MPW Spotlight: A Sense of Home

Please join me in welcoming Georgie Mack. I just want to make sure she gets the life that she deserves because I wasn't able to get the life that I deserve. Before, it isn't a place where anyone sleeps. Now I see, like, color, life. I, like, see a vision. I feel home. Me and my daughter have just been sleeping with my blankets and pillows on the floor. I want to be the mom that I never had. It made me feel like I was truly loved. I know I'm loved by my mom, but it made me feel like I'm loved by other people that aren't my mom. They see that I'm a hard worker and they were able to acknowledge that, it meant a lot. I don't have my mom to be able to acknowledge that. To have a community to show up brought back humanity for me that I had lost many years ago. This just makes me feel like I matter, and that I'm here. It's not just your home getting furnished. It's generating a type of hope where the world throws at you what it will, but you're not toppled by it anymore. It's the type of hope that helps you navigate transitions with resilience. When you're in survival mode, you don't dream because you can't, but when you experience a safe place where you can rest, you start to discover that magic, and it helps us to dream again. I'm Georgie Smith, president and founder of A Sense of Home, and I'm so thrilled to be here with you. It's very inspiring to be amongst women, empowering other women to reach their full potential, which really reminds me about the birth of a sense of home which happened when my spouse and I were going through the adoption process. We were qualified as adoptive parents and then we thought what about foster care and to get educated in the foster care space we started volunteering and shortly thereafter a young man who'd aged out of the foster care system asked for my help. He'd seen a social media post and it was I was transforming a space for a friend, a home and I inquired a little bit about him and he had never been adopted so he was aged out and fending for himself and he secured the miracle of a Section 8 apartment which is amazing but with no friends or family or community to turn to he was living on the floor and that's where I found him when he asked me to come visit him. He had his belongings in black garbage bags, clothing, shoes, there was no fridge stove let alone a sofa a bed there was one functioning light and in that space that very depressing space I thought for the first time about the phrase a sense of home and I also realized that it was there's a massive psychological difference between being housed and feeling at home and I remembered my first apartment and how at home I felt and I desperately wanted that for this young man and I also wanted to know how did he get here like how did this happen and I discovered a crisis. So only 25% of kids that go into the system get adopted. Every year at any given time there's about half a million in the system and 10% are aging out. 50% of the homeless population once spent time in foster care. Looking at this young man's situation I kind of could see how that would come to be and I discovered this term furniture poverty which is that without the means for a home to function like we all know it should. One can't show up and perform in work and school and they slide into homelessness. So I quickly did, which I'm sure all of you would have done, which was you asked your friends and your community for hand-me-down items. We secured hundreds of items within a day. And then my friends and I, we went and gathered everything and we created an exquisite home for this young man. And he was transformed as well us a space and he posted really proudly on social media and then all of his friends who had also exited the foster care system said can you please connect us to this service so speaking with them I explained it's not a service but of course we will support you and these requests did not stop coming in so I did go looking for a service nothing existed anywhere in the world so Melissa and I and our friends, we performed random act of kindness after random act of kindness. And it was for all women. It was young women and many of them with children, all living on the floor. And if social services came in, their kids would have been taken from them. And they would have gone into the system that the parents had escaped. And that's how they saw the foster care system, something to be escaped, where there was a lot of trauma that happened. And in fact, that's what I found, is that they were carrying more trauma than combat vets So we continued to respond to these cries for help, and I'm trying to convince the non-profits we're volunteering with about this crisis and here's the solution, and they were a little bit scared of it. And I'm like, I've got to come up with a model so that I can convince them to take this on as a program because it is a massive void and it needs to be dealt with. And I found this other situation, which is that 0.3% of all furniture is recycled, and there is about 380 billion a year of returned goods, perfectly good goods that are returned to retailers and they're shipped to landfills and paid to go into landfills. So how can I divert that to get to these kids that are in need? And then I came up with this model of the volunteers creating the home within only 90 minutes, created this incredible system and we still couldn't convince these non-profits to take this on. They were like, ooh, warehouse, trucks, liability, no, we can't do it. So in 2015, January of that year, Melissa and I had this very serious conversation. Rather than adopting one, why don't we serve thousands of young people and we started a sense of home. And nearly 12 years later, here we are and we have created 2,200 homes and served 6,400 young people in Los Angeles. And in May of this year, we opened in New York. and all of those, we've got a lot of brands that now come to us that are not only giving us their goods but they have heard about this powerful volunteer experience so this amazing corporate social responsibility, team building activity and we have this incredible thing going on where the young people are doing so well in their apartments that property developers have come to us saying you're creating the most successful tenant so right now in LA we've got 500 apartments so we refer the individuals to the apartment create the home and then we bring them into a community of care and the community of care is the essence of home community where we provide educational scholarships financial literacy and we provide really importantly mental health onboarding parenting classes and we create pods with other organizations so that no one is slipping between the cracks and the most important part is they get to pay it forward so after they've received their home they come to pay it forward to the next and that's how they organically become a part of the community they become an agent of change they become empowered to be the change they want to see in the in the world and they get to connect organically with their friends and their peers because that's what's also lacking it's home and community and so we have this incredible volunteer experience as I said that where people are coming they've just heard about us through word of mouth and our volunteers some of the most highest profile people in the world and then there's those that experienced the fires in last January in LA so a lot of our volunteers lost their homes and knowing how important home is to them that's it's the place where we spend two-thirds of our entire life is the foundational ecosystem for our existence we created a whole new program a disaster recovery program and we've already created a thousand homes for those that experienced