Quatrece McKinney is well known in the nonprofit sector for her engagement in the community. She is the vice president of programs for Monroe Harding, a local nonprofit serving families involved in foster care and young people aging out of the system.
But McKinney is also known through her active engagement in homelessness and affordable housing. Currently she serves on the boards of Community Care Fellowship, which serves people living outdoors with transitioning to permanent housing, and Woodbine Community Organization, a nonprofit that builds low-income housing.
“I’ve always been interested in the helping profession and doing things that support others,” McKinney said. “I started off working with people with disabilities. In time, I ended up working with young people who have been in foster care.”
When she and her husband moved to Nashville in the 1990s, McKinney got a job at Monroe Harding and has been there ever since. Monroe Harding provided her with the opportunity to be actively engaged in the community, which McKinney said allowed her to bring young people to the table and advocate for their interests herself as well.
What does Monroe Harding do?
Monroe Harding has been around for over 130 years. We started off as an orphanage and today we are providing homes, healing and opportunities for young people ages 0 to 26. The way we do it is to provide foster homes for individuals who are ages 0 to 18 who have been in custody and the care of the state. Our foster homes are located throughout Middle Tennessee, and we’re always open to talk to people who want to consider either supporting that work or being a foster parent.
And then we provide older youth services that consist of providing housing for young people who age out of foster care. We’re proud to say that we were able to expand some of these services to young people who may not have been in foster care. These are vulnerable young people, victims of crimes in most cases, who need some support.
We also have our Resource Center in Downtown Nashville. It provides an array of services including several education opportunities. We have a HiSET (High School Equivalency Test) program and some other educational supportive services, financial literacy and workforce development and internships. We provide therapy through all of our programs, life skills, and then some basic things that people just need sometimes, like food, clothing or connection to resources and supportive adults.
What we’re trying to do is work alongside our young people so that we can either provide or connect them to the resources they need to enhance their lives.
When you say you provide foster care, what does that mean, do you recruit foster parents?
We contract with the Department of Children Services in Tennessee, and we recruit foster parents. We are a part of the Every Child TN Initiative.* What happened is that in 2009, we merged with a foster care organization. That’s how we acquired foster homes, which we now oversee, and we also recruit foster parents.
When an individual or family wants to serve children who are in foster care, we will train them. We have question & answer sessions every month for people who are considering becoming foster parents. Foster homes are for newborns all the way up to young adults age 18. We try to honor those foster homes and work with potential foster parents to find out whom they may feel they’re best able to serve. Some people feel they’re best serving school-age children; others want babies. We just try to answer the call when DCS calls us and tells us they have a child in need; and if we have a match, we partner with DCS to serve the child and the family.
*Every Child TN is a statewide initiative to mobilize all Tennesseans to care for children, youth, and families before, during, and after foster care. (from tn.gov)
DCS has been embroiled in new lawsuits. What are some of the biggest challenges you have observed over the years in the area of foster care?
In foster care, some families and children have been misrepresented. As a society we gravitate towards all of the negatives. We put Band-Aids on things and don’t figure out what the root cause of the situation is. We need to take time to understand how we got here.
There are some efforts being made to reunite children with their families and strengthen the families. Sometimes it works, and of course, sometimes it doesn’t. There are some challenges with the ability to align with multiple systems. So when you think about what happened before a young person gets into foster care. Well, there are some systematic issues. Did we really support the family or was our [offered] support right for them? For example, there are a lot of hoops to get childcare or to access treatment or medical care or even food — all the things families need to take care of a child, and when they’re not there that often leads to a child coming to the attention of the Department of Children Services (DCS). And then DCS is another system entirely.
Navigating through foster care can be very complicated for young people. And so, people in the helping profession are often child-centered, but the organizational alignment can be difficult to attain. When everyone has a different opinion about how the child should be taken care of, we battle philosophies, and we work with different regulatory agencies that we try to comply with. The faith community has had some struggles as well. We try to balance societal norms. It becomes complicated to me.
