She grew up in group homes. Now she's opening one
Shonda McFadden came up hard, growing up in the Logan neighborhood of Philadelphia's northside, her parents both struggling with addiction, leaving her, as the oldest of four children, home to care for her siblings.
She was just a kid herself, 10, 12 years old, but she knew enough that those times when her mother would go out to the store and not return for few days she should care for her younger siblings, make sure they had something to eat and went to school.
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She really didn't understand what was going on, what her family was going through. She was young and that just seemed like the way things were. The family never lived in one place very long, often getting evicted and winding up in one of the city's homeless shelters.
Her mother was always honest with her, telling her that she had a problem. Her mother wanted to get help, wanted to stop living like that.
When Shonda was about 12, her mother decided enough was enough and entered a rehab program in Philadelphia. While her mother was away, Shonda and her siblings lived with their great-grandparents or grandparents, splitting time between the two households.
After about a year, her mother enrolled in a program at New Life for Children and Mothers, east of Glen Rock in rural southern York County, taking her children with her. It was culture shock. Shonda had never seen a cornfield before. She was happy to be back with her mother, and that her mother was doing well, but the place was in the middle of nowhere.
It used to be that she was able to do what she wanted to do, being, pretty much, on her own from a young age. New Life had all sorts of rules – it was highly structured – and she wasn't used to that. She developed a chip on her shoulder, and was kind of defiant. She tried to run away once, but saw a groundhog and got scared and returned to the home.
She never really got used to it, the rules. She and her siblings went to the Christian School of Southern York County, and as kids whose mother was in rehab, she felt everybody knew about them and felt they didn't belong. She felt a stigma.
Looking back, she knew the place provided a great opportunity, and she grew to love the couple who ran the home, a couple they called grandpa and grandma.
After her mother finished the program at New Life, the family moved to the York Suburban School District, renting a house from a missionary couple. When the couple returned from their mission, they moved to Dallastown.
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Shonda resorted to her rebellious ways. She was uncomfortable in school – she was one of two African-American students in the eighth grade – and she felt she just didn't fit in. Her mother was trying. She didn't know how unhappy Shonda was in school, only that her daughter was being defiant. Shonda started running away.
She wound up at the York County Development Center, a secured county facility that also housed juvenile offenders. She was supposed to stay there for 30 days before being placed in another home, but she wound up staying for eight months. She was OK with it. She bristled at the rules, but she said at that point, she wanted to be anywhere but home.
She transferred to the Lourdesmont School near Scranton. She had problems there and was sent to KidsPeace near Bethlehem, which offered a stricter program to address behavior problems and other issues.
She returned home when she was 16. Things went well for a while, but then, her mother relapsed and Shonda ran away. She made it to Scranton, living on the streets for a while. That was hard, and she decided that she wanted to change her life.
She called her grandmother – she didn’t know where her mother or her father were – and said she wanted to go back to school and sign up for Job Corps. In Job Corps, she earned her diploma and a nursing certificate.
She moved back to York with her mother. Her mother had gone to rehab and got clean, remaining clean ever since. Shonda got a job and her own place when she was 18. She started taking in kids who came from troubled homes. She knew what they were going through. She knew she could help them. She earned certification from York County as a kinship parent, a sort of foster parent for kids she knew.
She had a daughter of her own, and has adopted two other girls. She also cares for foster children, while working two jobs, one at Davis Elementary School and another at a hotel. She earned her business degree while working.
On Christmas Eve 2012, her father was walking to a bar to shoot pool with his son and a friend and his son when a car drove by and shots rang out. Her father was killed. The shooting had nothing to do with him; it was some gang beef. A kid's friend had been shot by a member of the West Side gang, and he just wanted to shoot someone from the west end of town. Her father just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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At that time, Shonda had a revelation. She knew why she was put on this earth, to help kids, and from that day forward, she worked toward doing that.
She saved money and developed a business plan. And this week, she opened a group home in the woodsy suburb of Elmwood, east of York, called the Genesis Home for New Beginnings. She has been working on the building for a year or more. She has hired staff and developed a plan for the kids who come there to live.
Initially, the home will house four girls. Eventually, that could expand to six. It will offer what she describes as a holistic approach to healing the wounds the children have suffered because of addiction or homelessness or abuse.
Shonda believes she is uniquely equipped to run such a place.
"I know both sides of the spectrum," Shonda, now 35, said. "I lived in group homes. I worked in group homes. When a child comes into a group home, they're frightened and anxious. I've been that child."
She said, "I think this was my destiny. I was destined to do this. Everything I went through, it was for a reason. It was for this."
The grand opening
Shonda McFadden's Genesis Home of New Beginnings, a private, fully-licensed long-term treatment home for adolescent girls between the ages of 12 and 18, will have its grand opening and ribbon cutting on June 15th from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. at 1502 First Ave. in Spring Garden Township. The ribbon cutting will be followed by an open house reception, including tours of the home.
Reach Mike Argento at 717-771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.