Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Samueli Academy
Samueli Academy was opened on August 22nd, 2013 to further meet our goal of helping foster and community youth graduate from high school and gain the skills necessary to enter the workforce. By using project-based learning and incorporating a work-based learning program, we hope to better equip teens with the skills needed for adulthood.
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
ALL Orangewood programs work together to build a strong foundation for adulthood for Orange County's children, teens and youth who have been in the foster care system. Orangewood Resource Center (ORC) offers emotional support, a hot meal, clothing, groceries, phone and computer. About 50% of ORC youth are homeless.Mentoring offers youth support and guidance. Scholarships send foster youth to college. Grants provide children and teens in foster care with the "extras". Rising Tide Communities is a comprehensive housing program to help former foster youth gain the life skills needed for independent living. Housed at two apartment complexes and one home, Beverly's House, and the Lighthouse for victims of sex trafficking. Independent Living Program is 1-1 support and workshops teaching skills for life after age 18. Full Service Partnership helps teens and young adults with intensive and individual support needed to achieve a stable, productive life.
Where we work
External reviews

Photos
Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Number of foster youth with housing arrangements
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
At-risk youth
Related Program
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Orangewood provides transitional housing to transitional age youth throughout Orange County through four housing sites.
Number of participants attending course/session/workshop
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Orangewood holds life skills workshops in the areas of relationships and daily living, education, employment, and more. These workshops are for youth in foster care and extended foster care.
Hours of mentoring
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Orangewood pairs caring adult mentors with current and former foster youth.
Number of college scholarships provided to youth
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Number of advanced studies scholarships provided to former foster youth
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Bags of groceries provided to youth
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Decreasing
Context Notes
Orangewood's on-site resource center helps youth with basic needs such as groceries, toiletries, hot meals and laundry facilities.
Hot meals served to former foster youth
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Health & Wellness, Housing, LIfe Skills & Employment, Education
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Decreasing
Context Notes
Orangewood's on-site resource center helps youth with basic needs such as groceries, toiletries, hot meals and laundry facilities.
Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Orangewood Foundation was created in 1981 to build an emergency shelter for children from our community who were being abused. After the shelter was finished it was deeded to the County of Orange and we turned our attention to meeting the ongoing needs of vulnerable youth. For 37 years, Orangewood has supported youth who are living with foster parents, kindship families, or in group homes. Today, Orangewood is driven by its mission “to prepare foster and community youth to reach their greatest potential”. While we still maintain a focus on helping youth from foster care, we have broadened our scope to include youth who might never have been in formal foster care but are in great need our services (educationally at-risk youth, sex trafficking victims, and homeless young people). Today about 75% of our clients are from foster care. Our vision statement, “all youth are given the opportunity to thrive and prosper”, describes exactly what we aim to accomplish.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Far too many young people leave foster care without a home or adults to help them transition into independent living. They are unable to pay for college, find a job, or secure a safe place to live. They lack education, guidance and basic life skills. This is also true of non-foster youth who come from families plagued by poverty and homelessness. These young people are at high risk of tragic outcomes including homelessness, poverty, unplanned pregnancies, incarceration, and substance abuse.
To address these critical issues, our strategies involve four key service areas: Health & Wellness, Housing, Life Skills & Employment, and Education. Orangewood provides the comprehensive programs including: affordable housing, educational scholarships, mental health support, skill building workshops, a drop-in center (Project CHOICE) and safe housing for CSEC youth (Commercially Sexually Exploited Children), adult and peer mentors, and a resource center for homeless youth that provides home cooked meals, medical care, group and individual counseling, referrals to housing and jobs, and case management.
All of our programs have adopted what we call the "Orangewood Way", a strengths-based, trauma-informed, respectful way of viewing the young people that we serve as resourceful `and so much more than just their present circumstances. We believe that our strategies are fairly unique and a bit more comprehensive than many youth services agencies. We use a care model that is known among service providers as “low-threshold”. We do not require traumatized, hurting youth to immediately comply with a rule-oriented program. This approach doesn’t work in the long term. It often reinforces a belief in the youth that they cannot succeed, they are fundamentally flawed, and people cannot be trusted. We don’t want to re-traumatize an already frightened youth by setting them up to fail and feel rejected, but instead extend unconditional love and use a much more grace filled, forgiving approach. Youth can visit for a hot meal, a shower, or just to talk with a caring adult until they feel safe enough to request more solution-oriented help, such as housing. We have respect for the unique path each of our young clients is taking, and the time they need to build trust in us. Rather than try to direct their steps, we offer to accompany them, providing support and guidance on the way.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Orangewood has evolved into a respected leader among Southern California’s providers of direct services for vulnerable, at-risk youth. Orangewood is deeply grateful for a high level of community support and strong collaborative partnerships. Our capabilities are enhanced through relationships with the Orange County Social Services Agency, Orange County Department of Children and Family Services, the County Board of Supervisors, and other local agencies. Orangewood is a member of the Orange County Alliance for Children and Families, Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, Juvenile Branch Blue Ribbon Committee on services to Dependent and Delinquent Youth, the Foster Youth Outcome committee, and the Juvenile Justice Commission. Orangewood has been awarded the County’s only Independent Living Program contract every year since 1998.
