About Challengers
Challengers Independent Living, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing independent life skills services to teens and young adults in long-term foster care. These youth have a variety of clinical issues, including but not limited to, sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment, learning disabilities and severe emotional disturbances. Our mission is to provide comprehensive independent life skills training to individuals, ages 15-21 and living in foster care, in order to prepare them for a positive and productive self-sufficient life post discharge from foster care.
Challengers administer our program through our continuum of care. We believe that there is a population in Maryland’s foster care system that unfortunately has been targeted for independent living. This population’s chances of adoption or reunification is less than 10% Therefore, if this population must live self-sufficiently, our model suggests that the teaching/learning process begin immediately. Therefore Challengers’ Continuum of care will accept Participants as young as 15 years of age. Our goal is to provide an environment where our Participants can learn, practice and develop independent life skills in a safe and supportive environment. The CCC is as follows:
- Bert’s Place and Bert’s Place Too- independent living preparatory program.
At this phase of the program, Participants will be able to practice life skills in a community setting within a 24 hour supervised living environment. The goal of the program at this level is to assist the Participant with becoming academically and emotionally stable. We understand the temptations and challenges ahead at the ILP level. Therefore, we must prepare our Participants from a proactive stand point. Enable them to establish routines that are internalized that will enable them to make good decisions on a regular and consistent basis. It is that building of cognitive structure that will rule the day! - Challengers Independent Living East and West- Independent living Program. At this phase of the program, Participant are served in an apartment style living environment, Participants are age level maturity with an ability to participate within the community with minimal supervision. The goal in this phase of the program is to allow our Participants to practice independent life skills with moderate supervision. Staff will have face to face contact with Participants throughout the day and throughout the evenings. The purpose is to provide monitoring to allow our participants to demonstrate mastery of a variety of life skills.
- Challengers Advance- Self-Sufficient Living Program- In this phase of the program, Participants resides in their own home. Participants are allowed to purchase homes, rent apartments, rooms, etc. on their own merits. Their names are on every aspect of the house, e.g., lease, utilities, cable, telephone, etc. Kids who make it to this level of the program would have demonstrated mastery of more than fifty concrete tasks/milestones. The goal is to allow our Participants to live self-sufficiently within the community with minimal support. Focusing on the word support which will inevitability discontinue at the age of twenty one, at least from a financial perspective. The goal of the program is to allow our Participants to transition to their home while they are still in care and we can help them through the adjustment phase of living completely on your own. This program is nearly ten years old and we have not had one Participant fail at this level of the program. Realistically, not all of our Participants make it to this phase of the program. There are rigid prerequisites to meet prior to graduating to this phase. It is the goal of every participant in our entire organization to get our Participants to Challengers Advance as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
- Challengers Beyond- After Program. Challengers will continue to service our participants for one year post discharge from foster care. This phase of the program is unfunded, therefore financial support is limited, and however, each Participant can continue to receive Case management services for up to 12 months post discharge from Maryland’s foster care system.
Challengers Teen Parent Program provides comprehensive life skills and parenting training to teens that are pregnant or with at least one child and living in foster care. The purpose of the program is to provide a nurturing environment for teen parents who have accepted the challenge of parenthood. The goal of the program is to provide a nurturing environment to practice life skills that will allow them to adequately parent their child while living in foster care. Participants will be provided with resources that will enable them to continue to work, attend educational endeavors and pursue career goals. One of Challengers’ goals is to reduce the rate of young adults discharge from foster care usage of already overburdened government adult assistance programs. We will be utilizing Object Relations as our theoretical underpinnings. Object Relations takes into account the needs of the child and the ability of the parent to adequately meet the child’s needs on a regular and consistent basis. We are looking forward to this next phase of our continuum of care. “It’s A Challenge, not a problem”.
