2022 COMBAT Funding: $52,650.00

In Housing Services of Kansas City's Own Words

Pemberton Park provides housing and case management for grandfamilies.  These grandfamilies comprise two very vulnerable, at-risk populations: elderly caregivers living in poverty and children who have experience significant trauma in their young lives.

Without interventions, these would most likely experience violence, bullying at school, drug abuse, (negative) involvement with the criminal justice system and be subject to other forms of victimization.  Instead, Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies offers these families a safe place to live; provides onsite case management to help the families navigate life's ups and downs; ensures issues that could result in eviction are handled before a family faces homelessness; helps address the complexity of grandparents raising grandchildren; and facilitates therapeutic interventions to help emotionally stabilize families.

These interventions, plus the referral network in place and available to the residents of Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies, are key to preventing violence.

Housing For Grandfamilies Difficult To Find

Simply housing Grandfamilies is very difficult. Public Housing designed for the elderly often excludes children from being present, while many other Public Housing developments cannot meet elderly residents’ needs.  For grandparents who find themselves raising grandchildren, there are many stressors in their lives, including:

• depression, resulting from a sense of disappointment at having to raise a child when they thought that stage of their life was finished
  
  
• economic hardships associated with raising a child while living on a fixed, retirement income
  
  
• repeated cycles of poor parenting and trauma
  
  
• resentment towards their children who put them in a situation of having to raise their grandchildren
  
  
• social isolation that can result from the responsibilities of raising a child.  

While having to deal with these problems, grandparents are also experiencing geriatric medical conditions and having to face the reality that the majority of their lives are behind them. The result can be, without intervention, an incredibly traumatic experience for elderly residents who had recently been looking forward to their "golden years."

Traumatized Grandchildren

For the grandchildren, the trauma of losing a parent at a young age to drugs and/or incarceration: the repeated traumas of having a birth parent repeatedly enter and exit their life; and not having a loving, nurturing and supportive environment to thrive in are all colossal risk factors for repeated cycles of abuse, drug and alcohol usage, negative involvement with the criminal justice system, and perpetuating the cycles of trauma and poverty. Furthermore, they may be placed in a household that is recreating the situations that lead to their parents not being present in their lives.

Also, many grandchildren exist in a different cultural reality than what their grandparents can understand (e.g. sagging pants and hip-hop culture) that can result in intense intergenerational turmoil.  These factors, coupled with the day-to-day stresses of growing up and adolescence, can lead to angry, isolated, anti-social young adults primed to make poor decisions that will negatively impact their futures.

A Welcoming Environment

Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies seeks to address these factors.

Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies is a welcoming environment that is able to serve skipped-generational parenting situations. All residents are low-income, qualifying for a Housing Choice Voucher (formerly Section 8).  

The full-time Case Manager has an office on-site and is able to assist residents with the day-to-day problems that can arise in their lives. To address the deeper traumas experienced by the Grandfamilies, the Case Manager maintains partnerships with Jewish Family Services to provide Grandfamilies individual and group therapy sessions.

LINC provides monthly grandparent support groups, wherein grandparents can learn new parenting skills and strategies, receive information about chronic health conditions and/or current youth trends, as well as having an opportunity to "let off steam" in an environment of people experiencing the same situations.

For the grandparents, the Case Manager is able to assist them with referrals to health services, and resource providers to help navigate aging on a fixed income.

For children, Pemberton Park hosts tutoring sessions, a community garden, a newly-formed baking club and field-trips facilitated by the case manager.

For older teens, the Case Manager is also able to help those residents plan for aging out of Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies, be it into early adulthood and employment or to help aspiring students apply for college.  In short, Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies is a nurturing, supportive environment that helps Grandfamilies not only improve their situations, but help break the cycle of trauma and poverty for a rising generation of Kansas Citians.