Missy Parmenter is the founder and executive director of Harbor58, a Sarasota nonprofit that provides trauma-informed mentorship, financial literacy education, housing and wraparound support for young adults aging out of foster care.

The journey started in 2015 when Parmenter and her husband, Jay, unexpectedly became caregivers—and eventually parents—of her sister’s daughter, a baby born prematurely and exposed to substances in utero. Suddenly, they found themselves navigating Florida's child welfare system with no roadmap and little understanding of who all the professionals cycling through their home were or what they did. Later came her nephew, another child her sister could not care for, whom they would also adopt.

“The [child welfare system] has added a lot more support and structure since then, but at the time, it was like the Wild West,” Parmenter says. “We felt kind of blindsided by the whole process.”

Instead of running from the chaos, Parmenter leaned in. She became a Guardian ad Litem—a volunteer position advocating for youth in foster care in the Florida court system—and started connecting the program with the church where she worked as a pastor. Along the way, she noticed a troubling pattern: Plenty of people were eager to help young children, but far fewer were willing to invest their resources when those children grew into teenagers whose trauma showed up as behavioral challenges. The kids who needed the most support were often the ones adults found the most intimidating.

When the pandemic hit, Parmenter began receiving calls about young people aging out of foster care with nowhere to go and no financial safety net beneath them. Assuming resources already existed, she started researching. What she found was startling. Every year, more than 20,000 young people age out of foster care in the United States. Within a year, nearly one in five will experience homelessness. Half will be unemployed by age 24. Only 54 percent will earn a high school diploma, and despite roughly 70 percent expressing a desire to attend college, just 3 percent will ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree.

“I was shocked at how little to no resources were available for teens,” Parmenter recalls. Then she came across an Oklahoma organization using tiny homes to help foster youth transition into adulthood. She went to her pastor and suggested they do the same. When he asked how much it would cost, she told him she had no idea. “It’s almost good that you don’t know how big something is in the beginning,” she says with a laugh. “I was just naive enough to say, ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll figure it out.’”

Her solution was Harbor58, and today, the nonprofit operates two pilot program homes providing supportive rental housing for young adults ages 18 to 22, along with mentorship programs and monthly financial literacy classes. Every resident currently in the housing program first came through Harbor58’s mentorship initiative when they were still in foster care, allowing relationships to form long before a housing need emerged.

The organization's ambitious next phase is now taking shape in east Manatee County: a cottage-style campus featuring 12 individual villas and a central community lodge where residents can access mental health services, life skills training, career guidance, mentorship and a stable place to live while pursuing education or employment.

For Parmenter, the housing—essential as it is—is only part of the equation.

“People don’t realize how much support one young person needs,” she says. “You can see why we have so many teens bouncing from placement to placement. To stabilize them and help them work through their past hurts and trauma, you need multiple supportive voices around them.”

Research consistently shows that one of the strongest predictors of success for young people who have experienced trauma is the presence of a safe, stable adult—someone who remains in their corner even when trust is tested. “They know they can count on us, even when they don't do what we want them to do,” Parmenter says. “Our care for them isn’t conditional. We're there for them—no matter what.”