KU grad creates homes for youths who age out of foster care
Mel McDaniel fulfilled her own childhood longing for a true home. Now she helps others who are starting out on their own.
When Mel McDaniel describes her student years on the Hill as her “great awakening,” she refers to revelations far more dramatic than the changes typical among countless college students.
McDaniel, s’02, grew up in an isolated forest region of Canada, where her parents belonged to a strict religious cult, cut off from conventional society. Cult leaders decreed that children spend much of their time closely monitored and separated from their parents and siblings. She and her two older sisters never experienced a true sense of family or home. She had food and a place to sleep, but the cult regarded children as “a little army of free labor,” says McDaniel, who recalls her early yearning for a real home and a dog.
As she grew older, she never thought college was an option until her aunt, Maggie Childs, a KU professor (now emerita) of Japanese, reached out and suggested that her niece come to Lawrence. “I owe her so much,” says McDaniel (whose name as a student was Mary Ellen Childs).
McDaniel reveled in the wide-open spaces and possibilities on Mount Oread, eventually making her way to the School of Social Welfare, where she spent her practicum year working with children in foster care. They, too, longed for the security of stable families and homes.
Though at first glance her career in interior design appears to have veered far from her KU degree, McDaniel says “my social welfare heart never left me.” In 2019, she founded Marvin’s Home, a nonprofit organization in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Marvin’s Home furnishes first apartments or homes for young adults who have spent their teenage years in foster care or other temporary shelters. Partnering with Valley Youth House, a well-known agency in Pennsylvania, McDaniel and her crew of 40 volunteers have created homes for more than 60 young clients starting new lives on their own.
Named for her beloved rescue dog, the venture grew from the success of Mel McDaniel Design, her full-time career “that pays my bills and helps fund Marvin’s Home,” she says. As she refurbished and revitalized homes for paying clients, McDaniel began to accumulate cast-off yet perfectly good furniture. She knew the forsaken beds, sofas, tables and chairs could become cherished furnishings for youths who had few possessions of their own.
Through financial and furniture donations, McDaniel and her volunteers by 2022 had acquired enough inventory to open Home on Main, a showroom in downtown Lansdale that features gently used and vintage items for sale. All proceeds benefit Marvin’s Home.
“Moving often implies a coming together. Your friends, or your parents, or your aunt and uncle come with their truck,” says McDaniel, who still recalls her solo move to KU and being amazed that other new students arrived with families who helped them move into their dorm rooms. “These kids move in with literally just their bags of stuff. I want them to see this team of people come together for them and do things you can’t really do all on your own. You can’t move a sofa up a flight of steps on your own. You just can’t.”
Some young adults leaving foster care also are parents themselves, and McDaniel especially enjoys creating rooms for their children. “Without fail, when we do a kid’s room, they go straight to the lamp and turn it on. I always try to find lamps with pull chains, so it’s easier for kids. Many of them have known only awful overhead lighting. There’s a simplicity to home, but you need certain things. And a lamp and a bed and a nightstand are essential to a bedroom.”
McDaniel has been a homeowner herself only since 2018, and she credits Marvin for leading her to that milestone. “When he was found, he was as abused and awful as a dog can be in a city,” she says of Marvin, who, though full grown, weighed only 38 pounds when McDaniel welcomed him into her apartment. She vowed to find a house with a fenced backyard.
Six years later, McDaniel marvels every day that she now has all she longed for as a child. “I just dreamed of a house with a mailbox—a home and a dog,” she says as Marvin, now 88 pounds, bounds into view on the Zoom screen and cozies up to his human. “Marvin’s Home is just a way of showing that once you get something, you want other people to have it. I want them to also feel that same inner peace of having a home where they’re safe.
“And that is no small thing.”
Jennifer Jackson Sanner, j’81, is editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
Photos courtesy of Mel McDaniel
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