Where Foster Kids, Caregivers, and Elders Interdepend
An interview with Treehouse Foundation CEO Erika Kuester
My interview today is with Erika Kuester, CEO of Treehouse Foundation — an organization that could not possibly be more aligned with our values and goals here at The Auntie Bulletin.
Treehouse’s motto is “ReEnvisioning Foster Care” and their approach involves creating intergenerational communities for foster kids and others; supporting social activism to improve the foster care system (which is badly needed); and collaborating with community experts and foster care alumni all along the way. Here’s how they describe what they do:
The Treehouse Model is the framework for an intentional, affordable-housing neighborhood designed to provide healing and permanency for kids who have experienced foster care. It also provides vital aging for older people and support for youth who have aged out of foster care.
We’re talking about an entire neighborhood dedicated to the wellbeing of foster kids, foster families, kids who have aged out of foster care, and elders. There’s a bunch of cool programming, and a bunch of shared spaces, and a bunch of community partnerships.
I asked Erika to talk us through the specifics, and boy did we have a great conversation. I’m so pleased to share it with you.
If, while reading this interview, you find yourself appreciating what Treehouse Foundation is doing, please donate to our fundraiser to support this wonderful org. You’ll be supporting foster youth (who need all the care they can get), foster families (ditto), and a bunch of elders who are modeling for the rest of us how to cultivate interdependent, childful lives into our old age.
You can Venmo me at @Lisa-Sibbett or send your donation to PayPal at auntiebulletin@gmail.com. You can also donate directly to Treehouse and forward me your receipt. I’ll calculate those funds into our overall donation total and in the new year, I’ll share all cash-out and purchase receipts.
Read to the end to find out how much we’ve raised so far!
Lisa Sibbett: How does Treehouse’s community model work?
Erika Kuester: It’s an intergenerational co-housing development focused on ensuring that kids who’ve experienced foster care have the support they need to thrive. We’ve got kids, caregivers or parents, and then older adults who provide support to families and kids within the community, and it’s a reciprocal model. There’s a lot of mutuality, so our older adults benefit as well – they see decreases in loneliness and social isolation – but really, it’s a capacity-building model. We’ve got kids going and taking out trash for elders who have mobility issues, or caregivers stopping at the pharmacy if an older adult needs something picked up and doesn’t drive anymore. And then our older adults serve as volunteers for our trauma-informed programming for youth. That could be as simple as helping a child with some homework, or preparing a meal together. We do a lot of work around food and food security. Over twenty years, we’ve learned that food is a tremendous community builder, so a lot of our older adults do the work of preparing meals across the community in conjunction with kids, which is really beautiful.
Lisa: When people join this community, do they make concrete commitment that they’re going to contribute things, or is that more of a community norm? What’s the commitment people are making when they move in?
Erika: There’s nothing that gets signed or anything. Our founder made the decision early on that including a volunteer hours requirement in the lease would make it too obligatory and mandatory, as opposed to something that is freely given.
We’re an affordable housing community, so according to fair housing law, we can’t discriminate between applicants for housing. We can establish a priority waitlist, though, of folks who have completed a higher set of requirements. For us, this is a training that orients folks to the norms, expectations, and mission and vision of the community. Most people do come through the priority waitlist, so they have made that commitment, but in soft terms.
The thing with the priority waitlist is that, if we have a unit open and we don’t have somebody on the priority waitlist who’s ready to move in, fair housing law dictates that we need to take the next person on the waitlist even if they’re not necessarily mission-aligned. We always have a lower percentage of folks within the community who are less engaged. But what’s really cool is, even if they didn’t come into the community with a commitment to the mission and vision, we do see folks that get curious and get engaged in the work. They like that sense of community that we’re able to foster.
Lisa: I was recently talking with a friend of mine, Ryan Rose Weaver, who writes about forests as a metaphor for community. An old-growth forest has a lot of biodiversity and difference in ages of the different plants, and everything’s really interdependent. It’s occurring to me, as I’m thinking about Treehouse’s intergenerational community including folks who join it without really knowing what they’re getting into, that the more diversity that’s there, the healthier that that community potentially can be – especially when it’s built with so much intentionality. Intergenerational community can be a shared value across a lot of different identities and ideologies. People can come together around supporting kids, supporting elders, supporting each other.
