In partnership with the Governor’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative and the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, Belmont Innovation Labs is applying the SOLVE model to one of our state’s most urgent challenges: improving outcomes for youth aging out of foster care.
Each year, around 850 young Tennesseans leave the foster care system at age 18—often without the stable housing, supportive relationships, or access to the mental health support needed to thrive. These young people are full of potential, yet face disproportionate risks of homelessness, incarceration, and unemployment.
Through the SOLVE process, we are designing solutions with—and not just for—these youth.
Discover
Landscape Study | May–November 2024
Our work began with a deep dive into the foster care transition experience. Over 250 hours of research, 10 hours of stakeholder conversations, and engagement with 75+ national and state resources helped us map the system, spotlight persistent challenges, and elevate youth voice.
The result is a Landscape Study rooted in data and lived experience, identifying three essential leverage points for impact:
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Supportive Adult Relationships |
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Accessible Mental Health Services |
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Safe & Affordable Housing |
Design
Impact Case | November 2024–June 2025
With these priorities in focus, we moved to co-create a path forward. The Impact Case highlights specific interventions and investment-ready strategies, framed around measurable outcomes and community voice. We explored the landscape of existing solutions and surfaced gaps where innovation and investment can catalyze real change.
The case proposes two pilots:
- Lumen Flats — a youth-designed housing model in Knoxville that reimagines supportive, affordable living spaces for young people.
- The Reconstruct Challenge: Thriving Youth is a venture philanthropy platform launching with a $1.5M goal to support 8–10 scalable youth empowerment pilots through catalytic capital, technical assistance, and statewide public-private collaboration.
Each proposed initiative includes embedded impact measurement, focused on the outcomes that matter most: stable housing, supportive adult relationships, and access to mental health care.
Deploy
Thriving Youth | Launching October 2025
The Deploy phase builds on the deep discovery and collaborative design work already completed, testing insights and blueprints through real-world solutions that serve Tennessee’s transition-age foster youth. This phase focuses on two key initiatives: the Reconstruct Challenge and innovative housing models, each launching with clear metrics and ongoing evaluation to track impact. By aligning capital, partners, and measurable outcomes, the Deploy phase ensures these solutions are implemented effectively, working to close critical gaps in housing, relationships, and mental health care — and demonstrating results over time.
Why It Matters
We’re not just designing for hope—we’re designing for outcomes. For each foster youth aging out of care, success looks like:
- A stable relationship with a supportive adults
- A safe place to live
- Access to mental health care and the ability to heal
- A pathway to independence and belonging
Through the SOLVE process and deep community partnerships, we’re working to break the generational cycle of crisis in Tennessee’s foster care system—replacing it with a foundation rooted in opportunity, healing, and hope. This is about creating the conditions every young person needs to thrive.