by Jennifer Guerra

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The Vista Maria campus in Dearborn Heights (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

The Vista Maria campus for girls has gorgeous brick buildings spread out over 37 acres. You could easily mistake it for a boarding school out east. There’s the big lawn out front. Volleyball courts behind each hall. Inside, you’ll find some girls watching a movie, others are working out, and some are getting ready for the big Fall dance.

But that’s where the similarities end.

First off, most of the doors at Vista Maria are locked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And the girls are ordered here by the courts; some have been abused, some have mental health issues and substance abuse problems, and some have a history of running away and skipping school.

On Vista Maria’s campus, they do everything. They eat, sleep and go to school here. They go to therapy; they go to meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous. But Cameron Hosner, who runs the program, says it all comes to a stop once the girls age out of the system:

“At 18, when they no longer have the resources or the support under the court, they have very little. They have food stamps, if they’re lucky they can get a housing subsidies. Their families aren’t in a position to help them in many instances, and so all the gains we’ve made could be lost very quickly.”

Hosner says in order for the girls to succeed after they age out of foster care, they need 3 things. They need a support system, they need to be able to finish high school, and they need a place to live.

“If I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight, as one young girl to me, and I don’t know what I’m going to eat tonight, I’m not going to be in school tomorrow till I figure this out, and you know what I gotta go out and do to try and figure that out. And so she’d have to go out in the street to figure out how to make enough money or just end up staying somewhere.”

So where can they go after they age out? That’s where the Neighborhood Stabilization Program comes in. Michigan got more than $98 million in NSP funds to help rehab or demolish foreclosed houses.

Hosner noticed tons of foreclosures around the Vista Maria campus, so he applied for some NSP money and bought a house nearby for around $80,000, including rehab. Up to 3 Vista Maria graduates will get to live in the house. They can stay as long as they want, although the goal is to teach the girls to live independently.

Cynthia Williamson is one of the young women who applied to live in the house. I met her at a coffee shop in Detroit, where she was pretty open about her attitude before she was sent to Vista Maria.

“I didn’t care,” she explains. “Basically I didn’t care. Like a lot of people gave me a lot of advice, but I never listened to it.”

She successfully completed the program after a year, and she’s back at her Mom’s house. She likes it OK, but she’s 18 and wants to see if she can live on her own.

“The reason why I want to do it on my own is that I have people looking at me as a role model, like my little cousins and my siblings. So I just want to show people that are my age, my youth, that you can do it no matter what you’ve been through. That you can do it.”

The girls in the house will have mentors. They’ll learn life skills like how to budget and apply for jobs. Cameron Hosner, the director of Vista Maria, says as long as the girls live in the house, they’ll need to pay $200 a month in rent, they’ll need to be in school, either academic or vocational, and they’ll need to do community service around the neighborhood.

“We want this not to be one of those situations where it’s who came into my neighborhood? We want them to say, could you send us 3 more of those wonderful young women who have overcome so much in their own lives and are now such model citizens.”

The first house is part of a pilot project. If it goes well, Vista Maria hopes to buy 30 more foreclosed houses near campus.

Contact Jennifer Guerra at guerraj@umich.edu

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