Folsom's Hope

Folsom's Hope serves a specific and essential community need. Without Folsom's Hope, no support programs are available to families in Folsom that provide educational, social and emotional support, including after school programming and one-on-one mentoring programs. Many student participants qualify for homeless program services and the free school breakfast and lunch programs. All of the students we serve struggle with academic performance. Programming is essential to target underserved at-risk youth. Participants in the programs face significant challenges including parent incarcerations, homelessness, transient lifestyles, and/or absent parenting. Our mission is to create relationship-based programming that meets students' educational, physical, social and emotional needs. Statistics show that children who are not given adequate resources early in their lives are two to six times more likely to vandalize, face criminal convictions, have teenage pregnancies, and fail to graduate. Folsom's Hope's community-based efforts seek to keep our participants from becoming part of these statistics.

Because Folsom has no Title I schools, we do not qualify for traditional grant funding for our programming. While we certainly have a need, the percentage of poverty at each of our school sites where our programming it held is not great enough to qualify for traditional grants. As a result, we depend solely on private/individual donors and business donors to help support all of our programming. Prior to Folsom's Hope providing this type of support programming, there were no programs in Folsom for at-risk students to meet these needs.