There are a few reasons this blog and podcast exist. We hope that through reading this post, you’ll come to understand our hearts, learn where you fit in, and be inspired as you continue to work with aged-out orphaned youth. Here are our hopes:

We want to share what we’ve learned

The Dry Ground Project podcast and blog was started by the team at Lighthouse Transitional Care, a Christ-focused nonprofit organization in Riga, Latvia that works with young adults aged out of the orphan care system or from difficult family backgrounds. Our goal is to mentor and lead them toward healthy adulthood. We do this by building mentoring relationships and teaching practical life skills. The Lighthouse was founded in early 2018, which means we’ve been at this for four years now. That means that if this were a degree program, we’d have a diploma by now! 

So far, we’ve not only built a successful program in a place where care for this population was severely lacking, we’ve also been in the weeds of direct care for our youth. We’ve lived life beside them, parented them, and done our best to teach them the skills they need while teaching them about Jesus, who, we believe, changes everything.

We started The Dry Ground Project podcast and blog out of a desire we had to share what we’ve learned so far. We’re not experts, and we haven’t done anything right, but we’ve learned a ton of valuable information along the way!

We want to amplify voices of aged-out youth and knowledgeable professionals

When it comes to working with aged-out youth, we believe one of the most important things we can do is LISTEN to them, and help them understand that their voice matters.

Unless we’ve personally spent time in an orphanage or foster home, there is no way to know what it’s like. In order to build successful programs that will truly help these youth in the long run, we need to hear from them what happened, how they feel and what they need.

Secondly, as paraprofessionals, we already spend a ton of time listening to professionals in areas including:

• Mental health and trauma healing
• Neuroscience
• Social work
• Teaching and career counseling

We want to create community

We want to find people like us! When we started to research this podcast, we couldn’t find a huge online community of people actually working with aged-out youth. Where are you guys?! We know that the whole “If you build it, they will come,” thing is a myth, but we hope we’ve found you and reached you somehow through this blog, our podcast, or our social media accounts.

Our ultimate goal is to bring people together to share stories about what it’s like to work with this amazing and challenging population!

We want to glorify God with our gifts

Our entire team is filled with creative people who have experience interviewing, writing, designing, recording, coding and more. When we thought about a way to combine all of our talents and gifts, it just made sense!

Our god is our creator, and we believe he created us to create! 

We’re so glad you’re here with us on this journey of creating, sharing and connecting. Let’s stay in touch!