The Halo Girls Home in Jefferson City is a residential program for homeless and at-risk girls ages 16-21 who are pregnant, parenting, and non-parenting.
Director Kayla Keller said the organization works to provide housing, healing and education to homeless and at-risk youth in the area.
“Some have children. Others do not, and they can stay with us for up to two years, while they're getting back on their feet, while they're saving money, finishing their high school education, learning life skills,” Keller said.
The home has been open since 2017, and Keller said they almost always have a wait list for non-parenting youth. At any given time, she said there are up to 20 girls and their dependents living in the facility.
Hannah Pond, the senior youth advocate, said while they are teaching the girls live skills, staff are also providing the youth with role models and adults they can rely on.
“It's really just walking alongside them in everyday life,” Pond said. “Getting to experience those little wins with them and even some of the failures, because you get to see how they come back from it and what they choose to do with it.”
For the month of December, we’re focusing on the health of those living in Jefferson City.
Kayla Keller: I think that a lot of times people have misconceptions about what homelessness looks like when it comes to youth.
I think that people expect homelessness to look like a person who's cold on a street corner with a cardboard sign.
Homelessness with youth is lacking in stability — it's not necessarily those people on a corner. It's those people who are couch surfing. They're staying with a friend's mom [who] says they can crash there for a couple of weeks, or an aunt or a cousin or this friend says,” I can stay here,” or “I'm in this unhealthy relationship because it gives me a place to sleep tonight.”
They've just been through some stuff, and some people who were supposed to be there for them weren't, or some adults that were supposed to provide stability and safety for them, for whatever reason, weren't able to.
Hannah Pond: So, our goal is to teach them how to be independent by teaching them those things that your parents are supposed to teach you. So, they're required to do chores. They're required to keep a steady, clean room.
We have family nights once a week on Wednesdays to where we teach them a life skill. We cook, we eat together, we talk about our weeks. We go over some housekeeping things. We clean the buildings together, and then we just have fun.
We do a lot of outings, like we go to the zoo once a year. Coming up we have Christmas.
So, we have, like, a legitimate Christmas morning with them — not on Christmas, but it's like what you see at your house, but magnify it. So there's, like, 15 kids sitting around opening all of their gifts, and some of them, these are the only gifts they've ever had.
Each of them have their own room. They do share a suitemate, and so, they have to learn, you know, conflict resolution, stuff like that — because it is a house full of girls.
We're teaching the moms how to be moms, how to have patience for their kiddos, how to learn and give themselves some grace because parenting is hard.
We’re making sure they get to school, or making sure they know how to conduct themselves in an interview, applications, resumes.
Kayla Keller: We want to be that foundation of a family for them because every kid deserves the support of a family —
Hannah Pond: Mhmm.
Kayla Keller: and not all of them have had the opportunity.
So, we come alongside them like a family would. We rally behind them, we celebrate them as they move through the program, but we celebrate baby showers, we celebrate birthdays, we celebrate graduation. We're the ones that are out there screaming like crazy people when they throw their caps up in the air.
And we, just, we walk alongside them as they keep going, like, every kid wants to have somebody to call when you have something great you want to celebrate, when you're having a hard time, when you can't figure out where to find paprika at the store — somebody to call. We become those people for
Hannah Pond: We're basically like their aunties. We just teach them all the stuff we need to do, and we have a lot of good conversations with them and just encouraging them, you know, it's okay, it's okay to fail, but you can keep learning from it.
