A Q&A with Grace Reddy, Chief Development Officer
Starting out on your own as a young adult is hard no matter how much support you have. Foster youth often have very little. This is where First Place for Youth comes in. They help young adults who are transitioning out of foster care to get set up for success in their first home and adulthood. They use MyRegistry.com gift lists to help collect in-kind donations to support their mission. We sat down and spoke with Grace Reddy, First Place for Youth’s Chief Development Officer.
What is First Place for Youth and what does it do?
First Place for Youth is a national charity that serves transition-age foster youth ages 16 to 25. We have operations in six California counties, and five other states, through various partners. When these young adults age out of foster care, usually at age 18, they are often left on their own. We believe that every young person deserves the opportunity to find the pathway to a successful and empowered adult life. By the way, we will be celebrating our 25th Anniversary of helping these young people in 2023.
What we do is to provide a housing solution that incorporates education and employment coaching, as well as wraparound Case Management support structures. We also serve provide services, without housing, through a bunch of other partnerships. We serve about 1500 youth per year with around 640 in our signature, My First Place program, where they're placed in their first apartment. The young adults are placed with other participants in apartments throughout the communities where we work, and we help them learning to become fully functioning adults.
How important are in-kind donations to First Place for Youth’s mission?
In-kind donations, particularly the gifts that are provided via the holiday season MyRegistry gift list are extremely important. These kids, in many cases, are entirely on their own. They may have a youth advocate who is their case manager, but they may not have family or other people to support them. During the holidays that’s extremely lonely.
So, we created a holiday event where these young adults can receive gifts. We create a gift list that donors can shop from to provide gifts for the event. And we also are working to expand the effort to other counties besides Alameda where we are headquartered.
Why can’t you just buy those gifts through First Place for Youth?
First Place for Youth does education, employment, and housing, the essentials of adult life. These are taken care of by the Foundation funds, but they don't take care of the things one might call the extras, First Place is well funded, but we run a very lean organization, and these “extras” really make a difference.
We receive about 80% of our funding from government contracts. The government contracts pay mostly for the housing. Then fundraising department raises another $8 million per year to support a rich set of services, we have an employment specialist and a youth advocate assigned to each young adult, as well as a housing specialist to get them to understand tenancy.
The holiday gift idea started with gift cards. Then some very generous donors would collect funds through various event as well as their own cash and go out shopping at Costco and Target, to purchase many wonderful things – like blankets, cookware, small appliances – the stuff you need to set up a home. At the holiday party the kids could go in pick what they wanted. It’s since become the annual tradition.
Then COVID hit and suddenly, everything shut down. But we still had the same issues to deal with – even though we couldn’t do it person which is really where MyRegistry shone.
How did MyRegistry help during the pandemic?
We were very excited about MyRegistry because it allowed us to be able to get something very personal for each young person. And made it possible to get many more people involved in supporting our efforts.
What I really love about MyRegistry is, it allowed us to create an in-kind giving site where somebody goes on and sees pictures, and they could buy a gift that resonates with them, something they would want to provide for young people.
Also, we really want to be able to shop local. And localize the registry for all our different communities. To create a MyRegistry.com gift list for Los Angeles County, for Contra Costa County, for all these different regions where even if they don't have as much staff or as many volunteers, they can still have that same opportunity. It's all about that very local engagement that is also very personal.
One of the things you’ve touched on are the benefits of using MyRegistry particularly as it relates to intentional giving and the expression of a donor’s personal values via the platform. Can you elaborate?
Yes. First off, it’s very easy. Though we try to get a wish list from all our young adults, if we can’t, the staff can say we would like to have 10 Instapots for example. It really saves our staff time so they can focus on supporting the young adults over the holidays—often a very difficult time for this population. And to our volunteers I can say here’s a list, please populate the MyRegistry. And the gift list is something we want to carry through to other times. For example, when Mother's Day comes up or when we have young brides.
Also, when we look at gift getting as these young people move through the cycles of foster care, there's different things they need. At first, maybe they just want their own pillows and their own towels. Then maybe they want to learn how to use a crock pot for cooking. Then as they learn their needs, we can help provide them with the items that will make their lives more comfortable – like a thicker comforter.
How has MyRegistry helped in collecting donations?
Last year in Alameda County, we used MyRegistry to gather 146 items for more than 100 young adults and our holiday celebration was an amazing event where each youth walked out with an item that s/he had requested. We definitely had the largest gift giving season we'd had thanks to the gift list. We were able post each young adult’s desired item(s) from books to metal detectors, to acrylic nail kits to diapers for their kids and even a shower head, we were able to get all those wish lists up there in a way that allowed our community to deliver on the dreams of the youth Alameda county that we serve.