On Sunday I had the great privilege of attending FareStart’s annual gala, where we ‘met’ Jennifer, the featured student / success story, via a prepared video. Jennifer did not have an easy life. She described how she was abused and neglected as a child, rendering her unable to connect with other people. This pattern continued into adulthood where she endured an abusive relationship, leading to a nervous breakdown. She was a mom of two daughters, but she was not the mom she wanted to be. It was not, as she put it, “how I wanted my life to go”.
Jennifer lifted herself out of homelessness, joblessness, mental health challenges, and a deep lack of self-confidence. This was a herculean task, one which probably would have been impossible without a lot of support. Fortunately, she had FareStart.
FareStart calls these individuals ‘students’ but I don’t think that covers it. FareStart’s Food Pathways program, which Jennifer was enrolled in, taught her how to cook in a commercial kitchen. But it supported her in so many other ways as well. It provided a stipend for housing and spending money while she learned. It offered housing services to help her secure housing after the program concluded. It offered social services and case management to ensure she was able to manage her post-traumatic stress disorder. It offered a broad range of job preparation support including goal setting, job search action plans, resume and cover letter preparation, networking skills, interview practice, and the like. It provided a range of self-improvement skills like computer literacy, self-empowerment, time management, financial literacy, and professionalism. Perhaps most importantly, as Jennifer talks about in the video, “a complete lack of judgment was everything to me”.
It’s a very happy story. Jennifer graduated from the program and got a job at a bakery in Pike Place Market. She emailed FareStart later to let her instructors know she got promoted. And her confidence increased so much that she was able to share her story with a room full of FareStart supporters.
It’s not hard to imagine, though, that Jennifer’s story could have turned out much differently if the FareStart network of support had not been in place.
I’ve done mock interviews with some FareStart students and provided them feedback from an employer’s point of view. The hardest question that comes up is often when students are pressed to explain the gap in their resume. They can’t try to hide this gap, particularly when it stems from a period of incarceration which will show up on a background check, so they’re forced to confront it head-on. Doing so requires very advanced interview skills: not only the acumen to describe how they transformed a weakness into a strength, but also the ability to appropriately redirect an interviewer to more relevant aspects of their experience. It’s not easy. Which is one of many, many reasons why it takes a village and lots of support to help students navigate all the obstacles they will confront as they strive to rise above homelessness. I’m so glad FareStart provides that whole village in one turnkey package.
Sadly, but also somewhat obviously, this package isn’t cheap. When FareStart shared its actual costs per student with me, they asked me not to share the data publicly as they get “mixed responses” about it. I don’t doubt that they do. As someone who currently pays private school tuition and has a roof over their head in Seattle, I can tell you that none of this is cheap.
I struggled with this request because one of my key goals for this year is to provide transparency and analysis on the most efficient and effective ways to help Seattle’s homeless, which is difficult without cost data.
I suspect those ‘mixed responses’ might change if viewed in proper context. In 2020, McKinsey estimated it would cost an incremental $5-11 billion to end homelessness in King County, or about $225-500K per homeless person. In that context, FareStart’s costs feel like a real bargain!
In the end, I’m convinced the organization is helping Seattle’s homeless cost-effectively. I hope my readers will take my word for it and forgive the lack of transparency this one time.
But I also hope that FareStart as an organization is able to find a way to talk about these numbers in a way that showcases its programs are a ‘great deal’ rather than an ‘expensive program’. I think this work is well underway. FareStart announced on Sunday a social ROI analysis which shows that for every dollar invested in FareStart programs, society benefits to the tune of $4 in employee take-home pay, tax revenues, reduced homeless and housing services, reduced prison costs, and the like.
Jen and I walked into the gala on Sunday afternoon with an amount in mind that we planned to give. It was enough for a small but meaningful fraction of a student’s tuition. As is our tradition, we talked about it beforehand to make sure we were aligned and didn’t get carried away in the moment.
That plan didn’t really work for us on Sunday.
Before we arrived at the gala we actually got a little carried away bidding for items in the silent auction. There were so many people going to the gala (about 650, I think) that we didn’t think we’d actually win anything. So we bid on a pair of UW-Oregon football tickets (with sideline access), a week of personal chef services, a gift certificate to Sophon (a Cambodian restaurant in Phinney Ridge), and a guest chef night with several well-known female chefs at FareStart… and somehow wound up winning all four! We also bought a ‘mystery envelope’ (labeled Sweet Tooth Around Seattle) that we thought Natalie would like, which ended up including gift certificates to two bakeries and a donut shop. Of course I’ll be sure to share these experiences in the blog as we use them.
Towards the end of the night, after listening to Jennifer’s story and many others, the auctioneer announced that several individual donors had offered to 1:1 match all donations at a level several times more than we’d planned on giving. Jen and I looked at each other and instantly knew this was a unique opportunity to double our impact that we shouldn’t miss. We raised our paddle together.
Special Thanks
Many thanks to our friends at Table 50 for joining us and helping us make a difference for a worthy cause. Thanks also to the donors who matched our gift for their incredible generosity (in total they matched $350K as a group). Most of all, thanks to the FareStart students who worked tirelessly under the tutelage of some of Seattle’s best guest chefs to pull off a magnificent meal. My hope is that someday soon we will be seeing them alongside us at a FareStart gala, basking in their professional success and bidding a bit more than they probably should for a great cause.
