How five decades of foster care and adoption work led to Southern California's newest TAY Hub and why the young adults aging out of foster care can no longer wait.
For 50 years, Walden Family Services has built its work around a simple, urgent question: what does a vulnerable young person need to be safe? For most of our history, the answer centered on foster care and adoption — recruiting, training, and supporting the families who open their homes to children who cannot safely live with their own. That work changed thousands of lives, and it still matters.
But over the past several years, a second question kept surfacing in our data, our case files, and our conversations with the young people we’ve served: what happens to them next? What happens on the day the case closes, the placement ends, and an 18-year-old who has spent years in the system is handed a bus pass and a case worker’s best wishes?
The answer, far too often, is homelessness. Nearly half of all young adults who age out of foster care experience homelessness within four years — not for lack of ambition, but for lack of the safety net most of us take for granted: a family to call when the landlord says no, a couch to land on between jobs, someone to co-sign a lease. That is the gap Walden has decided to close.
And in fiscal year 2026-27, we are going all in.
Every year, hundreds of young people age out of foster care in San Diego County alone — a fraction of the thousands across the five Southern California counties Walden serves.
Walden already reaches more than 1,750 youth and families annually and has touched over 100,000 lives across five decades. But when we looked closely at where the greatest risk – and the least support – actually lived, the answer was unmistakable: the years immediately after a young person exits the foster care system, roughly ages 18 to 26, known as the transitional age youth (TAY) period.
Stable housing, a paycheck, a diploma, a support system for young parents building their own families — these aren’t separate problems. They’re one problem, and they compound. A stable apartment means little without income to pay for it. A job is hard to keep without a stable place to sleep. And for the growing number of TAY young adults raising children of their own, every one of these gaps repeats itself in the next generation.
We couldn’t keep treating them as isolated issues and call it a comprehensive response.
This is the most significant strategic shift in Walden’s history, and we want to be direct about what it means. FROM: “We provide foster care and youth services.” TO: “We build stability, belonging, housing, and long-term outcomes for vulnerable youth and families across Southern California.” In practice, that means Walden Family Services is becoming Southern California’s TAY Hub — a single, comprehensive home for the housing, workforce, education, and parenting support that young adults transitioning out of foster care actually need, delivered together instead of piecemeal.
Our positioning is simple: Walden Family Services is building the human infrastructure that helps vulnerable youth and families achieve stability, dignity, and long-term success.
This isn’t a rebrand for its own sake. It’s a redesign of how we deliver help, organized around four pillars:
Comprehensive support, sustained relationships, and real, measurable outcomes — that’s what going all in for TAY youth means at Walden.
We know change can raise questions, especially for supporters who have believed in Walden’s foster and adoptive family work for years, some for decades. So let’s be clear: this pivot doesn’t erase that legacy — it’s built on it. Walden spent 50 years learning what vulnerable children need to be safe. Going all in for TAY youth is simply following that same commitment to its next, most urgent chapter: what vulnerable young adults need to build a life.
Every dollar, every hour, and every relationship Walden invests in a TAY young adult today is also an investment in the family they may one day raise, the workforce they’ll join, and the community they’ll help build. That’s not a departure from our mission. It’s our mission, fully realized.
“Housing changes everything. Stability creates opportunity. Every youth deserves belonging.”
We know change can raise questions, especially for supporters who have believed in Walden’s foster and adoptive family work for years, some for decades. So let’s be clear: this pivot doesn’t erase that legacy — it’s built on it. Walden spent 50 years learning what vulnerable children need to be safe. Going all in for TAY youth is simply following that same commitment to its next, most urgent chapter: what vulnerable young adults need to build a life.
Every dollar, every hour, and every relationship Walden invests in a TAY young adult today is also an investment in the family they may one day raise, the workforce they’ll join, and the community they’ll help build. That’s not a departure from our mission. It’s our mission, fully realized.
Join Walden and help fund the housing, career coaching, education, and parenting programs that give every TAY youth a real shot at stability — not just survival.