For most young people, adulthood arrives gradually. For a young woman leaving care, it can arrive on a date.
Think about how most people become adults. They move out when they are ready, or when a job or a course takes them somewhere new. If a plan falls through, they go home for a while. Someone helps them open a bank account, teaches them to drive, co-signs a lease, lends them money for a deposit, or simply answers the phone when something goes wrong.
None of this is dramatic. It is ordinary support, spread over years, and most of us barely notice it.
For a young woman who has grown up in residential care, the picture is different. Care arrangements are typically tied to age rather than readiness. When that age is reached, the structure that has organised daily life — accommodation, meals, supervision, routine, adults responsible for her wellbeing — comes to an end. The support does not fade; it stops.
Everything at once
The responsibilities that other young adults take on one at a time can land together.
- Somewhere to live, and the money to keep it
- An income, and the documents employers ask for
- A bank account, and an understanding of how to manage it
- Identification — a national ID, a birth certificate, a passport — and the process for obtaining them
- Transport to work, to classes and to appointments
- Education or training that has not yet been completed
- Health, wellbeing and the everyday administration of adult life
Each of these is manageable on its own. Together, and without a safety net, they are a lot to carry. A single setback — a delayed pay cheque, a lost document, a room that falls through — can put pressure on everything else.
It is not a question of capability
It is easy to read the paragraph above and conclude that young people leaving care are somehow less able. That is the wrong conclusion. The young women ABIDE works with are resourceful, determined and often far more experienced at handling uncertainty than their peers.
The difference is not capability. It is scaffolding. Most young adults are held up by a web of relationships and resources that they did not build and did not earn. A young woman leaving care is frequently expected to build that web herself, from the first day, while also holding everything up.
Vulnerability is a circumstance. Resilience is a capacity. Our work is to change the circumstance so the capacity can be used.
What a good transition looks like
A transition works when preparation begins before the leaving date, and when support continues after it. In practice that means:
- Practical readiness. Identification, banking, budgeting, workplace documentation and housing knowledge are in place before they are urgently needed.
- A route into income. Education, training, an internship, a first job or a small business — something that connects preparation to opportunity.
- Relationships that last. Mentors, professional contacts and supportive adults who remain in a young woman’s life after a programme ends.
- Stability around the individual. Help with the barriers that training alone cannot fix: accommodation, transport, technology access, wellbeing.
This is the thinking behind ABIDE’s four pillars — Holistic Education, Economic Empowerment, Stable & Safe Transition and Sustainable Growth — and behind programmes such as LifeLaunch, which turns unfamiliar adult responsibilities into understandable steps.
Why this matters beyond the individual
When a transition fails, the cost is not only personal. It shows up in lost education, unstable employment, housing insecurity and pressure on public services. When a transition works, a young woman becomes an employee, a taxpayer, a business owner, a mentor to the next cohort — a contributor rather than a case.
Adulthood should begin with opportunity. For young women leaving care in Trinidad and Tobago, making that true takes deliberate effort from institutions, employers and individuals who are willing to provide some of the scaffolding that other young people take for granted.
That is what ABIDE exists to organise.