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She's 19 and has spent most of her life in foster care, but whatever image you may be forming in your mind now, forget it.
Ivory Bennett will shoot down your preconceptions one by one.
At a recent weekday luncheon for Ward Home in the lobby of Heinz Hall, this Pitt freshman stood before a packed room of mentors and strangers and began by telling them what she wasn't.
In a setting that might have shaken the most seasoned speaker -- commanding an audience only midway through its pasta entree -- she told us she wasn't the daughter of a drug addict; her mother has bipolar disorder. She had no desire to be adopted as she and her younger sister moved through so many homes she lost count; she wanted to be with her mom.
School was a refuge for her. She once moved through three school districts in a span of seven days, but "I was always into academics, always able to excel, and I always loved it."
Ward Home exists for people like Miss Bennett. The program takes boys and girls from the ages of 16 to 21, mentors some of them where they are living and sets others up in efficiency apartments, but helps all of them begin the transition into adulthood.
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I'd frankly never heard of the program until this luncheon, but there are apartments for 11 young women in Friendship, for eight young mothers and their children in Wilkinsburg and for 12 young men in McKeesport, supervised 24/7. Dozens more receive regular counseling in their foster homes, dorm rooms, shelters, relatives' homes -- wherever they happen to be.
Although foster children generally have only a 50-50 chance of graduating from high school, all 22 seniors in a Ward Home program are graduating this spring. Twenty-one are going on to college, everywhere from CCAC to Penn State, and the 22nd is joining the Army.
Miss Bennett described her first year at Pitt as a roller-coaster ride but, singling out Heather Samuel in the crowd, said, "You were there for me."
Ms. Samuel is the program's WISE coordinator. That seems a tough title to live up to (WISE stands for Ward Independent Skills Enhancement), but she must have earned the title in the truest sense. Miss Bennett talked about calling her late on a Saturday night when college life got rough and finding out, yet again, that "this program is not confined to its mission statement."
Both women cried as Miss Bennett told her story and said she had no doubt her mentors would be there for her "for graduation, and when I get married, and when I have my first child."
After lunch, I spoke with Ms. Samuel, who has been working with Ward Home for 10 years.
Ms. Samuel remembered interviewing Miss Bennett when she was 16, living at her aunt's house. (Not every Ward Home applicant is accepted; the program wants teens who are motivated.)
Ms. Samuel was so impressed, she went back and told her boss, "You're getting a great kid, I'm telling you."
Miss Bennett didn't move into one of the efficiency apartments, but Ms. Samuel and her colleagues met with her regularly and helped her prepare for college applications, then college itself, but always for the general questions of life.
"She just inhales everything that you say," Ms. Samuel said.
Miss Bennett is majoring in psychology and social work and minoring in business. She will be a resident adviser in the fall. She has her eye on working with foster youth and perhaps becoming a motivational speaker. When she turns 21, she will "age out of the system" but there's no way she'll age out of the relationships she has built through Ward Home.
"You don't age out of the love they've shared with you," she said. The women of Ward Home didn't just teach her, they showed her "how to be beautiful mothers and beautiful wives."
"The things that you do for Ward Home," she told her heroes across a room filled with strangers, "will be with me until I die."
"We all come from broken homes but together we feel like a family."
