No young person should have to figure out adulthood alone.
The Hayes Youth Foundation is for young people ages 16 to 26 who are entering adulthood with no one behind them.
We walk beside you. You build the life.
The gap we are built for
Most young adults
have someone to call.
Someone who explains how a lease works. Who notices when they go quiet. Who knows a hiring manager. Who has a couch after a breakup. Who tells them the truth and stays anyway.
Some young people have none of that.
What they are missing is not services. Services exist. It is continuity: an adult who knew what happened last month and will still be there next month.
We give presence where presence was absent, tools nobody taught, resources that were never available, and doors that would otherwise stay closed.
And we stay, through the hard parts and the good ones, long after the programs end.
What we are building
Three things, launched together.
Each one fails alone. We have watched it happen.
A safe place to stand
The Marcos Fund and Doors of Hope open apartments through partnerships with multifamily owners.
The knowledge to move forward
Life Lab teaches what adulthood quietly assumes someone already taught you.
People who keep showing up
The Table brings young people and steady adults together over recurring meals.
Why Utah
Small enough
to actually solve.
In 2019, roughly 130 young people aged out of Utah's foster care system. That is about six percent of everyone who left care that year.
One hundred and thirty is a solvable number. And it counts only foster care. It leaves out everyone arriving from domestic violence, family breakdown, estrangement, or a home that stopped being safe.
A first cohort of fifteen is a meaningful share of the young adults leaving instability in this community every year, and it is small enough to do well.
We would rather prove this with fifteen than promise it to a thousand.
Already in place
Utah DCFS runs Transition to Adult Living services for youth 14 to 21, with aftercare through age 23.
TAL teaches life and job skills. It cannot conjure an apartment, or a table full of adults who keep showing up. That is the gap we are built for, and we intend to work alongside them rather than around them.
Three ways in
Build this with us.
Multifamily owners
Pledge a door
You already control the thing no grant can buy.
Donors
Be there on day one
We open in early 2027 and we will need funding on day one. Tell us now and we will come to you first.
Mentors
Take a seat
The Table needs adults willing to show up monthly, and to keep showing up.
The Second Mile
Some of you
will come back.
Every young person who comes through Hayes is invited back: to sit at The Table as an adult, to teach a Life Lab session, to answer the phone for someone in the year they were in.
It is an invitation, never a condition. Anyone who builds a good life and never mentions us again has finished. Nothing is owed. We will not treat a life as incomplete because it did not loop back through us.
For some people, the most useful thing they ever do is tell another young person, out loud, that they have been where they are.
Papo did not repay an institution. He became the kind of person who showed up. Some will want that. The door is already open.
Bill Hayes was not related to the child he raised.
He chose her anyway, and it changed the shape of her entire life. That is the whole thesis.