As part of the Fifty & Forward Campaign, San Diego Foundation is profiling nonprofit fundholders making a difference for education, children and families, and the environment. Engage in the campaign at SDFoundation.org/50.
Imagine not having a safe place to sleep at night. No roof over your head, no place to call your own and no certainty about where your next meal will come from.
Without stable housing, basic needs—like food, safety and the chance to study—become constant struggles. For many youth, this lack of stability leads to homelessness and a cycle that’s nearly impossible to escape.
Fortunately, organizations like San Diego Youth Services (SDYS) can step in to help equip youth with the necessary tools to prepare them for a brighter future.
A San Diego Foundation (SDF) nonprofit fundholder. SDYS is dedicated to empowering youth to thrive by meeting their basic needs, providing lifelong skills for self-sufficiency, and enabling them to achieve their life ambitions.
The organization offers a continuum of care for children and youth from infancy to age 25, providing safe places to live and long-term solutions through shelter, foster homes, community centers and housing.
The Urgent Need for Safe & Stable Housing
According to the San Diego Economic Equity Report, which SDF developed in partnership with the more than 16,000 of San Diego County students are unhoused.
The report also reveals that in the 2022-2023 school year, Native American, Black, Hispanic or Latino/a, and Pacific Islander public school children were much more likely to be unhoused than White students.
Stable housing is a foundation for the safety, health and achievement of young people. That’s why it’s so important to partner with organizations like San Diego Youth Services, which works to end homelessness, prevent delinquency and school failure, break the cycle of child abuse and neglect, and promote mental health and addiction recovery.
Through prevention, early intervention, treatment and job training, SDYS also helps youth before they need higher levels of care or experience homelessness so that they can live independent and productive lives.
San Diego Youth Services programs have changed the lives of more than 823,000 homeless, runaway and other vulnerable youth.
The organization provides intensive services to more than 14,000 youth every year in San Diego County with the vision to create a world where all youth have equal opportunities to achieve their goals and make their dreams a reality.
Interview with Walter Philips
Walter Philips, Chief Executive Officer of San Diego Youth Services (SDYS), explains how establishing a nonprofit agency endowment fund helps the organization grow and sustain its programs helping San Diego’s most vulnerable youth. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
What were the reasons SDYS decided to set up an agency endowment fund at San Diego Foundation?
We wanted to create a fund to provide a long-term sustainable source of income for San Diego Youth Services, to be able to support children, teens and young adults, where the need is the greatest, for many years to come. Our goal is to help build promising futures for children, teens and young adults, where they become self-sufficient and productive members of our community.
Why is organizational longevity and sustainability important to your work?
Our mission is to empower youth to thrive by meeting their basic needs and providing lifelong skills for self-sufficiency and achieving their life ambitions. As youth are our future, we would like to be able to help those most vulnerable in our community succeed and create productive lives for themselves. To be able to really make an impact and help those who otherwise would not have any opportunities, we need organizational longevity and long-term sustainability.
How does funding sustainability help your youth, staff and programs?
SDYS has been around for more than 50 years helping youth. We are one of the oldest nonprofits in San Diego and have helped over 800,000 children, teens and young adults. One of the reasons we have been able to support our community for such a long time is that we have focused on providing outstanding wraparound services to exploited, vulnerable and struggling youth.
We have also focused on sustainable funding and sound property investments, which means that we now own most of the housing properties where our young people live, allowing more of our funding to go directly to helping those most in need, compared to if we were leasing those properties. Last year alone, we helped about 14,000 youth. We are grateful to San Diego Foundation and other partners that have supported us as we have grown as an organization.
Do your donors see the value in San Diego Youth Services having an agency fund?
Our donors are happy that we are a financially sound organization and focus our funds on providing services to our youth. It is also important to our donors that other funders and institutions are investing in San Diego Youth Services, and that we have sustainable funding to be able to keep our doors open for many years to come.
How do you think the Fifty & Forward Campaign will benefit children & families that you serve in San Diego?
The Fifty and Forward Campaign focuses on three areas that are incredibly important to create successful communities: Education, Children & families and the environment. At San Diego Youth Services, we work hard to create strong families and build brighter futures for our region’s children, teens and young adults.
We are excited to see that San Diego Foundation is making an investment of this magnitude in our community with a focus on building equitable futures for our families and children, which is incredibly important to us. The Fifty and Forward Campaign will create stronger communities by creating a pathway out of poverty, opportunities for personal growth and brighter futures for our region’s youth.
Fifty & Forward
San Diego Foundation has supported nonprofit organizations like San Diego Youth Services for nearly 50 years.
Now, let’s take the past 50 years of investment and impact into the next 50 years of possibility and promise.
With your help, we will grant $500 million to realize our region’s greatest opportunities in three key areas: education, children and families, and the environment – and raise $1 billion to help shape our community’s future.
Partner with us to amplify your giving and help make a transformational change for the issues you care about most—and the issues that mean the most to our community.