I think several efforts have been made to move toward alignment, but we soon find it difficult to find a really balanced community that surrounds children and their families. Right now, there are some deep dives going on with affordable housing and transit, which help stabilize families. People are also working on support services to help families access food stamps, childcare, and other basic needs. These are areas that we can continue to focus on, and it all touches the foster care system because it all goes back to looking at what happened before children entered the foster care system.
And what are some opportunities you recommend our city and state take to improve the lives of youth aging out of foster care?
We need to focus on what’s good. People often do not recognize that many of the young people are very caring. They’re creative. They’re extremely smart, innovative, they are loyal, and they are driven. So, while we have to deal with the challenges, we should leverage the God-given talents and abilities that young people have. The question is, how do we move toward a strength-based system?
I think we need to go deeper. We need the community to understand their role in our children’s lives and not forget the family because I think it’s easy to love our kids, it’s difficult to really support families. We need to not give up on them. I know people are doing work on a systemic level. But in the community, we need to create and look for more opportunities that offer extracurricular activities that don’t cost families any money.
How do we pour more money into community centers or churches or small groups that help our children and some adults? Because healthy adults help children become healthy. There are things that we can do, and some efforts are already done in our community. We can showcase and support what’s good and not always only what’s bad.
I also see our state has provided more opportunities for young people who age out of foster care. I have seen more housing opportunities arise so that young people have some options. We just need to not give up. We need to continue to offer the resources and support the options that are out there, so people have choices.
Foster care and homelessness are very closely related. What are the consequences you see if our society does not take care of its young people?
Some of the consequences that we see are an increase in trauma experiences, an increase in unplanned pregnancies, you’re going to have a stifled workforce. Also, when young people try to survive, they sometimes get desperate, and their struggle to survive becomes a crime. Desperation also leads to increase in mental health challenges.
If we do not take care of our young people who have aged out of our system, we will miss out on the opportunity to allow them to contribute to our community in ways that nobody else can. That’s the big consequence for me because these young people have a story to tell and they can enrich our community through their lives. But if they’re stifled and don’t know where to go, what to do, what to say, and how to contribute, they could become a voice without a sound. And it too often leads to housing instability and homelessness when people don’t see their own value and are not be seen. It’s difficult.
Over the years you’ve served on several nonprofit boards. What are some key things that board members can and should do to help their nonprofits survive in the current financial climate?
We not only need experts who know the work but also people who have a passion for the work and can think outside the box. I love bringing people from for-profit organizations into the nonprofit world because there is some thinking that happens that does not always happen in the nonprofit world. There are some connections that can be made.
When we talk about the financial cuts, we have to think about, “If we cannot be funded this way any longer, who else is out there who can help us out?” Networking is super important for board members, even on fiduciary boards. But don’t be afraid to serve on a board if you don’t have money. If I know 10 people who can contribute financially, we can expand our reach. So, we need to be really engaged, committed, and creative in how the work can be supported.
Anything else?
We need to be mindful about how we invest in people and communities and who is left behind. I’m thinking about children, young people aging out of foster care, elderly people, people who cannot find jobs, those who suffer from mental illness.
Neighborhoods are changing and the people who don’t have much are getting pushed out or they’re being treated in a certain way. I think about the neighborhoods I drive through that do not have a grocery store. Then we wonder about families that have no healthy food in their house. Or elderly people who do not have their basic needs met.
The domino effect of us forgetting about these folks is significant. We don’t have healthy grandparents in some neighborhoods. People cannot take care of their own because they are not supported. Then we have housing that is limited. What I mean by that is that [we see situations where] we have a family member who is able-bodied who cannot support another family member because of the regulations around how many people can live in their house. We don’t always think about the consequences of our regulations. Loving grandparents, for example, can’t live-in because a single parent is on Section 8 housing assistance. So then, what happens to that child? Or the grandmother lets their child and grandchild move in [against the rules], and now she is losing her housing, too. I understand that we have to have rules. But how do we figure out what makes sense so families can support each other?
Also, when we look at the helping professionals. We are competing with paying for a living wage. Why would you work at a nonprofit to help people when you can make more working at Whole Foods? How can we help our teachers and helping professionals so that they can work just one job and do that one well? We have to feed the people who are supporting the people.