Step Onward Foundation

Our Vision is to help create a world at home and abroad where young adults and families who are at risk of homelessness reach their full potential as healthy, happy and self-sufficient adults who give back to their communities. Our support is an investment in the life of each young person we serve, and ultimately an investment in the communities in which they live and work.

Core Values that help achieve the manifestation of this vision are:

Grace: We believe when resources, trust and supportive relationships are given to survivors who are ready to step onward toward their future, growth and sustainability emerge naturally as a result.
Responsibility: We believe all survivors deeply desire to be responsible for their own well being.
Stewardship: We are committed to the ethic of responsible management of OUR resources for the benefit of recipients and in honor of our donors.
Compassion: Through kindness, caring and a genuine belief in the potential of our recipients, we encourage them to believe in themselves and strive for sustainability. In this way we further our mission to break the cycle at home and abroad.
Community instead of Competition: Since our inception we have partnered with others who are already in the business of breaking the cycle of homelessness. We complement our partners’ efforts by filling the gaps in the services that they provide.

We reach out to organizations with programs addressing homelessness and the struggle for young adults and at risk families to achieve or maintain sustainability and we fill the gaps that emerge when these individuals and families age out or time out of services. We do this across the board with many different populations including those aging out of foster care, timing out of shelter programs, families struggling with the cost of supporting their children with acute illness and trying to balance work and caregiving as well as (on a limited basis) young adults who were either abandoned by their parents while seeking asylum or sent by their parents from other nations in extreme conflict.

We provide counseling and financial support and mentorship to fill gaps in access to housing, food, healthcare, mental healthcare, higher education and transportation. We partner in filling these gaps with our recipients who are working, going to school and learning life skills and are highly motivated to achieve independence.

We have 15 years of experience working with many organizations and recipients to break the cycle of homelessness. Our goals now are to scale this model and these efforts across other cities in the United States to continue our mission and collaborate with other like minded non-profits and communities to strengthen the impact.

So far we have impacted a significant group of families and individuals, all of whom have not experienced homelessness again since our partnership and who are all achieving a significant improvement in employability, life skills, engagement with paths they choose and are passionate about particularly in our student population. In the cases of families who are receiving emergency funding while their children are in pediatric and adolescent hospital units, these families are able to have their financial gaps filled to keep them from becoming homeless and therefore the cycle of homelessness often triggered by acute health crisis is averted.

We hope to grow our fundraising exponentially through writing grants, as the majority of our funding has been from individual private donations, and we will carefully grow our staff to support both the fundraising efforts as well as program services.