Founded in 1989 by Irma and Aubrey Walker, My Home, Your Home (MHYH) is an innovative nonprofit organization founded with the mission of providing a safe, secure, and supportive environment to at-risk youth and young adults of Wisconsin.

MHYH strives to ensure that our staff is as diverse as the population we serve.  MHYH has a demonstrated leadership emphasizing commitment, vision, and results.  Collectively, MHYH has over 100 years of experience in identifying needs, developing a vision of service delivery to support local families and foster children, forming strategic community partnerships, evaluating service quality and compliance, and implementing programming.

MHYH strives to provide the best possible services to society’s most vulnerable children so that they can strive for happiness, health and productivity as adults.  In response to community needs, MHYH has grown significantly over the past decade.  MHYH currently manages seven core programs serving at-risk youth and young adults:

• Treatment Foster Care, which specializes in recruiting, training and retaining specialized homes to meet the needs of children, age 0 to 17, who have extended stays in the foster care system or other special needs;
• Wraparound Care, serving children and families who are at-risk of separation, referred to MHYH through the juvenile court system and the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare;
• Lissy’s Place, transitional housing for young single women between the ages of 18 and 29 who have recently “aged out” of foster care or are homeless;
• Amad’s Place – Placement Stabilization Center for young men between the ages of 12-17 who have disrupted in their current foster care placement;
• Family Supportive Services – providing education, mentoring and modeling for parents;
• Access to Recovery – is a consumer driven, alcohol and other drug abuse program providing comprehensive services to individuals and families.
• Training and Education – is a support program for staff, families, children and contracted services.

Each of our programs has given us a wealth of understanding regarding the community we serve, particularly their needs and the services and resources that best meet those needs.

Through the Wraparound Care we have gained experience in working with juveniles who enter the program as an alternative to out of home placement, such as the correctional system.  Care Coordinators are responsible for making daily to weekly contacts, depending on the needs of the juveniles on their case load, providing clients and their families with seamless services that aim to prevent further delinquencies and deter placements out of home.  Since so many minority youth require extensive services, yet few minority agencies provide them, we were pleased to add this to our menu of programs and expand our continuum of care to best meet the needs of the children we serve.

The Treatment Foster Care (TFC) Program has been the cornerstone of our program offerings.  TFC began in response to our recognition of the need to find permanent placements for the most challenging population of foster children to place – teens living in residential treatment facilities.  The teens in these facilities had little or no hope of returning to their biological families or being adopted and were resigned to living in these facilities until reaching the age of 18, whereupon, they would be discharged from the foster care system and left to fend for themselves.

Lissy’s Place, our Transitional Housing Program and Amad’s Place, our stabilization center have grown out of the needs that surfaced over our years of experience.  More recently MHYH has added Access to Recovery (ATR).  ATR is a comprehensive alcohol and other drug abuse program and Family Supportive Services that provides much needed education and mentoring to at risk parents.  Our Training Services provides for our needs both for our own staff, outside contracted agencies as well as the families, children and young adults we serve.

Irma Walker, MHYH’s President and Founder, draws upon almost ten years of experience working with homeless women and children as Chief Operations Officer for the YWCA’s Transitional Housing Program from 1990-1999.  Responsibilities included management of facilities, tenant relations, and community outreach.  She also developed housing programs in Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha through the UW-Extension’s Fair Housing Committee and planned Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) Conferences for four years.  In the ‘80s, when young people were attacking and even killing each other over jackets and shoes, Irma led a team that included representatives from the police department, faith-based communities, businesses and social service providers to develop a Dress Smart Program.  This initiative was implemented in schools and youth serving agencies until this youth crime subsided.