Feb 22, 2024 By Karen Mansfield 6 min read

Courtesy Growing Up Greene

Growing Up Greene’s Emergency Overnight Housing program provides shelter for children removed from their homes. The brightly colored quarters include a library section and huggables.

Courtesy Growing Up Greene

Growing Up Greene partnered with EQT to provide foster care comfort bags that include a blanket, book, journal, crayons, and toiletries at the shelter.

Courtesy Growing Up Greene

Growing Up Greene’s Emergency Housing program can shelter up to seven children.

Courtesy Growing Up Greene

Growing Up Greene’s therapy dog, Coalbie, a 17-month-old beagle mix, is available to comfort children at the nonprofit’s Emergency Overnight Housing shelter.

Greene County has new housing to temporarily shelter children whose families are in crisis.

In January, Growing Up Greene, formerly CASA, opened the Emergency Overnight Housing program that offers children who are removed from their home a space while Greene County Children and Youth Services searches for more permanent foster or kinship options.

Children served by CYS have been removed by law enforcement or child protective services due to abuse, neglect, incarceration of a parent, domestic violence, criminal activity or other dangerous situations with their families.

Often, those children are taken – sometimes in the middle of the night – to a hotel.

“There’s a lot of struggle with not having enough foster homes, not enough placements anywhere throughout the state to place these children,” said CYS administrator Beth Booker at the January unveiling of the house. “Sometimes it takes days to find that, and our staff has to accommodate and stay with these children 24 hours a day, and often that is spent in a hotel room or in an office, and neither of those are ideal.”

Greene County has 12 certified foster homes that are typically full, and no group homes for children. Because the county is bordered by West Virginia on two sides, neighboring Pennsylvania group homes are limited.

Enter Aaron Houser, executive director of Growing Up Greene.

He’d been considering converting his office, located in an older home, into a safe space for kids. Hotel rooms, he said, are typically sterile and not aimed at providing distraction or comfort for children who have just been through a traumatic event.

“We’re talking about unusual circumstances where CYS would have to take custody of children, usually later in the evening. Last year, about a dozen times, CYS was in a position where they didn’t have any other option than to move children they removed from their home to a local hotel for the night. Hotels are fine for us when we’re going on a trip, but for a kid taken from the only home they’ve ever known, a hotel is a white box that’s not designed to make them feel comfortable,” said Houser. “The kids are scared, they’ve been removed from their home. My thought was, ‘What purpose does an empty building serve?’ The idea was, let’s provide an inviting space with accommodations and distractions for children. We have the ability to make those fairly rare occasions much less traumatic and make things easier for the CYS staff that has to be there with them.”

The brightly painted, kid-friendly emergency overnight space can house up to seven children.

Growing Up Greene partnered with Snee-Rhinehardt Charitable Foundation, which provided partial funding, while Greene County Commissioner Betsy Rohanna McClure secured remaining funds through Pennsylvania’s PHARE Program.

T&N Contracting remodeled the office space, adding a new bathroom and shower. The house includes a living room filled with games, toys, a library and stuffed plushies, and includes a fully equipped kitchen for preparing meals, a washer and dryer, and a private bedroom space with bunk beds and a television.

Children at the overnight house also are visited often by Coalbie, a 17-month-old therapy dog whose handler and “fur parent” is Houser.

Coalbie also comforts children at Greene County Juvenile Court during court hearings and supervised visitations.

“Having (worked) with CYS for the last four years, I’m aware of how traumatizing it is for children (to be removed from their homes), so anything we can do to relieve that trauma and make it more genuine, more relaxing for the child, that’s what we want to do,” said McClure.

The house hasn’t been used yet.

At a tour of the overnight space in January, Booker said, “We hope to never use this, but in reality there are times it will have to be used.”

Growing Up Greene board member Keshia Weaver said after the organization evaluated its office space and looked into the costs associated with the project, it was “an easy decision” to move ahead with a search for funding.

“I previously worked for CYS and have personally been in the position of being unable to find appropriate housing for a child late at night. Remembering the look in their eyes when I was striking out made this project a no-brainer,” said Weaver.

Growing Up Greene partnered with EQT to provide foster care comfort bags that include a blanket, book, journal, crayons, and toiletries at the house.

Growing Up Greene’s mission is to protect children, Houser said. The nonprofit’s volunteer child advocates, board members, and staff serve children and families inside and outside the child welfare system.

In December, Growing Up Greene’s Iron Senergy Children’s Gear Distribution provided winter clothing – including jackets, hats, boots, and blankets – to 320 children from more than 100 families.

Houser said the overnight emergency space is an effort to “try something new in the hope we can help the next generation be in a better position than the one before.

“The idea of the (emergency housing) was, any possibility we have of providing a distraction that night when children are removed from their home is a benefit to the kids,” said Houser. “Every kid is different. Whether it’s quiet time reading in the corner, or making popcorn and watching a movie in the conference room, or getting a shower and getting into some clean clothes, all of those distractions are available. They can figure out the rest in the morning.”

Courtesy Growing Up Greene

Growing Up Greene’s Emergency Overnight Housing program provides shelter for children removed from their homes. The brightly colored quarters include a library section and huggables.