Erika: Very much so. And having alignment on core values is a key piece of that. It doesn’t matter if we have differences if we’re aligned around our purpose and our values. That’s what we fall back on in cases of disagreement or conflict or tension. That common ground helps us move through resolution and repair.
Lisa: I’m curious about the role of youth who have aged out of foster care, and how they fit into the community.
Erika: The goal of our community in Easthampton is permanency, so we’re asking families to make a commitment to bringing children into their homes for their lives, not just until they’re 18. While we don’t have a formalized set of supports for transition-age youth, when kids are ready to launch, they not only have their family connection to support them, but our staff is also helping think through next steps for them, helping find housing, work, education – whatever are that young person’s goals.
But we’re expanding. We’ll be moving toward groundbreaking in Boston within a year. We’ve got an MOU [memorandum of understanding] in place to launch a community in Worcester, and we are about to sign an MOU to launch a community in Framingham.
Each of these future communities will include studios for youth aging out. This is a new population with a different set of needs than we have supported in Easthampton. We’re partnering with an organization called Plummer Youth Promise, based in Salem, who have really successful programming that supports transition-aged youth to launch as thriving adults – whether that’s helping them secure access to post-secondary education or a job or figure out their housing plans. We will be learning from Plummer how to support these services as effectively as possible within our own intergenerational context. I could not be more excited about adding this population to our community model.
Lisa: So in the current community, the youth who have aged out of foster care are kids who grew up in that community (at least for some amount of time), and have family in that community. And then in the new communities there will potentially be young people who did not live there in childhood, but are joining the community as adults?
Erika: Exactly. We want to create homes for those transition-age youth as well. They would not necessarily be the youth who grow up in the community, because those kids have a family connection already.
Lisa: In the Treehouse community, are kids typically getting adopted out of foster care, or do some of them stay in foster care and also remain connected to their family of origin?
Erika: It very much depends. Permanency is the goal, but permanency can take a lot of forms. Adoption often gets elevated as the gold standard of permanency, but a lot of foster families don’t have the financial means to adopt. They may need the foster care stipend in order to continue supporting that child, even though commitment to that child being part of their family for life is there. We also have some kinship care arrangements – grandparents raising grandkids, aunts or uncles raising nieces and nephews.
Lisa: As I’ve been writing about foster care and talking to foster parents over the past year, I’ve been learning about another value that sometimes comes into tension with permanency in the foster care system, which is family of origin reunification. It’s my understanding that reunification is often prioritized by agencies, and rightly so. So I’m curious how you think about the goal of reunification and supporting families of origin to come back together.
Erika: Our thinking has evolved over time. There’s actually a movement that wants to abolish the foster care system and the child welfare system in its entirety – and I understand that. There are so many instances of family separation that are really about penalizing poverty. If a parent has to work three jobs to support a household, it is not a good result that their children would be removed. It’s better to think about the supports families need in order to parent effectively.
So we’re thinking about how we could create space for reunified families that have been at risk, that need support. Our definition of permanency would include reunification as long as it’s healthy and good for the child. We want to protect the relationships that are permanent in a child’s life, and there’s little that’s more permanent than family of origin. My Chief Program Office and I are actively talking about what it might look like to hold a couple of the family homes in our community for reunified or at-risk families.
Lisa: I can imagine that being really emotionally complex for families who have had run-ins with child welfare agencies, have been in fear of having their children removed, or have actually had their children removed – to now be living in a place where children get removed to. That could be healing or it could be incredibly triggering.
Erika: There will be complex issues to navigate. That’s why we don’t want to rush into it. It would be a tragic result to have families of origin in the community if they didn’t feel a sense of belonging, if they didn’t feel included. We’d have to be really thoughtful about how we support reunified or at-risk families. It’s a challenge we’ve got an appetite to take on.
Lisa: When thinking about foster care, there’s a risk of getting caught up in savior narratives – where the (often white) foster parents are perceived as “saving” foster children (who are often kids of color) by removing them from their families and communities of origin. We know these kinds of narratives can be incredibly toxic and harmful. How does the Treehouse community address or try to disrupt that kind of thinking?
Erika: It’s honestly tricky to ensure that we’re creating inclusion and a sense of belonging for families of color when they’re coming into an area – rural western Massachusetts – that is so overwhelmingly white. We’re intentional about providing trainings across the community around inclusion and belonging. We make sure that we’re doing deep diversity, equity, and inclusion work, that we’re equipping people with skills to work across lines of difference. I’ve heard so many awful stories relating to white saviorism. I want to be intentional about what we’re building, and again, it comes down to the values we embrace.
