Ensuring that individuals and families are sustainably lifted from the cycle of poverty through bolstering professional development, financial literacy, and connections with industry.
About the organization: Home Start provides services to children living in poverty who require comprehensive solutions to ensure their safety and healthy development. Last fiscal year, Home Start served more than 17,000 individuals through programs that focus on housing, domestic violence prevention, parenting education, behavioral health services, hunger relief, employment readiness, and benefits enrollment.
Home Start's Maternity Housing Program provides safe and secure supportive housing with wraparound supportive services for pregnant or parenting young women (ages 18-24) who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Highly skilled and compassionate staff work with each resident to develop necessary skills to live independently. Simultaneously, Home Start provides a safe and stable home for the mother and their dependent children. The program is the first of its kind in San Diego to address homelessness specifically designed for pregnant or parenting young mothers and their children by offering affordable, supervised housing in an urban region that suffers from an extreme lack of housing for low-income individuals & families.
Program funded by Life Science Cares: Maternity Housing Program, to provide affordable transitional housing and basic needs support to support unhoused mothers in becoming permanently housed.
About the organization: Just in Time for Foster Youth envisions a future in which every youth leaving the foster care system has a community of caring adults waiting for them after 18. They believe consistent, long-term help from the heart is the foundation for the success of our youth so they can thrive and enjoy productive, satisfying lives.
Just in Time for Foster Youth provides services for Emergency Needs and Stable Housing, Meaningful Employment, Reliable Transportation, Healthy Practices and Wellbeing, Essential Education (providing support from attending college to earning a Master's degree and then landing a great internship), and Financial Literacy.
Program funded by Life Science Cares: Workforce development and financial literacy support for former foster youth.
About the organization: Junior Achievement impacts students by providing Common Core-aligned K-12 programs guided by the three pillars of financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and career readiness. Recognizing the growing disparity between student debt and viable career pathways combined with the EDC’s forecast of thousands of jobs that may remain unfilled, JA San Diego continues to focus on opportunities that better prepare – and connect – San Diego’s students with future careers.
Junior Achievement has Fellowship programs in Lincoln High School and Chula Vista High School. These Fellows are connected to San Diego’s business community through a year-long leadership and work-based learning experience. Students meet each school day and develop the foundational knowledge of the local economy, personal finance, career pathways, and work readiness. The cohort model provides students with social capital and financial literacy through real-world experiences directly connected to San Diego’s industries.
Program funded by Life Science Cares: Continuation and expansion of the JA Fellows program in Title I schools. This program provides life-changing workforce development and financial literacy support for high schoolers.
About the organization: MAKE Projects is an employment social enterprise. They operate an urban farm, restaurant, and events/catering company to provide a paid, real-world work experience for low-income refugee and immigrant women and youth. The mission is to provide trainees with job readiness skills to help them achieve their dreams.
The vision at MAKE Projects is to see San Diegans cross social, racial, economic, and geographic lines as we gather over a common love of food, flavors, and culture. They believe in the power of food to bring diverse populations together, unite a community, and educate each other about our history and differences, as well as our commonalities.
Program funded by Life Science Cares: Increasing access to living wage career pathways for Refugee & Immigrant Women and Youth, by providing on the job training in the MAKE Projects restaurant.
