At The Crossroads

Rob Gitin robg@atthecrossroads.org 415-517-5458

At The Crossroads (ATC)Introduction

A San Francisco non-profit that reaches out to homeless youth and young adults at their point of need, and works with them to build healthy and fulfilling lives

Annual Budget (2011): $660,000

Staff size (2011): 8.5Street Outreach Counselors: 4

Since ATC started 13 years ago, we have helped more than 5,500 youth realize their dreams

At The Crossroads (ATC)Mission

We help homeless youth move beyond the streets & build outstanding lives

We accomplish this through nighttime street outreach,

one-to-one counseling,

collaboration, and advocacy

We help our youth thrive, not just

survive

We partner with other agencies and local government to

ensure there is a strong continuum of

care

We remove barriers by bringing our

counselors to the street, and provide

unconditional support

We focus on young people who do not access traditional

services

At The Crossroads (ATC)How ATC is Different

Focus on youth

Sustainable approach

Meet youth at their point of need

We focus on youth that are not targeted by other services or have not responded to traditional services

Youth who are disconnected from any type of consistent support

We walk the streets at night time, going to our clients’ turf, rather than making them come to us

We work with clients for as long as they want, even after they are off the streets

We focus on listening rather than advising, believing that helping our clients generate their own solutions is the best long-term approach

At The Crossroads (ATC)Why We Need Your Help

ATC is 100% privately supported; we do not take government money. About 20% ($125,000) of our funding comes from the I Think I Can Campaign and Summer

Sunday Hike, which is largely web-driven. An additional 40% ($250,000) comes from donors to our Annual Fund, which is fueled by the Campaign and the Hike. Therefore, our funding is dependent on our Hike and Campaign Websites!

Support for Youth Support for ATC

The number of youth on SF’s streets continues to grow, along with their material needs (food, clothing, etc.)

Our youth require intensive support to move forward in their lives, and this does not come cheaply

We need more counselors to provide SF’s homeless youth with the support they need to move beyond the streets

In the last two years, demand for our support has risen 200%, while our staff size has shrunk

At The Crossroads (ATC)What The Project Is

I Think I Can Campaign Summer SunDay Hike

This project will be to develop significant features on our I Think I Can Campaign Site and Summer SunDay Site, working on their databases. This is a wish list, and we understand everything may not get accomplished!

The goals include the following: Developing a feature to send out automated and manually created emails through the sites Developing a calendar feature that allows participants to have a personal calendar of

activities, and creates an overall Campaign calendar that shows all participant activities Developing tools that enable participants to easily record and send out video messages Developing social networking features that make it easy to share any action you take on the

site with your social networking communities Developing a photo gallery feature Other assorted improvements and smaller new upgrades in functionality

At The Crossroads (ATC)Why it’s a fun project

There is a diversity of tasks, enabling developers to build expertise in a wide range of areas. It

will include creating new features using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS It allows for a lot of creativity. We have our own ideas on how things should work, but are

excited to have students take ownership of the project and develop their own ideas. We have experience working on web development projects, and already have a project

management site (Pivotal Tracker) and a subversion host (CVS Dude), so we will be able to hit

the ground running. You will get mentorship and support from Arun Bhalla, ATC’s volunteer web

developer, who has 15 years of development experience The people involved with ATC are a cool bunch! You’ll get to meet many of them, and we know

you’ll like them! This project would have a tremendous impact on ATC, and therefore a huge impact on

homeless youth in San Francisco. These kids really deserve all of the support they can get.