Talking with the ClearPath Foundation
For this week’s post, I was able to talk with two leading members of the ClearPath Foundation, a group that’s working to address the issues that come with youth homelessness in our city. Their founder and chief executive officer, Sedonami Agosa, describes ClearPath’s goals and mission as “to help teenagers aging out of the foster care system as well as homeless teenagers with providing them with access to a bunch of supportive resources, including access to mental wellbeing resources, temporary and supportive housing, outlets to foster creativity, as well as academic and professional resources.”
“Clearpath’s product,” described by newly joined Anna Gildea, ClearPath’s outreach coordinator, “is a website that hasn’t rolled out yet and so a lot of the work that we’re doing at this point is trying to have conversations like these, generally spread awareness, and to build a network of people to release it to once it’s ready.”
The foster care to homelessness pipeline is a really big theme in their work, and because I know the topic can be unfamiliar (it definitely was to me) I asked Sedonami to elaborate a little bit on what that means:
“One of the biggest problems within the Foster Care system is that once you hit the age of 14, 15, 16, 17, the likelihood of you getting picked up by a family and staying with that family decreases by seventy five percent. There’s like a lingering problem where ages 13-17 are jumping from family to family. By the time you turn 18 you’re considered an adult by the state and no longer have access to the foster care system or all the resources that the system provides. So what tends to happen is when you’re 17 and you don’t have a stable family, most times you lose access to the foster care system, meaning that you no longer have access to housing. I will say that in New York City it’s a bit different because they’ve started providing services that you have access to until the age of 24, if you age out of the foster care system, but on a National level that’s not the case. Because of that you start seeing a huge increase in teenagers leaving the foster care system and knowing from the age of 14 that they’re not going to have a family.”
Sedonami first really encountered and learned about the problem in high school, where some of the roots for ClearPath originated: “We’re about eleven individuals, and five of us were in high school together. We always had a passion for helping homeless people, specifically teenagers. It really started from a few of us going on speech and debate tournaments and going out for lunch and seeing a lot of homeless teenagers hanging around the McDonalds area. From there, we started collecting World’s Finest Chocolate bars, which have coupons on the back, and every time we went down there we’d use the coupons to buy hamburgers and give them out. We started an organization in high school called Teens For Change that was doing food drives, clothing drives, and working at food pantries. Later on, when I was in college, I received a grant for social entrepreneurship through a two year progeam where I got to research anything. I really focused on the foster care system and homelessness, and eventually I really realized that there was a big big pipeline between them. I started looking into the gaps in the foster care system, as well as the gaps in the system for homeless teenagers, and I started to see that there are a lot of resources out there, but gaining access to them is such a tedious and overwhelming process. When I started thinking about it more and more I realized, there’s a lot of programs out there, so we don’t want to be another program that takes away the light from organizations doing a great job. There seems to be a problem of access and availability of the resources, and that led me to the creation of ClearPath, an access point to all the plethora programs out there, as well as creating an easier and streamlined way to getting those resources and making sure youth get responses on time. Through my research I also found that there’s a lot of disconnectivity between the non-profit sector, and when I say that I mean there’s a lot of resources and programs out there but they’re not connecting with each other, working together to solve the problem. That’s why I wanted to create a database where on the backend there’s a connection and partnership between all these programs and then on the front end it’s showing all these programs that can help people in their day to day lives.”
Later in the interview, Anna elaborated on his point about not creating another nonprofit and instead focusing on connecting the ones that exist already. “I think part of the creation of clearpath,” she said, “is acknowledging that there’s this weird ego that comes into nonprofit starters where everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, everyone wants to come up with something new, but there’s so many nonprofits out there that everything’s been thought of already. Everybody wants to start a new nonprofit and direct resources towards a super small thing instead of acknowledging that maybe that nonprofit has been started already and many you should just join it instead of just trying to start your own for the sake of it. What Sed’s been doing is having an aggregator of all these resources and directing people to one place. We have seen first hand when you try to find a room for the night, you can put ten college graduates together and it’s almost impossible to find a place sometimes. It’s so difficult to know where to go sometimes, and it shouldn’t be so hard. I think that that meets a unique need without creating a whole new thing in a way; just acknowledging that a lot has already been done but it’s so hard to access available resources. There’s also a huge percentage of homeless youth that have access, at least once a day, to wi-fi. That’s something that we can make use of.”
Though I know that the interests of our readers vary, I think that piece of advice is really important and universal, especially when you think about the college admissions process and activism specifically. I think that we’re all encouraged to be leaders, and that’s amazing, but it’s important to remember what the purpose of your work is, beyond your individual gain or ego, as Anna put it.
When talking about ClearPath’s short term and long term goals, they brought up their website launch, maybe an app, and a heavy focus on building a community to release to when the project is ready. They suggested you check out their instagram, @clearpath_foundation, or blog, where they post regularly with resources and information.
To end the conversation, like we do with every interview, I asked both of them what their pieces of advice to the audience would be. They answered really genuinely, and I think we could all benefit from what the both had to say.
Anna said, “I just think it’s so important to be yourself. I really really wish I had been myself more, instead of who I was in middle school. It couldn’t be a harder time to be in school than it is right now, but one way to connect with people is online and doing things like this. It really makes a difference for mental health to see faces, even if it’s on tik tok or whatever, and those connections can really change your life.
Sedonami said “One of the biggest things when I entered college, going to a majority white institution, was imposter syndrome and feeling as if I didn’t belong there. I think one of the important things you need to realize is when you step into any majority white space, you are there for a reason. It doesn’t matter what the background is of all the other people around you, you’re still there regardless of that, and on an equal level because you made it there. You should be proud of being in those spaces instead of the exact opposite, feeling like an imposter.”
A special thank you to both of them for participating in this conversation, and check them out at the links included for more information! Our dms, emails, and comments are always open so let us know who you’d like us to talk with next.
