The Mentors

“My dad was kind of never really in my life, and my mom, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before I was even born,” says Michelle Hanke. “That was just really, really difficult.

“It’s not like anyone ever explained to me what my mom had. I knew something was wrong, but I just didn’t know what it was. It caused me to have to grow up really, really fast. I pretty much raised myself and Markese, my younger brother.”

Growing up in Detroit, the two bounced around between foster care, relatives, and friends. “I went to a lot of different schools when I was younger.” They eventually wound up in Ypsilanti Township with a family from their church, and that’s where Hanke graduated from Lincoln High.

Afterward, she moved in with a friend while Markese stayed with the family. “It was really hard ’cause I had just lost all of the support that I had from the family I had lived with,” she says. “I just knew I couldn’t really give him much help because I was still trying to figure out life for myself, especially with the pandemic and everything.”

When a friend told her about Our House, a nonprofit youth services agency, Hanke tried to get Markese into their mentoring program. He didn’t want it, but she did.

“My whole life I felt like I was always having to be independent and do everything on my own,” she says.

“I just didn’t want to do that anymore, and this mentoring program really provided just everything that I needed.”

In the program, “you learn things like finances, about credit and debt,” says Hanke. Clients learn “the difference between when you need to go to urgent care, or to the ER; how to set up a bank account. Just basic things, but things that you don’t really learn in foster care. No one teaches you. You just kind of are tossed out and you figure it out.

“Like when I got my first car, all I knew was oil changes, but I didn’t know how to change a tire or anything like that. So [Our House] had someone come and show us how to change a tire and just all kinds of stuff that you otherwise would not learn. If your parents didn’t teach it, you’re just kind of out of luck.”

Mentoring is Our House’s “flagship program,” says executive director Natasha Motsinger. “If we stopped doing everything else, we would still focus on mentoring. It’s the number one protective factor that helps increase positive outcomes for our youth: having one trusted adult in their life.”

“I really wanted to learn,” says Hanke. “I wanted better for myself, and I knew that I couldn’t get better unless I got in connection with people who knew more than me. And this program was that.

“My mentor helped me figure out how to get my own health insurance. When I got to Washtenaw Community College, I really didn’t know what I was doing. My mentor, she had already been through the process of college, and she explained to me what transcripts were, what classes I needed to take, how to meet with an academic advisor in order to figure out what I needed to take to go towards my degree.”

While Hanke was moving forward, her brother was falling behind. She says Markese never finished high school, has had brushes with the law, and has been incarcerated, though he’s now free again.

Such outcomes are all too common.

“More than a quarter of all young people who age out of foster care end up homeless within the first year,” says Motsinger. Most age out at eighteen, though some stay in young adult voluntary foster care with just case management until the age of twenty-one. Many are forced to make the transition to adult life without family support, stable housing, or health care.

Our House was founded in 2012 solely as a mentoring organization. In 2018, a grant from Michigan Medicine’s Community Health Services Fund allowed them to add a life-skills and residential program called Launchpad. Motsinger says it “served four youth, eighteen to twenty-four, mostly college students that couldn’t afford the cost of living, but were also youth who had an identified need for life-skill and independent living support; they had access to somebody who could walk them through the hard decisions, they just had us as a safety net so they didn’t end up in critical conditions as often. They had someone there to help them learn basic skills; how to organize spaces, whether or not a lease is a good idea to sign for a new car, how to manage their time, because often trauma impacts executive functioning.

“We ran that from 2018 until 2023, and in those five years, we had some very good outcomes. Then, in 2021, Our House became a licensed and contracted Child Placing Agency and opened our first Independent Living Plus (ILP) program. The first ILP we ran was called Mosaic and it served up to ten youth, ages sixteen to nineteen, who were preparing to age out of foster care.” It ran for two years. Now, Motsinger says, “Our House provides mentoring and other supports up to age twenty-six.”

She adds by email: “Experience and data showed that a program that supports a young person while they develop independent living skills strongly reduces the potential for negative outcomes such as homelessness, evictions, credit issues, involvement with law enforcement and unplanned pregnancy.”

When Hanke came to Our House in 2020, she was initially placed in a host home. After four months, a donor-funded housing scholarship enabled her to move into her own apartment.

“Previously, I just felt really alone, it was scary, and I didn’t know what I was doing,” Hanke says. “I kind of clung to Our House. I always tell people it was like the parents I never really had. Even though I lived with people and I developed relationships, it was always transactional, or I felt like they felt entitled to my successes. Our House was the first place I had gone to where I felt like I didn’t have to earn anything to be there.”

Transitioning to independence is even harder for mothers. When young women “have children while in foster care, 49 percent of them do not get to keep their children long term,” says Motsinger. “Their children are removed from the home within the first two years. I think somewhere around 11 percent are removed within the first week. We are the intervention that prevents that from happening so often.”

