Growing foster kids into successful adults with a 'loving and kind environment.'

Amy and Daniel Martel have been involved with the foster care system for many years – at first, they working in a group home setting, then they adopted five kids into their family and now they have opened Rooted 242.

Rooted is a cafe in downtown Moberly that aims to combat what the Martel's see as a major problem in their community – kids aging out of the foster system with little or no support as they enter adulthood.

Missouri Judicial District 14, which includes Moberly in Randolph County and Howard County, has a very high rate of children being in the care of the state.

Amy said they opened the café to give these kids the opportunity to learn healthy life and job skills, as well as create a safe space where foster involved families can meet – all over a good meal.

Amy Martel: Teenagers are hard. They pull all sorts of emotions into it that you're not prepared for. Their trauma is shaped so differently than a five-year-old.

And so, we see that a lot of kids who age out of foster care because: A – they can't find that family, that forever family that wants to kind of ride that wave with them, or B – they want to get out of the system. They want to be independent. The problem is, is that they don't know how to do that well yet, and that's where Rooted was really birthed.

Because not only did we want to teach them some good job skills, but we also wanted to teach them how to have a nontoxic work environment, how to advocate for your needs with a boss, and how to have good customer service and how to handle myself in a workplace.

Also how to have good life skills – how to have an apartment, how to pay my bills, and so, those were some of the ideas that started with our job skill training program that we wanted to instill.

We didn't want to just teach them how to do dishes, but we wanted to be able to come alongside them and be able to speak into their life through trust and in this working relationship.

So, our mission statement is “Standing in the gap from adolescents to adulthood with youth and families from hard places, specifically affected by foster care.”

And so, that has birthed into many different ministries that we're currently doing.

Our job skill training program in our café. We have community events to build healthy community because it's not just about having community, it's having a good, healthy community.

We have a supervised visitation space that is clean and safe and set up like a living room, so it is conducive to rehabilitating family relationships because preserving the family unit is important.

We also have a support group called Thrive. It's for families who are in crisis of potentially getting their kids removed into foster care or families who have had their kids removed.

So, that we can advocate for reunification. We can help them work through their service plan, so that we can get reunification happening more readily.

Rebecca Smith

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KBIA

But our third and final phase – what we are working towards right now – is providing housing. We have drawings and we have the demolition work laid out for four apartments upstairs from our cafe, so they'll be able to live and work in the cafe.

Aged out foster youth can qualify for what's called an FYI voucher, the Foster Youth [to Independence] Initiative voucher through section eight housing.

And so, if they've spent time in foster care, they can qualify for this voucher, which will take care of their rent for three years, and so, we will partner or utilize that voucher to be able to pay the rent.

So, that they can learn how to save their money, they can learn how to budget their money, they can do all those things for that first three years to get themselves sustainable.

So, we can have a program here where we can mentor, life skill coach, job skill train, have housing that's safe, affordable and good for them in this loving and kind environment, and then be able to launch them and they know what that good looks like, so hopefully they will seek that out.