From homeless to hope: Inside the Milestone Transitional Living Program

The house is handsome but not remarkable from the outside: a beige brick rambler with a basement off 700 East and 8600 South in Sandy. There’s a perfectly manicured yard and a small patio off the front porch where sits a heavy black bike rack.

The place screams this is not just a house, but a home.

That sense is even stronger in one of the well-appointed bedrooms, where a laughing handful of girls are jumping up and down and two of them actually squeal a little with excitement as they open closets and peer into the pristine shower before exploring the rest of the place.

Look closer, though, and see they’re not girls, but young women. And this place matters to them because housing is not something everyone takes for granted.

The excited young adults are members of the Youth Action Board of Salt Lake County Youth Services, a panel dedicated to combating homelessness among young people. For some of them, homelessness is a memory, not a theory. They were there, couch surfing, maybe sleeping in their cars, moving between shelters and friends’ houses in search of a roof and safety in precarious times.

This home is one such haven, part of the Milestone Transitional Living Program operated by Salt Lake County Youth Services. This particular place was just renovated and is featured in the 2024 Salt Lake Parade of Homes.

Monday, state and local government officials, faith leaders, volunteers, formerly homeless adults, contractors, builders and other donors invited the community to see what big hearts, corporate and private donors, and a lot of hard work can do for an especially vulnerable community. About a third of the program’s young adults aged out of foster care. All of them lacked the traditional crucial supports that help teens transition to independent adulthood.

An elaborate array of red, blue and gold balloons, some shaped like spiky stars, adorned the front entrance Monday. The place was decked out for a celebration.

Reaching milestones

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, right next door, owns three of the Milestone transitional houses, all located in Sandy. A West Valley City fourplex is master leased with Housing Connect. And Salt Lake Rotary just bought an apartment building in Millcreek that is now part of the program, each location operated by Salt Lake County Youth Services. Between them, 36 young adults who were homeless or on the brink are safe and sheltered.

Still, the houses are not shelters, but rather the core of a self-sufficiency program for adults 18 to 21 who were homeless or frighteningly close. Young adults who will commit to clean, sober living and obey a set of basic rules like no substance use including smoking, no weapons, no overnight visitors, no pets. They also commit to finding jobs or being in school.

The program especially emphasizes the importance of having a high school diploma or its equivalent, said Mina Koplin, section manager at Salt Lake County Youth Services.

They can stay for up to 18 months while they learn skills, finish high school if they’ve dropped out, and find work or enroll in further education, including vocational training. In Koplin’s words, it’s about helping a vulnerable population “get capable.” Each house has a house manager. Youth Services provides case managers with small caseloads so they can provide real help. Skill-building includes essentials including cooking and managing one’s money.

There is no free ride here. The formerly homeless or vulnerable adults pay a $50 deposit and then a monthly fee that starts at $200 and goes up $50 every three months as they find work and become more capable of managing that cost.

The program boasts an 83% success rate, defined as being housed and having jobs or being in school. A program study of all 300 who have transitioned through the program in the past found that two years after leaving, 80% still met those criteria.

Rocky road to adulthood

Maygan Martinez knows what the home could bring to future residents, because she lived in a Milestone Transition Program home herself.

Her story has echoes throughout the community the program services: into foster care as a teen, aged out at 18. She told Deseret News she thought she was going to be okay, but three months into being an adult, she had no place to live and no support system. She’d also started college and found she just couldn’t do it alone at that point. Then a serious car accident deepened her existing depression.

For five or six months, she couch surfed with friends, then went to a Volunteers of America youth resource center for a couple of months. Next, she lived in her car for three months, before hearing about the Milestone program.

She stayed for about eight months and left because she got a housing voucher. But that success was a mixed bag: She had two part-time jobs but lost her housing because she earned too much, though it was not enough to make housing work at market rate. She was homeless again for a month, then spent a short, bumpy time living with a friend. Unsure what to do, she called Koplin and asked if she could get back into Milestone. After considering Martinez’s plight, Koplin offered her a job. For two years, during the pandemic, Martinez was a resident manager in a Milestone home.

