Good+Foundation

Good+Foundation is a leading national nonprofit that works to dismantle multigenerational poverty by pairing tangible goods with innovative services for low-income fathers, mothers and caregivers, creating an upward trajectory for the whole family.

Founded in 2001 by Jessica Seinfeld, Good+Foundation began operations in New York City. As an organization founded and led by women, our goal was to get mothers the tools they need — such as clothing, diapers, high chairs and strollers — to provide for their children. It took most of our first decade, though, to fully recognize that our culture, policy and social service providers were treating fathers as secondary, non-essential actors in the well-being of these children. After years of pairing our donations with social services primarily providing for mothers, our fatherhood initiative started in 2010 with our first donations made to fatherhood-specific programs. We expanded our operations to Los Angeles this same year.

Research has yielded strong evidence that father absence has persistent negative effects on children’s social-emotional development. Similarly, enabling a father to be involved in his child’s development can bring moderate to high cognitive function gains to the child. Through our work with grantee partners, we aim to address some of the barriers to father engagement, giving non-custodial and low-income dads better tools to become active fathers and supportive co-parents.

1. Addressing the needs of non-custodial fathers

Since beginning to serve fatherhood programs in 2010, Good+Foundation has donated more than 1.5 million items — such as cribs, diapers and strollers — to more than 35,000 fathers and their families. Our incentive model pairs these items with progress through transformative services around continuing education, healthy relationships, mental health, responsible parenting, workforce training and more. We also support events fostering strengthened bonds within families, such as Shop with Pops, in which we provide The Children’s Place gift cards to fathers who have completed our grantee partners’ curriculum. These dads bring their families to the store to purchase new clothing, which reinforces to the father that he can be a provider. It also gives him valuable time with his child and builds trust with the mother. Good+ is providing for the immediate material needs of fathers while helping them gain the tools to empower themselves and their families.

2. Building capacity for existing partners to include fathers

Traditional gender norms often condition men to avoid seeking the help that they need, and social services have long cemented this notion by neglecting fathers in their programming. This was especially true among our LA partners, where only 24 percent of the non-fatherhood focused programs were actually tracking father engagement in 2018, despite purporting to help families in need. After a re-application process, Good+ began facilitating webinars and quarterly partner meetings to provide ongoing professional development and collaboration around best practices and successes as we seek to better address our three focus areas: Engaging Fathers, Supporting Mothers and Early Childhood Education. By 2019, the number of LA partners tracking father engagement reached 100 percent, and it has remained at this level since.

3. Implementing and advocating for reform to systems marginalizing fathers

Good+ has expanded professional development beyond our grantee partner network. In 2019, we began partnering with the LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to train all incoming social workers twice monthly on addressing implicit biases and engaging fathers in a positive way. We have also become active in the policy arena through our continued partnership with Ascend at the Aspen Institute to address outdated child support laws. Current legislation creates barriers within families rather than tearing them down, so Good+ and Ascend created a toolkit for comprehensive child support reform at the state level. The toolkit includes educational issue-focused white papers and provides case stories about states that have successfully reformed their laws and how they did so.

With warehouses in New York City and Los Angeles – the two largest cities in the United States and home to more than 2 million people living below the poverty line – and around 75 partners nationwide, Good+Foundation has the capacity and connections to be a national leader combating inequality and implicit bias against dads.

Alan-Michael Graves, Ed.D. leads our work to create father-friendly environments, develop strategies for broader father-inclusive policy change, implement training programs and provide technical assistance and incentivized donations to help partners serve fathers more effectively. He is an established and well-respected leader in this space.

Current child support policies disproportionately punish poor fathers and fathers of color by restricting access to their children and making it more difficult to work; our work aims to change that. Good+ and Ascend at the Aspen Institute have partnered to drive comprehensive child support reform at the state level with the creation of educational issue-focused white papers on topics like alternatives to civil contempt and jail, driver’s license suspension exemptions, co-parenting support and fatherhood. These papers also draft legislation for lawmakers at the state level. A Good+ working group assembled to create a child support policy environment that promotes father engagement has identified broad consensus from national leaders for such reforms.

Good+ entered 2020 equipped with experience in swiftly responding to crises nationwide, from the Great Recession to the 2018 California wildfires. Having built an organization prepared to react to the real-time needs of under-resourced families, we were able to nimbly respond to these unique circumstances and events. Our financial responsibility and stability allowed us to do this, as we entered the crisis with 5.5 months of operating expenses in our investment fund set aside. We have earned eight consecutive 4-star ratings on Charity Navigator as well as a GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency and accreditation by the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance for our efficiency of operations.

Last year, 92 percent of all expenses went directly back toward Good+ programs. We distributed more than $11 million in essential family products to 123 programs, including 4,592,006 diapers; 1,320,968 bath, health and hygiene items; 130,387 personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies; 108,147 wipes; 85,197 food and formula items; and 65,768 backpacks and school supplies. We also distributed 5,186 critical gear items (breast pumps, car seats, cribs, feeding seats, front carriers, playpens, safety gates and strollers), meeting 98.7 percent of requests.

To provide additional assistance during a time when product deliveries and distributions proved especially challenging, Good+ moved quickly to establish our Emergency Microgrants program. Through this initiative, we have disbursed $265,000 in financial grants to our partners to help clients pay for rent, groceries, medicine and more.

Recognizing that our work is not complete unless we address the issues making our donations necessary, we launched the Good+Foundation Training Academy in 2020 to equip frontline workers with the tools they need to better support fathers, mothers, caregivers and children. This includes training for every new social worker within the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Through the Academy, we trained 3,997 individuals in 2020 on topics such as father inclusion and paternal relative engagement meant to address implicit biases in social services so that ultimately, children are better served and have stronger developmental outcomes.

Good+ has also been active in the policy arena through our ongoing partnership with Ascend at the Aspen Institute to reform the outdated child support system, a program that impacts one of every five American children. Current legislation creates barriers within families rather than bringing families together, so Good+ and Ascend are creating a toolkit for comprehensive child support reform at the state level. Doing so will help fathers to be more effective co-parents to mothers who are also suffering from the system’s ill effects. Ultimately, our goal is to put children at the center of the child support debate so that this government program provides families with support they need to thrive.