the fires and that's about one sixth of the population of Altadena and through this we discovered that there's a lot of populations we need to touch so right now we're just focused on the foster youth and providing this three-step way to stability and we're going to convert our disaster recovery program into a licensing model to serve other populations because beyond foster youth there is this need, especially women escaping domestic violence. So as we focus on scaling our operations around the United States, we'll look at partnering with non-profits on the ground to license our model and to really expand what we've done. And I'm just really excited to be in this room and to connect with you all over the next few days and invite you to be a part of what we do. You know, there's opportunities to join our board, to connect us with philanthropists, like-minded organizations, come to our gala on November 12th. And I just could take a photo of that, or we've got some booklets out the front there if you want to learn more about the organization. and I just really thank you for getting to know our work and I hope to meet you over the next few days. And I'm just going to have a little further chat with Ellie. Yeah, round of applause for Georgie, please. Yeah, she does really, really amazing work. Georgie, I know the organisation started in LA and then this year you expanded to New York. Tell me a bit about Operation Me, how those two cities have been different. Well, fortunately we have a partner in New York that has not because we need a big warehouse we need a lot of space around 10,000 square feet so we partnered with a moving company in New York that was had the insurance to go into the buildings in New York and also was just understood New York really really well so they're giving they've wrapped one of their trucks in our logo so they've given us their access to their staff and also a space within their warehouse so that's donated we began with the donated warehouse and so we knew that that was possible so we went looking for that so that's a little bit different in terms of having that kind of partnership and all those flights of stairs you've got to go up we've also found the apartments to be in much worse condition in New York yes so we typically so we can refer someone to an apartment if we if they've if we've got an apartment that's a match for that young person sometimes like the original young man that found us they're on the floor already and in New York we have a partnership with Benjamin Ball paint to paint the buildings the interiors because they're really bad and the floors are really bad so thankfully we have a partnership with Ruggable for covering the because you know you can't carpet a rented apartment so with area rugs has been really important and I have to say that that kind of community part of what I was speaking about so Ruggable founder Geneva Bell is the main funder of our scholarship their staff come to volunteer so they donate area rugs funds and they come to participate so we love having that kind of relationship with our partners what you mentioned some of the things that areas you need support right now what's the biggest challenge that a sense of home is facing at this moment massive demand because no one's doing what we're doing so it's meeting it's scaling at the right pace so we went to New York because New York asked us to come it has the second largest population of foster youth in the country LA has the largest there's a lot of other cities that want us to come now but also women escaping domestic violence is typically the reason why a young person's going into foster care and that is typically why a woman is becoming homeless and those organizations have come to us so I mentioned licensing our model we've built our own software our own app so to license to non-profits that are willing to take this on that is serving other populations we've become very expert at foster youth and so if we can work with those non-profits to license our model that we do have Kirkland Ellis working with us on an agreement in that capacity so can we're doing a strategic plan in 2027 and is that the way we deal with that massive demand so that could be a way to expand across the country in terms of beyond foster youth because it is so profoundly impactful it prevents homelessness and it provides the community it makes someone feel so seen and heard the young person at the end that you heard from Regina she's a PhD student she's in her final year she's studying the impact that we've had on her and she has educated us of the science of how it's changed her life and she was someone that went into the system because the parents died due to health reasons you know not they were living in poverty but it was health reasons right and she is a she's a recipient of our scholarship she's what the experience is a corrective experience many of you would have heard about this from clinical psychology you need a corrective experience many corrective experiences to get over trauma and this the actual radical transformation of love and community showing up to create the home provides a corrective experience which so it's not just a home and it's not just a community there's a psychological shift that allows someone to go out to become a successful citizen and to actually begin to achieve their goals and dream bigger and finally what do you want all of us in this room to leave knowing about foster youth that it takes a village to raise kids and we when we forget about those that are most where the challenges are really stacked against them they're not going to become the adults that we want to have in society so get in as quickly as we can to support them to provide the care and to make them feel seen and heard like one person can make a difference one person saying I believe in you truly does make a difference and so being aware of organizations like us and others and volunteering your time with your company with your family to participate in being the village it takes to raise a child and you know the average child average American child doesn't stop being dependent on their parents until 29 and these kids are aging out at 18 and 21 it's not possible for them they really need infrastructure they need they need us and it started off just by simply sharing furniture and home goods but then something so much more and I think that's the really interesting thing that I've discovered in this is that home as policy as policymakers science is getting it but the policymakers aren't understanding it's not like it's not just about education and jobs education and jobs doesn't happen unless you've got a home and you feel safe and that you feel confident to go out to study and to have your job. And that's something that I think, especially as women, we really get it. We, you know, it's something I kind of always pushed away from, like people always wanting me to redesign their homes and I didn't want to be put in that box as a woman, but it is the foundation of the economy. Without the home, there is no economy. and so we need to pay more attention to creating emotionally resilient and beautiful homes and we can do that collectively because we all love doing it it's so much fun it's like in 90 minutes it's like you know Lady Gaga heard about it and came because she was like what is this going on it's like because we get changed because we see that we can shift from seeing witnessing radical transformation but also remembering that home doesn't have to be this big thing it's just where we feel like we're loved and we belong and that emotional safety is what's most important Georgie thank you so much and Georgie will be at dinner this evening so please come say hello thank you you did a great job yay