Lattia
Foster Love
What problem does Foster Love solve?
There are more than 430,000 children in the American foster care system at any given time, and only about half that many licensed foster parents. Kids in care are routinely moved between placements carrying their belongings in garbage bags. They face disproportionate rates of homelessness, educational disruption, PTSD, and involvement in the criminal justice system. Foster families and agencies are stretched thin, and the gap between what these kids need and what the system provides is enormous. Most people have no idea how bad it is — and even fewer know how to help.
Who benefits from their work?
Children and youth currently in the foster care system across all 50 states, along with foster families, kinship caregivers, and the local agencies that support them. Programs reach kids from early childhood through young adulthood, with specific initiatives targeting emergency needs, enrichment, education, and the transition out of care.
What makes their approach unique?
Foster Love built a self-sustaining business model that most nonprofits only dream about. They created a corporate team-building company whose profits fund the charity — meaning 100% of public donations go directly to programs for kids. Not 90%, not "most." Every dollar. The team building side offers in-person and virtual service activities where corporate employees decorate duffle bags, build bikes, assemble birthday boxes, and create STEM kits that go straight to foster youth in their local communities. It's a model where businesses get meaningful team experiences and kids get tangible resources, and the charity never has to choose between fundraising and serving. On top of that, they partner with over 2,400 local agencies nationwide to make sure donations and resources reach kids in the donor's own community.
What does a donation accomplish?
Every dollar donated goes to programs — operational costs are covered separately through the team-building business and corporate partnerships. Donations fund Sweet Case duffle bags that replace the trash bags kids are given when they move between placements. Each bag is decorated by a volunteer and stuffed with a teddy bear, blanket, hygiene kit, coloring book, and crayons. Beyond that, funds support bike builds, skateboard builds, birthday boxes, superhero boxes, STEM kits, academic services, emergency rapid response resources, and higher education support. Ninety-two percent of total organizational spending goes directly to children, with just 6% on general operations and 2% on fundraising.
Where do they serve?
All 50 states — Foster Love partners with more than 2,400 local foster care agencies across the country to distribute resources and connect volunteers with foster youth in their own communities.
In 2008, Danny Mendoza was a junior in high school when he learned that his nine-year-old cousin Roger had ended up in the foster care system and was sleeping in a vehicle. Danny was sixteen — too young to become a foster parent, too young for most people to take seriously. But he wasn't too young to do something. He started collecting recycled cans to fund a sports camp for kids in foster care. That was the whole operation: one kid, some cans, and a camp.
That small start turned into something nobody expected. The sports camp became an organization. The organization became a movement. Today, Foster Love has served over a million foster youth across all 50 states.
The thing that makes us different isn't just our size — it's how we pay for it. Early on, we realized that the typical nonprofit fundraising cycle was a trap. You spend half your energy asking people for money and the other half justifying how you spent it. So we built a team-building company. Corporations pay us to run service activities for their employees — decorating duffle bags, building bikes, assembling birthday and STEM boxes — and the profits from that business fund our entire operation. That means when you donate to Foster Love, every single dollar goes to kids. Not overhead. Not salaries. Not rent. Kids.
The program we're best known for is the Sweet Case. When children in foster care get moved from one home to another — which happens a lot — they're usually handed a couple of garbage bags to carry their stuff in. Think about that for a second. You're a kid, your whole life just got upended again, and someone hands you a trash bag like your belongings are garbage. We replace those bags with personalized blue duffle bags stuffed with a teddy bear, a blanket, a hygiene kit, a coloring book, and crayons. Volunteers decorate every single one. It's a small thing that says something enormous: you matter, and your stuff matters, and you are not trash.
We work with over 2,400 agency partners across the country. When someone donates or volunteers in their city, those resources stay local. The bikes go to kids in their community. The birthday boxes show up at their local agency. That connection between giving and local impact is something we protect fiercely.
We've been at this for almost twenty years now and we're nowhere close to done. There are still 430,000 kids in the system. There are still kids carrying garbage bags. And as long as that's true, we've got work to do.
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