2022
Hi again, Texoma!
We are thrilled to share another installment in our ongoing series highlighting THF grantees. These organizations make a powerful impact within our community in their own distinctive ways. You can directly support their services by giving to THF’s Community Fund. When THF receives a donation to this fund, 100% of those dollars go back to the community through grants and giving. Thank you for helping us make a difference right here in Texoma – every single day.
THF Team
We continue our series highlighting THF community grant recipients in my interview with Adrean Stinnett, Executive Director & Founder of J127 Ministry. Adrean and her small-but-mighty team of five operate this transition home specifically for young girls aging out of the foster care system in Texoma.
“Our name comes from scripture, James 1:27, a verse about caring for the orphans and the widows. When a child ages out of the foster care system, those are our modern-day orphans. We also [partner] with a widow’s ministry. Our mission is helping young ladies that are transitioning out of foster care, a group home, or have become homeless. We help them gain the tools they need to be successful.”
Adrean spent years fostering teenage girls, and she witnessed first-hand how difficult the transition can be from foster homes to the “real world” – with virtually no other support available in the area. As with many of our non-profit partners, Adrean took lessons from her own life, and her own foster children, and now shares the gift of her learnings and her passions to help others in our community.
“What I saw was, as they aged out of the foster care system, they often returned to the situations they had been pulled out of. Or they thought, ‘Hey, I’m 18, I can do this on my own,’ but they just didn’t have the tools that they needed. One of the plans I created with one of my foster daughters was successful, and it’s the basis of what we do, on a larger scale, here at J127. We saw such a huge change in her life, that’s how all of this started.”
Andrea helps me understand why this transition period is so important. These children have been moved from home to home, often with very strict rules and very little freedom to make their own choices.
"In foster care they are often told “this is what you have to do” and they’ve never been able to make their own choices. So, then all of a sudden, they are 18 and they think they can just do it alone and they really don’t know how to manage that freedom. We are trying to be preventive, if we can reach the young ladies as soon as they age out of foster care so they don’t end up a statistic. The statistics are so overwhelmingly negative. We can help them have the tools to be successful [instead].”
Instead of overwhelming the girls in her transition home with overly strict rules and highly-scheduled routines, Adrean awards them freedoms to make their own choices, and even more importantly, gives them a safe place to fail and learn from their mistakes.
“We always tell our girls; this is a safe place to fail. We want them to change behaviors and patterns so we allow them to make those choices. And if they do make a bad choice or get themselves in a bind, we can help them walk through and see how they could have made a different choice and that’s where a lot of the learning takes place.”
The programming J127 schedules for the girls is focused on highly-applicable life skills classes that help these young ladies better manage their own lives once they are ready to move on. And the classes are given by members of the Texoma community, further showing her residents that they have the local support they need.
“Our THF community grant funds our [weekly] life skills classes.The topics can range from cooking to budgeting to how to maintain your car. Learning sewing, internet safety and online dating and so on – with different people from our community coming in to teach each class.”
Perhaps the most unique aspect of J127’s program is the mentorship arrangements. Built on a model of generational care, advice and perspective, each resident at J127 is paired with a mentor near her own age, one near a mother’s age and one near a grandmother’s age – often a woman from the widow’s program. This incredible program affords every resident a support system that is established during their stay at J127, but is designed to continue long after they leave.
“Our mentoring program builds a support system for our girls. Life mentors are paired with just one girl and the goal is that when they leave us the mentors go with them. We are looking for people who will pull up an extra chair at their table for our girls and stay with them as they leave.”
As Adren recounts the early days of her mission to create J127, we at THF are reminded of how powerful our community is when we work together for the common good.
“We are 100% funded by our community, and our community has come together and wrapped around this mission. We spent the first year before we opened seeing if our community would be interested in helping the individuals we would be serving, and they proved they were – we were able to open J127 debt-free! We saw that even though it’s not people we are serving directly, our community has come together to unite for kids in foster care.”
It is such a pleasure to share the story of the life-changing impact J127 has in our community, and we are proud to help support their work through the THF community grant program. If you want to learn more about J127’s work, visit their website.
– THF Team