Lisa: This is making me think about what you said earlier about mutuality. You were talking about the kids contributing to the community, and the elders contributing to the community. Speaking as someone who lives in co-housing and talks to a lot of people who also are intentionally building interdependent community, what comes up over and over again is this idea that everybody benefits. It’s not that the kids in foster care are benefiting unidirectionally from others’ benevolence, but that everybody who contributes is getting a lot back.
Erika: It’s a healing modality in trauma to be able to support somebody else. It benefits the older adults when that mutuality is in place, and creates these ripples of reciprocity that are incredible to witness.
We’re thinking intentionally about what kind of formalized supports we can offer to older adults in the community. 2026 will be the twentieth anniversary of the Easthampton community, and we have a lot of older adults who moved in around that time who are now in their 80s or even 90s. Treehouse is their home. They want to age in place. When this community originally launched, the focus wasn’t so much on what kind of supports would older adults need to continue showing up and engaging in the way they do, because they were mostly younger and had fewer age-related challenges. But now we’re thinking about supports like support groups around death and dying. What does memory care look like? We have funding applications in to hire an intergenerational specialist with expertise in older adult issues who can make the connection back to services in western Massachusetts.
Lisa: Speaking of Treehouse’s future, you mentioned plans to build three more communities in Massachusetts. If you could wave a magic wand, what’s your long-term vision for how this model might scale?
Erika: We’ve made the commitment to have five communities in the pipeline to development within the next five years, and we have the softer goal of getting to ten communities in ten years. Once we launch Framingham, the goal is to have number five be outside of Massachusetts. That will present a learning curve because we have tight relationships with agencies and providers across Massachusetts, and would have to build the relationships with that state’s equivalent to the Department of Children and Families, and build credibility and reputation. The hope is that if we’ve got four communities across Massachusetts, we’ve got strong proof points when we move on to other states. Our initial expansion would be mostly focused on New England, with the possibility of DC or other East Coast locations that are easy to fly to. Our ultimate goal is to bring this model to as many communities as want it, but first we need to be successful in launching a second community!
There’s an organization in Oregon that I don’t know if you know about – Bridge Meadows? [Lisa’s note: I did not!] They have three communities up and running right now, and they’re launching a fourth in Tacoma, Washington. [Lisa’s note: OMG! That’s only an hour away from me!]
I gave a presentation at the Generations United conference over the summer, and that was a co-presentation with the CEO of Bridge Meadows and a researcher based out of the UK, Savannah Fishel, who focuses on intergenerational communities. One of the things Savannah shared is that most intentional communities fail after five to six years. So for Treehouse to have a track record now approaching twenty years, that puts us in a position of leadership in these types of communities. I talk with folks across the country and the world who are interested in launching similar models, and I love those conversations. It’s really cool to see people applying a similar model to address a range of social challenges.
Lisa: What’s one thing that you wish people knew or understood? If you could educate people about something, what would it be?
Erika: That’s a great question. You could ask me that question every day and every day my answer would probably be different. Right now, what’s sticking with me is that I would love to dismantle the perspective that every foster parent is a savior fixing an irreparably broken family. I would love if the general public was more aware of how the child welfare system has penalized people of color, penalized people for poverty, and that we could actually get into dialogue about how to fix these issues.
Lisa: I’m on the mailing list for the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), and they sent out a newsletter the other day that was about the foster care reforms being put forward by the Trump administration. Some of them are cool, like they want to increase funding and support for youth aging out of foster care, which, like, that’s amazing. On the other hand, they want to incorporate more AI and technology in identifying families that are at risk of having kids go into foster care. The folks at NICWA were saying a real concern about this is that AI, which we know has been trained on data sets that privilege white people, might identify families of color as being more problematic. The use of AI might increase the amount of kids of color being flagged for removal from their families of origin.1
Erika: I’ve been following the White House’s position on all this. There’s a prong in that foster care package banning faith discrimination in foster family selection. On the one hand, non-discrimination is a good thing. But then the governor’s office of Massachusetts responded by restating its commitment to making sure that foster youth have access to gender-affirming care, right? I hope that people are looking with analytical eyes.
