At The Crossroads Rob Gitin [email protected] 415-517-5458
Dec 19, 2015
At The Crossroads (ATC)Introduction
A San Francisco non-profit that reaches out to homeless youth and young adults at their point of need, and works with them to build healthy and fulfilling lives
Annual Budget (2011): $660,000
Staff size (2011): 8.5Street Outreach Counselors: 4
Since ATC started 13 years ago, we have helped more than 5,500 youth realize their dreams
At The Crossroads (ATC)Mission
We help homeless youth move beyond the streets & build outstanding lives
We accomplish this through nighttime street outreach,
one-to-one counseling,
collaboration, and advocacy
We help our youth thrive, not just
survive
We partner with other agencies and local government to
ensure there is a strong continuum of
care
We remove barriers by bringing our
counselors to the street, and provide
unconditional support
We focus on young people who do not access traditional
services
At The Crossroads (ATC)How ATC is Different
Focus on youth
Sustainable approach
Meet youth at their point of need
We focus on youth that are not targeted by other services or have not responded to traditional services
Youth who are disconnected from any type of consistent support
We walk the streets at night time, going to our clients’ turf, rather than making them come to us
We work with clients for as long as they want, even after they are off the streets
We focus on listening rather than advising, believing that helping our clients generate their own solutions is the best long-term approach
At The Crossroads (ATC)Why We Need Your Help
ATC is 100% privately supported; we do not take government money. About 20% ($125,000) of our funding comes from the I Think I Can Campaign and Summer
Sunday Hike, which is largely web-driven. An additional 40% ($250,000) comes from donors to our Annual Fund, which is fueled by the Campaign and the Hike. Therefore, our funding is dependent on our Hike and Campaign Websites!
Support for Youth Support for ATC
The number of youth on SF’s streets continues to grow, along with their material needs (food, clothing, etc.)
Our youth require intensive support to move forward in their lives, and this does not come cheaply
We need more counselors to provide SF’s homeless youth with the support they need to move beyond the streets
In the last two years, demand for our support has risen 200%, while our staff size has shrunk
At The Crossroads (ATC)What The Project Is
I Think I Can Campaign Summer SunDay Hike
This project will be to develop significant features on our I Think I Can Campaign Site and Summer SunDay Site, working on their databases. This is a wish list, and we understand everything may not get accomplished!
The goals include the following: Developing a feature to send out automated and manually created emails through the sites Developing a calendar feature that allows participants to have a personal calendar of
activities, and creates an overall Campaign calendar that shows all participant activities Developing tools that enable participants to easily record and send out video messages Developing social networking features that make it easy to share any action you take on the
site with your social networking communities Developing a photo gallery feature Other assorted improvements and smaller new upgrades in functionality
At The Crossroads (ATC)Why it’s a fun project
There is a diversity of tasks, enabling developers to build expertise in a wide range of areas. It
will include creating new features using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS It allows for a lot of creativity. We have our own ideas on how things should work, but are
excited to have students take ownership of the project and develop their own ideas. We have experience working on web development projects, and already have a project
management site (Pivotal Tracker) and a subversion host (CVS Dude), so we will be able to hit
the ground running. You will get mentorship and support from Arun Bhalla, ATC’s volunteer web
developer, who has 15 years of development experience The people involved with ATC are a cool bunch! You’ll get to meet many of them, and we know
you’ll like them! This project would have a tremendous impact on ATC, and therefore a huge impact on
homeless youth in San Francisco. These kids really deserve all of the support they can get.