A transitional living program that housed homeless youth in Aroostook County has shut down after it was denied a $350,000 federal grant that made up the bulk of its funding.
The Northern Lighthouse announced on Friday that its transitional living program would close immediately, after officials were notified shortly after the government reopened last week that they would not receive the grant.
The program began in 2023 and supported homeless youth aged 16 to 21 at the same location in Mars Hill as the nonprofit’s Safe Harbor Shelter — an emergency shelter for children aged 10 to 17. That shelter remains open.
It was the only program of its kind in Aroostook County.
“It was gut-wrenching, having to meet with the team and tell them the outcome of what had happened and seeing the looks on their face,” Blake Hatt, The Northern Lighthouse chief operations officer, said Monday.
When it closed Friday, the transitional living program was serving five people. Over the next two weeks, the Presque Isle-based Northern Lighthouse will work through a transition plan to find alternative placements for them, Hatt said.
The program had already been operating without federal funding since Sept. 30, the start of a new budget year, because of a delay in reviewing their grant application that was exacerbated by the government shutdown. A notification informing Northern Lighthouse of the denial did not offer specifics behind the decision.
“It stated that funding decisions were made and our program and application was not selected for funding for this round,” Hatt said.
The Transitional Living Program grant is awarded by the Family and Youth Services Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families, which is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The grant underwent changes this year with HHS restructuring under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The department folded the previously standalone Street Outreach Program grant into the Transitional Living Program grant, raising its ceiling from $250,000 to $350,000.
HHS also significantly accelerated the application period for the grants, shifting from a 60-day window to 14 days, and added a requirement for a signed memorandum of understanding or other formal agreement with a local law enforcement agency.
The addition aimed to establish protocols for coordinated outreach and develop joint training opportunities to improve interactions between law enforcement and homeless youth, among other provisions, according to the notice of funding opportunity.
But the National Network for Youth, a group that advocates for eradicating youth homelessness, called it “virtually impossible” to secure a memorandum of understanding with the 14-day application window, a timeline it referred to as “unrealistic.”
The Northern Lighthouse included a memorandum with the Presque Isle Police Department in its application and obtained a second with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office shortly after it was submitted.
Hatt said the organization’s application was “graded very well,” and that they are reaching out to other programs in the region to see if they have been similarly impacted.
“I know it wasn’t like an error in the application part just because of the grade we received,” Hatt said. “We’re still kind of sifting through all the details.”
Maine’s 2025 Point in Time Count — the federally mandated single-night census of the sheltered and unsheltered homeless population in communities across the U.S. — found that there were 672 homeless youth and young adults in the state up to age 24.
It’s a roughly 24% decline over the previous year, but one that can be largely attributed to the state moving away from using motels as emergency shelters, making the homeless population more difficult to count, as the Portland Press Herald reported earlier this year.
In Presque Isle, where The Northern Lighthouse is headquartered, there has been a 10% increase in use of The County’s only warming shelter in the past year, Homeless Services of Aroostook executive director Kari Bradstreet told the Bangor Daily News last week.
The loss of the transitional living program is a blow to efforts to curb homelessness in the region, Hatt said.
“Seeing some finish their education, get their diplomas, move on to college, get their own apartment, get driver’s licenses, seek alternative education, volunteering, employment, seeing them reach these milestones, it just reaffirmed that that what we were doing was the right thing and it was a needed service for the community,” Hatt said.
“It’s going to leave a hole, for sure, in our community.”