2023 Gift: Youth Alive

Youth Alive! is an Oakland-based organization that is focused on breaking the cycle of violence through prevention, intervention, healing and advocacy. Founded in 1991, Youth Alive! has a school-based prevention curriculum—Teens on Target—that reaches thousands of middle school students across Oakland annually and is focused on providing tools for conflict resolution and education on violence prevention. They provide violence interruption and bed-side support at three area hospitals through their Violence Interruption services and Caught in the Crossfire programs which offer case management focused on ensuring wounded youth have the resources they need to stabilize and heal.

Youth Alive also provides support to families who have experienced a death related to gun violence and provide ongoing counseling services to clients. Frontline staff are members of the communities they serve.

2022 Gift: Dignity on Wheels

 Dignity on Wheels is one of the largest programs of We Hope. We Hope is an organization set up in East Palo Alto by pastor Paul J. Bains. We Hope provides food and shelter and job training programs to the homeless. In 2015 it also started the mobile hygiene service Dignity on Wheels (offering showers, laundry service and bathrooms) to lift the spirit of the homeless population. The combination of services and the design of Dignity on Wheels’ purpose-built trucks are rooted in We Hope’s practical experience and deep empathy. What’s the value of a shower if you have to wear the same clothes afterwards? So let’s provide laundry service as well. Many bathrooms are closed to homeless people. So let’s add bathrooms. Many people want to shave, but that takes away from their showering time. So let’s equip every truck with an outside mirror and an outside sink. Today Dignity on Wheels comes to 20 cities, including 6 locations in the Bay Area. Each truck shows up twice a week for a 4-hour session which allows for 12 loads of laundry and 36 showers. Toiletries are also provided. On top of that, Dignity on Wheels  tries to leverage weekly contact moments with regulars to connect them to the broader services We Hope and others offer, such as job training, health services and permanent housing. And it works: 30% of all visitors end up using thed extended services and 30% eventually get into permanent housing.

2021: Street Level Health Project

Street Level Health Project (SLHP) is an Oakland-based community center dedicated to improving the wellbeing of underinsured, uninsured, and recently arrived immigrants in Alameda County by working with this population located in the two highly impacted 94601 and 94606 zip codes. Responding to the COVID pandemic, the SLHP staff and volunteers are currently focused on meeting the critical need for food caused by the diminishment of daily employment opportunities. Its Health Access Program acknowledges the role of employment in maintaining health and mitigating illness among low-wage workers facing poverty, malnutrition, chronic illness and homelessness. As one of the few organizations targeting Day Laborers in Oakland, its innovative outreach model pairs community health workers and employment specialists to engage disconnected workers in addressing social determinants of health.

2020: Voto Latino

Voto Latino is a grassroots organization dedicated to empowering the Latinx community in the democratic process through voter registration, education, and participation in the census. This is primarily achieved through the use of digital platforms like social media, as well as digital app called 'Voter Pal' that enables people to register to vote with only a driver's license. Voto Latino has been successful in registering a half a million people to vote, some for the very first time. Their current goal is to register 500,000 people in time for the 2020 elections in November.

2019: Healthcare Foundation of Northern Sonoma County

The 2019 recipient for Kindling is the Healthcare Foundation of Northern Sonoma County. Healthcare Foundation works to create healthier communities by raising funds to invest in critical areas of healthcare needs. Their three main focus areas include early childhood development, access to healthcare and mental health.

In response to the overwhelming needs created in the aftermath of the destructive wildfires in 2017 a Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative was formed to offer free help to those recovering from the fire. The six components of the collaborative include the development of an informative website to learn techniques to cope with stress, an app to help build resilience especially for teens, free individual counseling, trauma informed yoga, private group sessions at your own location and drop-in group counseling.

The Kindling Foundation chose to fund the Skills for Psychological Recovery training offered by the Healthcare Foundation in July of 2019 to mental health professionals. This is an evidence-based intervention to learn how to provide post- natural disaster support to moderately-distressed fire survivors. Over 320 mental health professionals have already been trained in previous trainings. Healthcare Foundation has teamed up with researchers at Stanford who will measure the effectiveness of their strategies. 
We are pleased with our choice for this year as it is both timely and of great importance. As wildfires continue to plague Northern California, having mental health professionals ready and trained to deal with the issues that come up in the aftermath is of fires is invaluable.

2018 Gift -- Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth

RJOYs is intervening both systemically and in direct service theoughout the Bay Area to interrupt broken systems of justice and incarceration.

Our grant this year supports in two ways: half provides money for “circles” which are the main tool of restorative justice. When harm is committed (from assault to rape to murder) community members are gathered, often with the perpetrator, to find paths to healing and eventual reintegration. When youth are released from jail, these circles have been shown to reduce recidivism by more than half.

One thing we love about RJOY is their use of indigenous African wisdom and culture. Often this helps young people who have known nothing but punishment and bureaucracy to connect with their own roots and a sense of purpose beyond violence.

The second part of our gift goes to support their Restorative Cities project. Working closely with Oakland’s mayor they are trying to make the city the first “restorative city” in America. That means RJ would become the norm in schools, in the DAs office and in Juvenile Hall. Their work has already gotten Oakland’s school system to invest $3m annually in RJ programs. This has sharply decreased suspension and expulsion, two key predictors of future incarceration.

In 2017, we chose to support Refugee Transitions

Refugee Transitions is a community-based nonprofit agency serving high-need, low-income refugee, asylee, and immigrant newcomers who have experienced forced migration due to war, violence, or economic duress. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Refugee Transitions provides education, family engagement, and community leadership services that help newcomers from over 50 countries become self-sufficient and successful in their new communities. A key component of their work over the last 30 years has been fostering cross-cultural relationships between receiving and newcomer communities and developing leaders within the newcomer communities.

Refugee Transitions' mission is to assist newcomer families in becoming self-sufficient in the United States by providing services to help them attain the English language, life, job, and academic skills they need to succeed in their new communities.

Their vision is to see all newcomers thrive and become full, participating members of our shared communities. They believe in the power of education to unlock opportunity, and they provide solutions that are transformative for students and volunteers alike. They are honored to share in the journeys of their students and firmly believe that refugees, asylees, and immigrants have the resilience and leadership potential to shape our world for the better.

The core service is Home-based Tutoring, for which they recruit, train, and match volunteer tutors with youth and adult newcomer students. This individualized program is highly effective. Their Home-based students consistently outperform demographic averages in terms of graduation rates and language-learning gains, and they are able to reach the most isolated members of our communities—newcomers who are young mothers, elderly, or disabled. Their Home-based Tutoring is supported by English Language and Literacy Classes for adults and After-School Tutoring for youth, along with family services and leadership development opportunities that help to find comprehensive solutions and create pathways forward for newcomers.