Foundation Focus

From Ralph F. Boyd, Jr.
Chairman and President and CEO, Freddie Mac Foundation

The Freddie Mac Foundation is as committed as ever to working with nonprofits and our community partners to help children and families thrive.

Recently, we completed an evaluation of our priorities and investments to ensure that we’re making the greatest impact possible on the lives of those we serve. We’ve found that one of the most effective ways we can help families is to support them in meeting one of their key challenges: finding stable housing and the supportive services they need to stay in their homes and build a better future. As a result, we’ve sharpened the Foundation’s overall focus to make home a place where children and their families thrive.

Stable Homes, Stable Families
A stable, healthy home is what every family needs to survive, succeed, and ultimately prosper. We’re now investing more of our resources in emergency and transitional housing and housing with services. These services include job training, counseling, financial literacy, school readiness, after-school academic programs, and other services provided within the setting of the housing communities we support.

Foster Care and Adoption
Keeping with our goal of creating stronger homes and families, we’ll continue our work to find permanent homes for children in foster care. We have expanded this program area to help foster youth through the age of 23 find stable housing and achieve self-sufficiency – to give them a better chance to become independent thriving adults.

Academic and Career Success
Education is a clear path to excellence, and a key to transforming lives. We want children to have a burning desire – as well as the capacity and tools to be life-long learners, so that they thrive as they grow into adults who we are fully and productively engaged in their families and communities. Accordingly, we focus this program area, formerly known as ‘Youth Development,’ on rigorous public, charter and independent schools that serve children in especially vulnerable communities, and also on programs that promote academic achievement and career success, including comprehensive early childhood education, after-school programs with a sharp academic focus, and high-performing college preparation programs and career training. Going forward, although robust, our investments in this funding area are narrower, sharpened and focused.

Programs Ineligible for Funding
Beginning in 2008, we will no longer fund life skills, generalized mentoring, pregnancy prevention, delinquency and truancy prevention, or youth leadership programs. In addition, we will phase out our work involving stand-alone child abuse prevention, parenting, mental health and home visiting programs and family enrichment services. We will, however, continue to fund local Healthy Families America programs. Programs that we no longer fund based on our new guidelines may, however, be eligible for a transition grant, pending a review of their existing grant report. While we recognize that these programs are doing meaningful and important work, we are no longer able to support those that fall outside the scope of our newly revised focus areas.

The Year Ahead
This year, our Foundation will invest about $24 million – primarily here in the D.C. region – to make home a place where children and families thrive. We are excited about our shift in direction and the opportunity it presents to help even more families meet their most basic of needs: creating a stable, healthy home. We look forward to continuing our work as a major investor and partner to help children and families in the National Capital region thrive.