PERIS Foundation

THANKS for your interest in supporting the PERIS Foundation. Our mission is to oversee and champion PERIS Hill, a newly-built, beautifully designed, affordable housing community that provides permanent supportive housing, preventing homelessness for young adults aging out of foster care. 

PERIS Hill is an innovative model created through research and with the guidance of a foster youth advisory council that incorporates supportive housing for young adult fosters into a larger affordable housing community. Our goal is to interrupt the foster care to homelessness pipeline through an environment of supported autonomy and interconnected independence. 

Research shows that foster care disproportionately impacts black, brown, first nation, and LGBTQ+ communities and that 36% of fosters experience at least one episode of homelessness before they are 26, and that’s a pre-covid statistic. 

Seven years ago, the PERIS Foundation began with an effort to research the landscape of supportive housing for fosters and found that in Minnesota and throughout the country there is a severe lack of deeply affordable, supportive housing for these young people. What does exist often creates a siloed experience, apart from broader community, in settings that can compound trauma. Often young people have to be or become homeless to access supportive housing. 

That research led to the solid conclusion that it’s time to try something new in supportive housing for young people aging out of foster care. 

PERIS Hill is that something new. We believe that PERIS Hill will empower and build momentum for fosters as they move into adulthood in part because it’s a typical, mixed income apartment building, with market rate amenities and opportunities. Young adults living at PERIS have the opportunity to build community with each other and the rest of the tenants in the building. They can access onsite supportive services provided by our partner, the YMCA of the North's Youth and Family Services, but they aren’t required to. Our rents are deeply affordable and created with extended foster care benefits in mind so that young adult residents have disposable income to budget and spend as they please, and they have support if they make a mistake, so that mistakes are not catastrophic but learning experiences.

At PERIS we get to work closely, in a learning posture, with young adult fosters, direct service providers, and public entities to tell a new story so that we can all work together in a larger collaboration for greater impact. We are tracking our progress and our learnings so that this model can be replicated and young adult fosters will have a real say over their housing. We’re committed to telling a data driven story that will impact the ecosystem. 

Thanks for being part of our journey and for supporting the resilient young people who call PERIS Hill home!