Growing up without a stable home or long-term connections with caring adults creates serious consequences for foster youth that often sweep them into intergenerational cycles of foster care and poverty. First Place for Youth was founded in 1998 to prevent poverty and homelessness among the largely overlooked population of youth who have grown up in foster care. The mission of First Place is to help foster youth build the skills they need to make a successful transition to self-sufficiency and responsible adulthood. Over the past 24 years, we have developed a network of programs with evidence-based direct services, including providing safe, stable housing, paired with intensive case management to build crucial life-skills and emotional wellbeing. We consider our individualized education and employment counseling to be the core of our program, ensuring that young people have a clear path to succeed in school and build job-readiness skills qualifying them for living-wage positions.

We believe that all young people in foster care have the potential to achieve long-term success in adulthood, and we envision a world where the disparities between them and the general population have been eliminated. First Place for Youth is a national leader in providing evidence-based direct support, increasing awareness, changing perceptions, and building a movement to make this vision a reality.

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Increase financial sustainability by proactively closing gaps in public funding, exploring revenue strategies for technical assistance, and strategizing to intentionally size our California footprint.

Goal Type: Focus on core programs to achieve mission and scale back on programs not seen as core.

Goal Two: Increase infrastructure and organizational focus to expand influence and advocacy on policy change in California and articulate the national strategy.

Goal Type: Invest in the capacity of our organization (financial, management, technical, etc.).

Goal Three: Commit and advance principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion within our own organization and our work to transform into an equitable and anti-racist institution.

Goal Type: This goal reflects our commitment to further our advocacy work for our organization and or cause area.

Describe an investment in leadership

First Place has always believed in investing in the potential of its employees—this is one of the core competencies that guide our work. Professional development plans are integrated into our employee work plans and performance reviews, and the organization covers the cost of relevant trainings. We also leverage community partnerships where possible, such as Tipping Point Community’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship, in which we currently have an employee participating. One of our strategic pillars is to transform into an equitable and anti-racist organization. To this end, First Place is working to implement our own Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Emerging Leaders Program, to support the retention and promotion of potential BIPOC leaders within the organization. This will include a mentoring program between the cohort and existing BIPOC leaders at First Place.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Strategic Partnerships

• Networks of Collective Impact Efforts

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

• Policy Advocacy

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

First Place has been at the forefront of contributing knowledge to the field in how to develop more effective programs for transition-age foster youth. Our aim has always been to transform foster care, both for the individual and on a systemic level. We take a dual approach to our mission: (1) provide results-driven direct services to youth who need support pursuing their goals; and (2) advocate for public policies that improve the lives of as many foster youth as possible. Our direct service work informs our advocacy efforts, and our advocacy helps create environments that promote stability and success. As a field-building organization, we collaborate with partners across the country to share our program model, technical expertise, and visionary data tools. We are working on several fronts to raise positive impressions of and outcomes for transition-age foster youth, including through public relations, advocacy, and programmatic innovations to help them achieve their full potential.

COVID-19 exacerbated the overwhelming barriers young people face when aging out of foster care—from accessing housing and healthcare to progressing in school and finding economic security—everything got even harder. As many as 60% of program participants were laid off, furloughed, had their hours cut, or otherwise had their employment negatively impacted as a result of COVID-19. One-hundred percent of youth’s education was affected, as most lacked the fundamental digital literacy skills and equipment that became pertinent to progress in school. This led to a huge pivot in our strategy to keep young people safely housed, financially stable amidst significant income loss, and also continue to support their educational progress and postsecondary readiness. First Place quickly and intentionally built out our education and employment support services to include a COVID strategy. Our ultimate goal is to support youth’s educational progress and postsecondary readiness, to ensure they are prepared to persevere through the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic. In addition to core programmatic services, staff have supported youth in securing essential items, provided digital literacy skills training, connected them to transitional employment, and creatively built community online. We are closely monitoring COVID’s continued impact on youth outcomes, and developing our education and employment strategy in step with our findings. Beyond our internal programming, we are working to ensure former foster youth are a target population in COVID-19 recovery nationwide by leveraging our research brief, Raising the Bar, a comprehensive summary of the strategic evidence-building work First Place has conducted over the past several years. Utilizing current data in combination with personal understanding of young people, we recommend a renewed education-to-employment focus, investments in extended care, individualized placement decisions, and extending the runway for those who need it.