Martinez and her friend Natalie Clark — herself a lived-experience expert on transitions and foster care — founded a nonprofit called 1999 Collective, which helps connect those who were in foster care as teens with support and resources. Clark is also on the Youth Action Board as a liaison with the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, where she works with youths transitioning to adult living. Deseret News wrote about her difficult journey out of foster care in 2020. Clark’s now planning on a master’s degree.

Martinez is headed to college to work on a political science degree and hopes eventually to go to law school.

She’s a former president of the Youth Action Board, which is now headed by Yixiao Burke, who was couch surfing at 18 and lived in Volunteers of America transitional housing between February 2019 and August 2020. With more stability in her life, Burke earned a degree in psychology from the University of Utah.

With a little help, they’re all succeeding.

Parade-worthy program

On the living room wall between the big window and a door, there’s a decorative placard that says: “Today is a good day for a good day.” There’s a comfy-looking sectional couch, art on the walls and an open floor plan so the kitchen’s within sight. Right now, there are scads of household items on the table, including a crockpot, a big jug of laundry soap, new dishes, cookware and kitchen utensils — all still boxed — as well as other basic items including a tape measure and screwdriver set, linens, and other goods a person would need to set up a household.

The program’s young adults get coming-and-going gifts. A bike for transportation; hence that big bike rack. And the items on the table are what program graduates get when they transition out, along with some other essentials like towels and blankets so they can set up their own homes.

And oh, yeah. They also get the program fees they paid every month. Every penny. Koplin says if someone stays the 12-month average time, he or she will have a nice little chunk of launch money for a rent deposit or a used car or whatever will most help move to independent living — about $3,000.

Birth of a program

During an event leading up to a ribbon-cutting Monday, Pastor James Wakefield, emeritus pastor of Good Shepherd, told assembled volunteers, donors and officials that “I helped start this thing and I could not be prouder of what has happened since 2009. We stumbled our way in. We were good-hearted and persistent.”

The Lutheran congregation had been working with young people in foster care and trying to help create good transitions to independence since 2002, so they had long cared about vulnerable adults and homelessness when, in 2009, he said they realized the property the church owned next door might further their efforts.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Wakefield asked a reporter. In early August of 2009, the church started working with Salt Lake County on the notion and by Dec. 1, all the red tape and barriers had been resolved. Miraculous indeed.

Still, there was a learning curve and they made some mistakes, Wakefield said. But by 2012, the program and partnership with the county was running well. So the church provided two more properties.

Community partners have been collected like seashells along the way by those involved with the program in many capacities, a good number of them gathered by Chris McCandless, who several officials hailed for his efforts on behalf of Milestone. The former Sandy councilman has enjoyed a long career in real estate that provided a wide group of contacts he admits he’s unabashedly tapped for help. And as a sign posted in the church next door notes, the list of donors and doers is very long, including a hefty cash donation from Mountain America Credit Union. The list was there because the people who provided the labor and the resources were lauded at a dinner Monday night at the church.

McCandless was talking about all of the companies that donated labor, money, crews and materials to bring the project to life when Garry Mickelsen, of Mickelsen Excavation, walked by, proving his point. McCandless joked that Mickelsen has “every big yellow machine” one could imagine, which was pretty handy when they needed some of them — and their operators — to help with the landscaping. Better still, he was among those with a heart for service to the young adults in need of help, McCandless said.

Helping young adults escape homelessness by sharing one’s resources is an easy way to make a difference, according to McCandless. His hope is that the Milestone model prompts other churches and communities to do the same thing.

It’s a dream shared by Aimee Winder Newton, senior advisor to Gov. Spencer Cox and director of Utah’s Office of Family, who said she would like to see the Milestone model all over the state. She said as a mother of four young adults, she knows that it’s “really hard to transition to adulthood.”

And many are doing it without loving guidance or support.

Before the ribbon on the house was snipped by Sandy Mayor Monica Zoltanski and other officials, Good Shepherd’s current pastor, Jeff Tally, prayed the house would be blessed. He said he hopes God’s plan is for praying people to bring a little bit of heaven here on earth and asked for an end to generational homelessness.

He prayed that young adults would find sanctuary, peace, recovery and restoration in this home.

For more information, call Youth Services at 385-468-4500 or visit SLCO.TO/MilestonePOH.