You are an adult now — and Texas made you promises. Here's how to collect them.

You're an adult, and you're owed things

There is a particular loneliness to aging out. One day there are caseworkers and court dates and people whose job is to know where you sleep, and the next day there is a garbage bag of clothes and a bus ticket and a birthday nobody made a cake for. You were handed adulthood the way you'd hand someone a hot pan — fast, and without a mitt.

So let's start with the thing nobody framed for you correctly. You are not a case that closed. You are a young woman to whom the State of Texas made a set of specific, written, legally-binding promises — and the reason to read this page is that those promises are worth real money and a real future, and they are sitting there unclaimed with your name on them.

The state didn't do right by you as a child. That is exactly why it wrote down what it owes you as an adult. Your job now is not to be grateful for the scraps — it is to walk in and collect what is yours.

Every year, hundreds of young Texans age out of foster care with almost no one to explain any of this. Nationally, about 15,379 youth emancipated from foster care in the 2024 federal reporting year — roughly nine percent of all the young people who left care that year — and about half of them are young women like you. (AFCARS, U.S. Children's Bureau, FY2024) The exact Texas figure for a given year sits in the state's own Data Book — depending on how you define "aged out," it runs into the many hundreds. (Texas DFPS Data Book)

You are one of a large number of people the system produces every single year — which means the help was built for a crowd, not just for you. There is a whole apparatus meant to catch you. Almost nobody uses it.

You are not the statistics — but know what you're up against

What follows is hard reading, and here is the reason to read it anyway: not so you'll see yourself as doomed, but so that when a landlord or a boyfriend or your own tired brain tells you "this is just how it goes for girls like you," you'll know it is a pattern that was engineered, not a verdict on you. You get to be the exception. Knowing the odds is how you beat them.

Homelessness

By age 21, roughly 27 to 28 percent of young people who'd been in foster care reported having experienced homelessness, according to the federal outcomes survey that tracks them. (NYTD, U.S. Children's Bureau) A landmark multi-year study following an older group of former foster youth across three Midwestern states found the share higher still by their mid-twenties. (Midwest Study, Chapin Hall — a landmark study, not a national count) The tuition waiver and the housing help below exist precisely to keep you from becoming one of those numbers.

School

You have probably heard that "only three percent" of foster youth ever earn a college degree. It is a myth, traced to small decades-old studies, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation has explicitly debunked it. (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2025) The honest picture: in that same older Midwest study, about four percent had finished a four-year degree by 26, but the best recent evidence puts the share earning any two- or four-year degree at eight to twelve percent by the mid-to-late twenties — and rising. The barrier was never your ability. It was money, housing, and the fact that the supports fall away at 21. Which is what the waiver is for.

Motherhood, early and often unplanned

In that same major longitudinal study, 71 percent of the young women reported a pregnancy by age 21 — against 34 percent of young women their age in the general population. (Midwest Study, Chapin Hall — a three-state older cohort, not a current national figure) We put that here not to shame anyone, and not as a fact about "girls today," but because it is one more thing the system's abandonment made likelier — and because if you are a young mother, some of what Texas owes you can help you keep your feet under you.

The danger you already survived

This last one is background — it is about what happened to girls in care before they turned 18, not a service anyone is offering to a minor. In one recent year, 386 children were confirmed to have been trafficked while in the conservatorship of Texas DFPS, and about nine in ten of them were girls. (Texas DFPS Human Trafficking data) If something like that is part of your history, know two things: it was done to a child who was owed protection, and it is not a life sentence. Adulthood is where you get to author the next part.

These are the odds the system stacked. They describe a group. They do not describe your future — that part is still unwritten, and the pages below are how you write it.

What Texas will pay for — and the clocks that quietly close

Here is the useful core of this page. Every item below is a real Texas benefit for young people who were in foster care. Read them with a pen. Most of them have a clock — a birthday after which the door closes — and the clocks are the thing nobody warns you about until it's too late.

Most who qualify never claim it. Don't be one of them.

This is the part that should make you angry enough to act.

The tuition waiver is one of the most generous benefits any state offers a young person — and most of the young people it was written for never use it. Roughly two-thirds of eligible former foster youth don't enroll in college in the years right after high school, and the researchers who study this attribute the gap to two ordinary, fixable things: they were never told the benefit existed, and the process to claim it is onerous to navigate alone. (The Imprint, 2025, reporting on the work of Prof. Toni Terling Watt)

Sit with that. It is not that these young people tried and failed. It is that a life-changing benefit went unclaimed because nobody handed them the form and sat with them while they filled it out.

Take-up gap: The Imprint, 2025. Counter-fact: Texas State University study.

Read those three cards together. The benefit is free. The people who use it graduate at more than triple the rate. And the only thing standing between most young women and that outcome is a form nobody helped them file. The whole point of this page is to make sure you are not the two-thirds.

Who to call, what to bring

You do not have to figure this out alone, and you should not try to. Here is the short list of people whose actual job is to help you claim what's above — and the documents that make every one of these calls go faster.

If you're missing half of that list, call the free legal line anyway. Missing documents are the first thing they help you replace — that is a normal starting point, not a reason to wait.

Where Mercy Manor comes in

Everything above is yours whether or not Mercy Manor is ever part of your life. But sometimes a young woman doesn't just need a form filed — she needs a safe place to be a person for a while, long enough to breathe and heal and figure out who she is when nobody is managing her.

Mercy Manor is being built to be that place: a home for a year, for adult women rebuilding after everything came apart. A year is long enough to stabilize, to heal, to learn the ordinary adult skills nobody taught you, and to become someone with a future she chose.

Mercy Manor is a residential home for adult women (18 and older) — it does not and cannot house minors. The program has not yet opened, and its intake criteria are not final, so we promise nothing here. Still to be confirmed with Sharon and the board: whether a young woman who has recently aged out of foster care is a fit for the program, the age range, whether the program costs her anything, any faith requirement, whether she may bring a child, and the opening date. If aging out of care is your situation and you want to talk, please still reach out — we can help you find your footing right now regardless of whether a bed here ever opens.

If we're not the right door

We would rather tell you the truth than take you. If Mercy Manor isn't open, or isn't the fit, these doors are open right now — and every one of them is free.

Go deeper

• Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — what a childhood in the system does, and how it heals
• What trauma-informed care actually means
• Homeless, or nearly — if the housing help ran out
• The state of the need in North Texas — the whole picture, sourced
• Our program — what a year in a real home is built to do

Common questions