The Eastern Shoshone Tribe opened the Eastern Shoshone Children’s Lodge this summer to provide temporary care for kids placed into protective custody. The new lodge offers a safe place for kids in need to land while still keeping them connected to their communities and culture.
The 258-acre horse ranch is tribally owned and provides an alternative placement within the community. The rural lodge opened in June and provides support for kids experiencing out of home placement.
Director of the Eastern Shoshone Department of Family Services (DFS) Vernalyn Bearing created the Children’s Lodge after receiving her Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Denver. She said the space is helping to provide a much-needed service that hasn’t previously existed in the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.
“The Children's Lodge is a service that has been needed for a long time – it really helps the DFS department with emergency placements. That's a huge load off of caseworkers who are often scouring for emergency placements,” she said.
Bearing created the lodge in collaboration with her colleague Rahel Manna. Bearing and Manna started planning for the lodge in the fall of 2022 and dove headfirst into questions of where the home might be located, how to fund the project, and what might best support the young people living in the space based on information from other Native group homes in the region.
Bearing said the Children’s Lodge is a place where children in crisis can just be kids, run through the sprinklers, play in the sand, or go to the park, despite hardships or adverse circumstances they’ve experienced prior to their time at the lodge.
“The focus is on them – some children are stripped from being children and bypass all of those important benchmarks that a child should have, so we're able to go back and get them headed in the direction to where healing is now at the doorstep,” said Bearing.
Children at the lodge receive trauma-informed care from trained specialists. Manna said the lodge is working hard to ensure that many of the counselors at the facility are Native in an effort to keep kids connected to their own cultures and to help kids have more examples of what sort of career paths might be possible in their own futures.
Bearing said that sometimes kids arrive at the lodge with their belongings in trash bags.
“I hate that, the trash bag thing,” she said. “But now we have a stockpile of bags and suitcases to provide them luggage – children are happy to have their own belongings.”
Manna added that any kids leaving the lodge receive a “sweet case,” which is a duffel bag with a teddy bear, blankets, a quilt, and toys and toiletries. Kids are also able to take a wardrobe of whatever seasonally-appropriate clothes they need from the lodge.
Bearing said the Children’s Lodge does not eliminate childhood adversities but it does provide a space to begin a healing process.
“We might not be able to fully heal a child, but we've made a lodge that slows things down for them, so they know they have an existence, they have a place where people care for them and will advocate and protect them,” she said.
Manna said that both she and Bearing see the kids at the lodge as the future and don’t look at them any differently from other kids in the community.
“Just because children go through poverty and foster care, it doesn't mean that they're counted out from being future political leaders or successful community leaders. Both of us have gone through extreme childhood trials and tribulations in life, we believe in their future,” she said.
For both Manna and Bearing, creating engaging and culturally-relevant programming for kids to participate in while at the Children’s Lodge has been a top priority. The lodge recently received a generous grant from the LOR Foundation for a 12-passenger van to transport kids to go swimming, attend horse culture, and get to school, as well as doctor’s appointments. The lodge also received a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Community Facility grant to purchase a like-new tractor to keep the property clear of snow in the winter months.
Additionally, the lodge received a grant from Wyoming First Lady Jennie Gordon's Wyoming Hunger Initiative to incorporate a garden with Native plants and a vegetable garden. The garden will be a hands-on learning opportunity for the kids and will include chokecherries, sage, elderberry, as well as corn and pumpkins in the fall.
“Gardening is very therapeutic, in everyone’s own special way,” said Bearing. “It brings healing.”
Manna said the project wouldn’t have been possible without consistent support from the Eastern Shoshone Business Council, individual community members, and organizations like the USDA and Salvation Army, which helped furnish the inside of the lodge.
“Funders were supportive, the Eastern Shoshone Leadership was supportive, community volunteers were supportive, on and off the reservation, and all of the vendors that we needed to set up for essential services were supportive,” she said.
Manna said that ideas like the Children’s Lodge have a tendency to stall out in under-resourced communities, where funding opportunities are often stretched thin and staffing capacities are limited. But, she said, the project did not encounter any major obstacles and has been possible exclusively through tax-deductible donations and grant funding.
“We went into it thinking it was going to be like pushing a boulder up a hill, but actually, it was more like pushing a boulder down a hill – it just took off,” she said.
However, Manna said the lodge still needs support to buy computers and on-site staff housing so that employees don’t have to commute over an hour to the location. She said being able to offer on-site housing (like the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the local schools do) could significantly decrease high staff turnover rates that all congregate care facilities face and would be a huge help in the winter months.
Bearing said the process of starting the lodge has been one long lesson in not giving up – and one that will certainly continue to unfold as she and Manna adjust to new seasons and emerging needs from the kids at the lodge.
“It's been a steep learning curve, but I think we've learned a lot along the way. We learned that if you put your mind, your work and your heart into a goal, it will happen,” she said.
