Harmony House opens fourth transitional home for youth in poverty WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY ABBEY MARSHALL Lydia Williams says her life has been pretty easy lately. That’s new for the 18-year-old, who has been on her own for three years, since her mom was hospitalized when she was 15 and could no longer care for her. Williams lived with her brother for a short stint, but then ended up at Safe Landing Youth Shelter for more than eight months: an experience she describes as “horrible.” Eager for a way out, she found Harmony House, a transitional and emergency housing nonprofit for young people between the ages of 18 to 26. “It’s been cool,” Williams says of her
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time at the first-ever Harmony House for young women that opened last fall. “When I came, I had a lot of anger. I’ve matured and learned how to control it... I had to learn to be independent.” Now, after eight months in the home, she is moving to her own apartment: a dream she couldn’t have imagined when she was 15 and bouncing from place to place. Karla McDay saw cases similar to Williams’ every day in her 18 years as a social worker at Summit County Children Services. As someone who specialized in working with young people who aged out of foster care, typically at age 18, McDay helped prepare teenagers to exit for life as legal adults, but she found that many struggled to launch.
“Finding employment, early pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse: all those issues kept resurfacing. When many people turn 18, they go to this semi-structured, semiindependent environment, whether it’s college, military, living with family,” says McDay, the founder of Harmony House. “What’s happening to foster youth and homeless youth is they just kind of go. I had a vision of creating a home to help not only young people who were in the foster care system, but any young person who needed that transition.” In 2014, McDay opened the first Harmony House in East Akron with four bedrooms in a shared living environment available to young men. It was important to her to create a welcoming home environment that differed from a shelter, with bright colors, decorations and furniture. “I really wanted to see change,” she says. “Sometimes change is born outside of systems. Systems and bureaucracies thrive on the status quo. If you want to make change, be innovative and really impact lives, sometimes you have to break out of the system.”
july 2021 · Vol 9 · Issue #7
For $10 a day, the young men had a place to live with lights, heat, cable and WiFi, as well as free haircuts, a laundry room and basic toiletries. A partnership with the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank also ensured meals. “When I came to Harmony House, I didn’t have no money, I didn’t have no job, I didn’t have nothing,” says 25-year-old Jon Bennett who lived in the original Harmony House in 2014. Bennett stayed in the home for two years when he was on the brink of homelessness at age 18, ultimately leaving after securing public housing through Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority. “It gave me more than a place to stay; it taught me to be independent.” With the success of Bennett and several other young men, McDay replicated the model in 2018, opening the doors to the second Harmony House with four beds in West Akron. A year later, the organization received a grant from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development for six apartments at Alphada Place as part of the continuum of care,
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