Lisa: Thanks for jogging my memory about the faith-based non-discrimination piece of the foster care package. LGBTQ kids are overrepresented in foster care, so now there’s a lot of concern about their not being able to be placed with families that affirm their gender or sexual orientation. It’s a serious concern.
Okay, my last question is: how can Auntie Bulletin readers support Treehouse Foundation? We’ve got a fundraiser going on right now, and we hope to have $2000 to send you at the end of the year. What else is helpful?
Erika: Help us build awareness. Share stories about the work. This story that you’re putting together for the Auntie Bulletin, if folks share it with their networks, that helps us build visibility and awareness. In this philanthropic climate, dollars are always very, very important, but that visibility is more important. That’s going to fuel our expansion work. The more people who know about it, the better.
We are likely to hold a conference in either late 2026 or early 2027. That’ll be focused on learning about the model, supporting others who might want to launch similar communities, and getting folks in conversation with our community members. So folks could keep an eye out for that.
And for folks in or near Massachusetts, we welcome people for tours in the community. We would love to share more about the work. So if people are interested in coming and checking things out, just drop me an email.
Lisa: Oh, and so you’ve got a newsletter that readers could sign up for if they wanted to stay up to date, is that right?
Erika: Yes, absolutely.
Lisa: So this is making me think, since you were mentioning the importance of philanthropy: Aunties who are reading this interview, forward it to your rich friends and your rich family members!
Erika: I mean, to all your friends – and if some are rich, even better! One of our earliest major donors was in the family of Reed Hastings, who launched Netflix. This person was someone’s neighbor, and they were telling a story about Treehouse, and that’s what brought one of our major donors into the work.
Treehouse Foundation Fundraiser Update
Let’s help build the world we want to live in, Aunties. Please include Treehouse Foundation in your end-of-year giving!
Between my $200 match and those of four generous Auntie Bulletin readers, we’re matching the first $1100 in donations. So far, we’ve received about $425. Help us reach our $2000 $2200 goal and donate now.
You can Venmo me at @Lisa-Sibbett or send your donation to PayPal at auntiebulletin@gmail.com. You can also donate directly to Treehouse and forward me your receipt. I’ll calculate those funds into our overall donation total and in the new year, I’ll share all cash-out and purchase receipts.
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The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free, feminist, anti-capitalist publication that will never try to sell you anything (okay, except a paid subscription). Through the end of 2025, we’re donating all of our affiliate revenue to Treehouse Foundation. We hope to send them $2000 on December 31 – so do your holiday book shopping at Bookshop.org and hook up this worthy organization with a little extra cash!
The NICWA newsletter only came out by email and I couldn’t find a way to link to a webpage, but here’s what they wrote about the White House’s new Executive Order on foster care:
“On November 14, the White House released a new executive order (EO) titled “Fostering the Future for America’s Children and Families” (EO 14359). The EO directs federal agencies overseeing child welfare policy and programs, among other things, to review current child welfare policies to assess how data collection is used to evaluate whether a program is successful, expand the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics in child welfare services, speed up of the placement of children into a permanent placement if they can’t return home, and increase partnerships between child welfare agencies and faith-based organizations.
“Some of the changes outlined in the EO could support Tribal Nation priorities, including increased emphasis on data collection to improve implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act and, when necessary, ensuring Native children are placed in extended family homes when they can’t stay at home safely. However, there are also concerns with using AI and predictive analytics in child welfare and speeding up permanency for Native children in state systems. Predictive analytics, a data-driven process that can be used to assist in determining which families should receive supportive services and what types of services, has been criticized for reinforcing biases against certain families, particularly against families of color. Advocates fear that this type of data analysis and the promotion of AI in child welfare could lead to fewer services for Native families and more removals of Native children into foster care. Using AI in child welfare also raises concerns about conflicts with Tribal data sovereignty and how data on Native children and families would be collected, used, and stored.
“NICWA is taking steps to learn more about the directives in this EO and working with Tribal leadership to talk with the Administration about their plans for implementing the EO and requesting consultation with Tribal Nations and development of a plan specific for implementation with Native children, families, and Tribal Nations.”
Love this interview so much! Thank you for spotlighting the incredible work Treehouse Does!
Framingham?? You’re going to be in Framingham?? Ahhhhhhhhh!! (This is happy screaming as I LIVE IN FRAMINGHAM) I will be looking over the website to find out how I can get involved!! Thanks Erika and Lisa for this excellent interview!