Missy Parmenter is the founder and executive director of Harbor58, a Sarasota nonprofit that provides trauma-informed mentorship, financial literacy education, housing and wraparound support for young adults aging out of foster care.
The journey started in 2015 when Parmenter and her husband, Jay, unexpectedly became caregivers—and eventually parents—of her sister’s daughter, a baby born prematurely and exposed to substances in utero. Suddenly, they found themselves navigating Florida’s child welfare system with no roadmap and little understanding of who all the professionals cycling through their home were or what they did. Later came her nephew, another child her sister could not care for, whom they would also adopt.
“The [child welfare system] has added a lot more support and structure since then, but at the time, it was like the Wild West,” Parmenter says. “We felt kind of blindsided by the whole process.”…