Life Skills for a Homeless Teenager

Even before reaching out to Cornerstone, a teenage boy who was kicked out of his mother’s house found a mentor in the coworker who offered to let him stay at his home while he looked for a place to live. He needed guidance on whether to look for a car or a place to live first. And because the store where he worked full time was going out of business, he needed to find other avenues of income.

He soon added a second job and then a third job to his week, and we were able to help him find both a place to live and a car that fit within his budget. We helped this Neighbor learn some basic life skills that he’d never had the opportunity to explore. Now, he wants to learn how to become self-sustaining. Every month he creates a budget for the month, and at the end of the month he will review his actual spending versus his budget. This skill will be an asset to him for the rest of his life.

His goal is to graduate from college and work in the automotive industry designing cars. To help him get there, his mentor introduced him to Dave Ramsey’s teenager financial peace program. He has also worked through our budget accountability program, which involved saving funds for an emergency and starting a savings account. Our Neighbor has returned to community college and is now working only one job — a position in the automotive field that one of our donors helped to connect him with. He has also started to mentor a teen in a situation similar to his, sharing his life skills and firsthand experience with another Neighbor who can learn and grow from them.