On January 15, 2020, Casey Family Programs, the largest private foundation whose aim is to minimize the need for foster care while creating communities of hope, awarded Bring Up Nebraska with the Jim Casey Building Communities of Hope Award.
Nebraska Children and Families Foundation is proud to lead this prevention partnership.
A young woman was temporarily homeless. How did she use her resilience, resources, and a little support from a Central Navigator and KAJ Hospitality to find a place she now calls home?
At 25 years old, Kloreace thought big and dreamed bigger. Six months after enrolling in Opportunity Passport™, she bought a house! A passionate school psychologist, she possesses many talents: she’s intelligent, driven, and compassionate. She’s also an advocate for the Opportunity Passport ™ program, which we oversee along with Community Action Partnership of Lancaster and Saunders Counties.
Imagine having experienced the foster care system. Maybe you connected with a family. Maybe you didn’t, and now you’re alone. You’re ready to live your best life, but are so focused on surviving, you’ve yet to approach thriving.
The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, CYI, Central Plains Center for Services and The Sherwood Foundation have teamed up to create Granting Opportunities for Achievement and Lifelong Success (GOALS). This initiative supports young adults who are transitioning from extended foster care during and throughout the pandemic. Read more.
When Zeny and her husband moved from the small town of Hastings, Nebraska to Lincoln, she had to begin all over again. For anyone who has encountered not only a new chapter in life, but a new library, that transition can be scary, exciting, and abrupt. One CYI component that helped Zeny along her way was Opportunity Passport™, which is implemented in Lincoln by Community Action Partnership of Lancaster and Saunders County. Read more about Zeny’s accomplishments.
Resources for Unconnected Youth: Connected Youth Initiative Grants Hope During an unsettling time, our communities and youth with foster care experience matter. Despite these challenges, positive changes are happening every day both here at Nebraska Children and Families Foundation and in the communities in which we work. We’ve seen…
Long before the pandemic, Connected Youth Initiative’s Project Everlast Omaha, its partners, and the community has offered programs to assist unconnected youth. The term “unconnected youth” refers to young people between the ages of 14-25 years of age who have experienced the foster care system, juvenile justice system and/or probation, homelessness, or human trafficking. Find out more about Project Everlast Omaha’s efforts to support unconnected youth!
As COVID-19 numbers rise, Project Everlast Omaha seeks out those affected youth in the metro, particularly those released from incarceration. For young members of our community, feeling excluded is hard enough, but being released into an uncertain, altered world is even more taxing.
Read more about how Project Everlast Omaha assisted a young man who had been released from incarceration.
As we search for light in dark corners, we must acknowledge the struggles, strengths and triumphs of these youth. Each one has a different story; each one is capable of being remarkably successful, sometimes with a little support from CYI’s resources.
Recently, one young mother’s story arrives at a welcome time. Although her experience was not easy, and was perhaps exacerbated by the coronavirus, we are glad that she was resourceful and resilient enough to ask for assistance, and that CYI was there to help. Read this young woman’s story.
Schuyler, Nebraska, with the help of our First Lady and other generous organizations, provided a terrific example of a community that cultivates positive change through engagement. When families in the Platte/Colfax Counties who were pursuing distance-learning were left with no available technology, the Community and Family Partnership, one of Bring Up Nebraska’s community collaboratives, reached out to its partners for assistance.
Find out what happened next.
Growing the Good Life 