Orangewood benefits from truly outstanding Volunteer support. Our volunteer base is made up of both dedicated individuals and corporate groups who provide grants, in-kind gifts, services and special event support. Without our volunteers, our influence in the community and ability to carry out our mission would be significantly diminished. Additionally, two auxiliaries, "44 Women", started by Susan Samueli, and "PALS", provide valuable, ongoing support.
Orangewood is led by a very strong Board of Directors made up of 43 community leaders. Our Board is very active, providing governance, strategic direction, supervision and fundraising, and is organized into eight regular committees: Program, Ambassador/Fund Development, Governance, Executive, Audit, Investment, Finance, and Marketing. Two additional committees meet only as needed, the Compensation Committee and Rising Tide Committee. The Board relies on program outcomes and data provided by program directors, as well as feedback from the youth we serve, in order to lead our strategic planning.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
Every year, our team of dedicated staff and volunteers directly serve about 2,000 young people; this number includes the 500 students enrolled at Samueli Academy. At Orangewood Foundation, progress is part of our culture - both programmatically and organizationally. Even though we are an established organization, we don’t “rest on our laurels.” We constantly evolve and adapt our services to better address the needs of our community’s youth.
For twenty years, Orangewood produced the Conditions of Children Report for our county and continues to be a contributor to the document. Orangewood operated several Community Programs, including FaCT, from 1994 until 2016. During this time, significant progress was made in the prevention of child abuse through Family Resource Centers around the County. In 2016 Orangewood made the decision not to seek more community service contracts; we decided to focus on what we do best: providing direct services for vulnerable youth. In 2013 Orangewood opened Samueli Academy, a tuition-free, charter high school for foster youth and educationally at-risk teens. It is now an award-winning school with a long waiting list each year! In response to the high percentage of young women being trafficked who as children were in foster care, Orangewood opened The Lighthouse in 2016, a transitional housing program to support this specific population. In 2017, Orangewood was selected to receive a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the State of California to expand our onsite Resource Center to better serve the growing number of young adults in Orange County experiencing homelessness.
Here is what’s next: On May 2, 2019 we celebrated our ground-breaking ceremony for our residential program at Samueli Academy. This will offer a 5/2 model, so that youth can live on campus Monday through Friday and return home (with foster parents or a kindship family) every weekend. Another exciting development is that Samueli Academy will add grades seven and eight in 2020. This will allow many students to change the trajectory of their lives at an even earlier age; it is our goal to capture their interest and enthusiasm even before high school!
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
Orangewood Foundation
Board of directorsas of 07/18/2022
Greg Dunlap
Deloitte Tax, LLP
Term: 2016 - 2023
Cindy Dillion
ProblemResolved.org
Steve Keefer
Business Executive
Marissa Barth
Fidelity National Title Company
Bob Bartholomew
Windjammer Capital Investors
Alan Clifton
Passco Companies, LLC
Keith Duggan
First National Capital Corporation
David Dunn
Athletes First
Richard Dutch
3M Health Care
Bruce Fetter
Business Executive
Adam S. Horowitz
Horowitz Group
Daniel M. Houck II
Universal Asphalt Co., Inc.
Bob Istwan
Motive Energy, Inc.
Sandi Jackson
Community Philanthropist
Chris Jones
Acra Aerospace Inc.
Mitch Junkins
The CDM Company
Harry Langenberg
Optima Tax Relief
Renee Pepys Lowe
RPL and Associates, LLC
Joe Lozowski
Tangram Interiors
Neena N. Master
SoCalGas
Vic Merjanian
Titan HST and Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP
Mohit Mittal
PIMCO
Vikki Murphy
Wilson Automotive Group
Ken Parker
Haynes and Boone, LLP
Lauren Peterson
Whittier Trust
Andy Phillips
Cliq
Jeff Roos
Lennar
Timothy Ryan
Anaheim Arena Management and Anaheim Ducks
Susan Samueli
Samueli Foundation
Sona Shah
My Private Professor Tutoring
Rick Sherburne
CBRE
John E. Stratman
Kaiser Permanente - Orange County
John Stumpf
Core Logic
Kasey Suryan
Pacific Drive-Inc and Lyon Living
Kris Theiler
Disneyland Park
Paul Tobin
Consultant & Attorney
Piero Wemyss
Business Executive
Kimberly Kirksey
Kirksey & Co
Dennis Berlien
Glumac
Jo-E Lopez
Snyder Langston
Mark Powell
Wealth Strategist
Cassandra Williams
Atech Consulting
Fermin Glasper
McCarthy Building Companies
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Not applicable -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Not applicable -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Not applicable -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Not applicable
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
Gender identity
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data