The Home Creation

ASOH strives to create a physical home that is the embodiment of the dreams and unique personality of each recipient (and their family) to transform their experience of scarcity to one of comfort and care. Empty walls, floors, and rooms, once unlivable, are transformed into fully-furnished, functional, and beautiful homes in less than two hours by a team of volunteers.

ASOH installs 330 items in each home to ensure optimal well being and a fully functional home.

How It Works

ASOH partners with LA County and DCFS to advance Permanent Supportive Housing.

ASOH is the only partner agency with DCFS that refers former foster youth for vouchers and the only agency that DCFS turns to create homes for former foster youth. ASOH secures housing vouchers for former foster youth and once TAY youth receive the keys to their apartment, ASOH turns their empty space into functioning and inspired homes. ASOH connects TAY youth to additional services within our expansive Resource Network and supports them in onboarding to these programs. Resource Network opportunities include financial literacy training, educational scholarships, therapy, trauma informed healing, referrals for job placement, and job training.

ASOH welcomes recipients to pay it forward in supporting their peers in having their homes created.

The Pay it Forward Alumna (PIFA) Community enjoys special events where they gather to learn about additional resources, receive custom gifts and wishes, and most importantly connect to the community. Pay it Forward Alumna are invited to become Peer Mentors. They too receive their own mentors and the cycle of support continues as each individual flourishes.

Unique and Innovative Supportive Services

All Alumni of ASOH are invited to pay-it-forward, empowering individual creativity and collective creativity that fosters an environment that serves to Illuminate and help others actualize their potential.

  • Ongoing Resource Navigation for Alumni to support their stability
  • Access to Individual Therapy and Wellbeing Programs
  • Pay-It-Forward Alumni (PIFA) Program- provides peer to peer mentorship and a supportive community
  • ASOH Scholarship Program
  • Financial Literacy Trainings
  • Empowerment Workshops
  • Annual Events for Alumni and PIFA
  • No “aging-out” of services
  • Resources for Parents

Supporting Mothers and Children

Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

  • 85% of those ASOH serves are young women and 68% have children of their own.
  • ASOH provides all essential items to ensure children of recipients with open cases have everything they need to comply with DCFS guidelines.
  • ASOH provides kids and babies with clothes, shoes, books, toys, school supplies and more.
  • ASOH connects both mothers and their children to ongoing services.

ASOH does not have an age limit.

ASOH supports any former foster youth in creating their first-ever home. Harnessing beautifully donated furniture and home goods, volunteers create inspiring homes in only 90 minutes. ASOH introduces recipients to a community of care and access to ongoing resources. Alumni achieve a sustainable tenancy, dignity, self-worth & a foundation from which they can thrive.

Applicants must be working or going to school (or a combination of work and school) for at least 30 hours per week. Should an applicant not qualify we will refer the individual to programs to ensure they do meet our requirements.

When an applicant does not yet have a home, we help them secure housing vouchers through county programs and/ or introduce them to a budding that is specifically accepting ASOH recipients.

Why Home is Especially Important for Former Foster Youth

  • While homelessness is an obstacle a young person exiting foster care is challenged with, their entire lives have revolved around housing insecurity. For most young people who enter foster care, their parents’ challenges with housing or what happened in the “home” is why they entered the system.
  • These young people endured deplorable living conditions, mostly due to poverty and/or mental illness, experienced by their parents.
  • These conditions may involve infestations, dangerous animals, an absence of running water, heat, or bedding, or a single one-bedroom apartment occupied by 20+ individuals from multiple families.
  • Housing issues may also involve co-located drug labs or gang territory, criminal activity involving deadly weapons, and all-night partying so extensive that children are unable to sleep.
  • For most young people who entered and endured foster care, “home” is neither safe nor stable.
  • These challenges often follow young people in the form of trauma and future difficulty obtaining housing.
  • Often the most affordable housing may return the young person to the same neighborhood they once fled.
  • Alternatively, even if housing is secured, furnishing the apartment, making it a home, and having the requisite resources to make it a lasting place to live is all but impossible.
  • With these challenges so prevalent, A Sense of Home has become the gold standard for giving our kids the homes they truly deserve once and for all.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Home and Self

Self-Actualization

This is to become self-fulfilled and all that a person can be. For self-actualized individuals home is more than a place to live, it is a place where one can manifest one’s dreams.

Self-Esteem Needs

A degree of self-respect as well as respect for others and respect received from others. Being proud of one’s own home, creates self-esteem that emboldens self-respect and inspires respectful behavior to others and one’s environment. Mutual respect empowers the pursuit of career and educational goals.

Love and Belonging Needs

Having a space that feels like home affords a sense of belonging while being accepted and understood by the community affords the confidence to build and grow healthy relationships.

Physical Safety Needs

To be free of fear. When a person is in a state of fear, all concentration goes to calming the fear with no ability to focus on achieving other goals. For a person to develop fully as a human being there must feel safe, especially in their home.

Physical Survival Needs

The need for food, drink, shelter, sleep, and oxygen. If a person cannot satisfy their basic survival needs, they cannot move up the pyramid to meet additional basic needs.

Together, we can rebuild more than homes. We can restore lives.

Former Foster Youth of LA - A Sense of Home