LAUNCHPADS: A Freedom Forward Pilot

In California, 1 in 4 youth exiting foster care end up homeless within two years. To try and address this, Freedom Forward piloted Launchpads— an AirBNB-like platform that tried to connect individuals with extra space in their homes with youth in extended foster care who were in need of housing. Our hope was to radically change the way young people accessed housing and to fill a much needed hole in the system. After trying to make the project work for two years, we ultimately decided that we would not be able to scale the program the way that we hoped. This page shares our learnings and collateral so that others who are running similar programs can avoid mistakes we made, and use any of our materials that may be beneficial.

We are so grateful to everyone who helped us along the way.

Launchpads Learning Report

Freedom Forward is a registered 501c3 organization that is working to prevent the commercial sexual exploitation of youth in San Francisco by transforming systems that too often contribute to their exploitation. We are committed to improving systems such as the foster care system and the juvenile justice system that often intersect with commercial sexual exploitation by bringing new ideas, funding, and resources to the space. We are a community that takes risks in pursuit of a better future for the youth we support, with the conviction that changing the status quo requires bold steps that may or may not work. As part of our guiding principles, we focus on fostering thoughtful innovation, including sharing our learning openly, even (and perhaps most importantly) the initiatives that did not go according to plan.

This report discusses Launchpads, a project that built an online marketplace where youth in extended foster care could find rooms for rent in the home of community members. After trying to make the project work for two years, we ultimately decided that we would not be able to scale the program the way that we hoped. This report discusses the journey of this pilot program, including learnings and areas for improvement.

Launchpads Collateral

When we built Launchpads we imagined that it would make housing searches easier for three different sets of people: youth looking for rooms, hosts who had spaces to rent out, and social workers who are often left helping young people find housing without many resources at their finger tips. Our tech platform had portals for each of these users, and programmatically we built out support for each different use case. Below we’ve included demo videos showing how the technology worked and handbooks for each user type.