In 2024, a year after closing Mosaic, Our House received a state grant to open the Nest, a separate independent living program for pregnant or parenting teens. “At our Nest, we have staff on-site who are helping them break the cycle,” Motsinger says. “They get respite, they get a lot of support, and they get that help while they’re learning how to be parents.”

Now, “that is our focus,” she continues. “So far, everyone who’s come to us is currently pregnant, and we see them through that process. They give birth surrounded by the support and love of our village and then stay with us in our Nest program until they’re ready to take that next step out.

“Then they’re eligible for a housing voucher, but they can stay with our organization and do our life skills program. They have wraparound help, access to our nurse practitioner, our therapist and their mentors.”

Nest’s residential program is one of only two for young pregnant women in the entire state, says Motsinger. The other program, located in Lansing, has six beds; Nest has eight.

While meeting their clients’ needs, Our House discovered another problem: “Youth in foster care don’t have consistency in their [health care] providers,” says Motsinger. “When they’re moving from placement to placement, they’re moving from doctor to doctor. These are young people who often have significant health issues and sometimes a great deal of trauma. So, when you’re going from psychiatrist and doctor to all these different places, there’s not a ton of health education that happens.

“Running a housing program, you run into so many things that come up. Is it time to go to the emergency room? What kind of treatment do you need? Do you need inpatient mental health services? Do you need to go to urgent care?”

Kat McKowell, a family nurse practitioner, began to address these questions and issues as a volunteer in 2021. She now works full-time as Our House’s health and wellness director, providing nursing services, health education, and on-call support.

“Kat has been so helpful in helping our clients learn how to manage their health independently,” says Motsinger. “Without Kat’s guidance, helping us to learn how to appropriately assess, I don’t know what we would’ve done.”

Motsinger and McKowell are particularly excited that Our House has recently joined with Ozone House, the Corner Health Center, and the Washtenaw Housing Alliance to implement a federally funded Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project (YHDP)—a two-year program aimed at expanding housing and support services for young people experiencing homelessness.

“We are expanding our life skills program to offer classes to a much wider audience on budgeting, self-advocacy, communication, relationships, independent living skills, parenting classes,” says Motsinger. “Anybody who comes through the homelessness system can be referred to our classes. We will be a prevention service to help them learn the skills that might help them to not end up homeless, and also to help people learn to live independently for the first time.

“We’ll be offering those at our offices, and it’ll be referral based through the YHDP program and the partnership with Corner Health. They will be offering mobile counseling services, more health care clinics, and we’re actually launching a vaccine clinic for them.”

When asked whether the recent cuts to so many federal programs will affect them, Motsinger says, “So far, what we know is that the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Projects have not been cut. And we did receive funds as a county for the planning purposes. So, we are optimistic.”

Related: The Social Services Shake-Up

“Always optimistic,” McKowell adds quickly, “But realizing that support for programs like this does need to come from the community. We’re always seeking donors, volunteers, and different funding sources.”

“Our programs work,” says McKowell. “Statistically, and just from lived experience, I see it. Compared to the Midwest Study that was conducted about foster children, our outcomes far surpass anything in that study.”

According to Our House’s 2023 Impact Statement (there was no residential program in 2024), by age twenty-six none of its participants had been arrested, compared to 70 percent in the Midwest Study. Only 8 percent were parents, compared to 63 percent in the study. And of those who reported a mental health need, 75 percent received treatment, compared to less than 20 percent in the study.

Their client supports “go all the way around,” says Motsinger. “Case management, mental health, physical health, transportation, funding, emergency funding. It’s wraparound—it’s whatever they need in that moment to help them continue to be successful.”

“We are at 136 young people historically served, and we have twenty-three open cases currently, including four in our Nest,” she emails later. “We just got one person [in the Nest] last week, but two of the three already have graduated and are enrolled in college.

“Eighty percent of youth who have been in Our House’s mentorship program one year or longer have graduated high school. Since 2020, when we started tracking that outcome, of the twenty-one young people who have been with us for more than three years, 100 percent of them have their GED or diploma.”

Hanke attended and graduated from Washtenaw Community College while in the mentorship program. “That was a feat,” she says. “My education [before college] was not the best; very spotty. I never thought I was smart enough. I never thought I would go to college. I’m the first person in my family to graduate from college or high school. So, I just never thought I could do it.” In fact, she was the student speaker at WCC’s commencement in May of 2024.

She is about to turn twenty-six, and will no longer be a mentee in Our House. Instead, she has two new roles: She’s the mother of a year-old daughter, Emery, and since last September she’s been working for Our House as their youth communication specialist. She acts as a guide for new mentees—offering them encouragement, her earned wisdom, and her lived experience, as they grow toward independence.

“I advocate for all the mentees in the mentoring and the Nest program,” she says. “I love it. Everything that I’ve been doing for the last five years is what I now help them with.

“So, for me it’s full circle: I’m able to give back to something that’s given so much to me.”