About
Three successful professionals.
None of us takes a salary.
Operating in the shadows, 10 years strong. The people running this organization already have careers of their own. Nobody here is paid by it, and nothing given to it is spent on us.
3
Working professionals running the organization
$0
Paid out in salaries to any of us
10
Years strong, operating in the shadows
18+
The age our work begins, not the age it ends
Who We Are
When The System Steps Away
Your Heart Our Hands is an Arizona nonprofit providing direct, practical support to young adults aging out of foster care. Powered by professionals and intentionally built lean, we show up where the need is, keep resources focused on young people, and stay involved when formal support ends.
Foster care is built around a date. On one side of it, a young person has a case worker, a placement, a plan, and a phone number that answers. On the other side, most of that ends in the same week they are expected to sign a lease, hold a job, and manage their own health care.
We work on the far side of that date. Not as a replacement for the system, and not as a program a young person ages out of a second time, but as the people who keep answering. And we do not wait for a young person to find us. We go out and look.
What We Do
How we show up
- Street Ministry
Street Outreach
We do street ministry. We look for the aged-out foster kids where homeless people gather — encampments, shelters, transit centers, the parking lots and underpasses where people end up when there is nowhere else. Most of the young people we serve did not come to us from a referral list. Someone went out and found them.
- Housing
Housing Navigation
We help young people find, apply for, and keep stable housing, and stay reachable when things get shaky.
- Education
Career & Education
Support enrolling in school or training, building a resume, and landing a first real job.
- Mentorship
Mentorship & Connection
A consistent adult in your corner. Not a caseworker who rotates out, someone who stays.
- Crisis
Crisis Response
Direct, fast help when something urgent comes up: a lost ID, an eviction notice, a missed paycheck.
How We Work
Lean, direct, and built around one thing
Run by professionals
Social workers, case managers, and operators who have worked inside the system and know where it drops people.
Nobody takes a salary
Three working professionals run this organization unpaid. There is no payroll line to cover before the work starts.
We go where the need is
Meetings happen at a job site, a bus stop, an apartment complex, not only in an office.
We stay after the paperwork
There is no exit date on the relationship. Support does not end because a file closes.
Ten years in
What that has actually looked like
Dozens of young adults, over ten years. We do not have a success rate to quote you, and we would be wary of anyone working with this population who did.
- Hearing aids for someone who could not hear.
- Glasses for someone who could not see.
- Getting somebody re-enrolled in school after they had been out of it.
- A place in a church project where a person could be useful and known.
Very few of the young adults we have worked with finished high school or earned a GED. That is the real number, and it is not for lack of trying. Some got back into school and stayed. Some got back in and left again. We kept answering the phone either way.
What we can say without qualification is that dozens of people got something they needed from us that they were not going to get anywhere else.
The rest of it
Need does not arrive in tidy categories
Most of what we do is for young adults leaving foster care. That is the work, and it is why this organization exists.
But over ten years the need has not always shown up with the right label on it. A widow with nobody left to call. An orphan. A family carrying a disability they did not plan for. When somebody like that crosses our path, we do not check whether they fit the mission statement before we help.
That is what the name means. Your heart is what gets donated. Our hands do the work.
Who Is Accountable
Board of directors
Sergio DeSoto
Technology consultant
Matthew 25:31-46
Joel S. Levinson
Retired 3M executive, five-time entrepreneur, author
Robyn Interpreter
Attorney at law, M&I Law
The board serves without compensation. No one at YHOH draws a salary.
Getting Started
Three steps in
Reach Out
A young person, a caseworker, or anyone who knows them can start it.
Meet Your Navigator
One person who learns the whole situation, not a rotating intake queue.
Build Your Plan
Whatever comes next: housing, work, school, a document you cannot get replaced.