About
Small on purpose.
A registered Canadian charity in Toronto, working on one thing at a time for young people leaving foster care — and looking for three people to help run the next one.
The foundation
We fund the part that's hardest to fund.
Most money for young people leaving care arrives once a program has proven itself. We try to be useful earlier than that — committing to something while it is still only an argument, staying through the years it takes to become a result, and handing it on once larger funders can see what they're funding.
That means we stay small deliberately. One thing at a time, done properly, with partners who know the population better than we do.
The people
Who's doing this.
Leads the foundation's work and the design of the residential program. A long career building internet companies, and — more to the point here — currently building a business with AI himself, which is the same work the program will teach.
Leads how cohort members are chosen and coached. Has been through Y Combinator and two other accelerator programs, from the applicant's side — which is the side that matters when you're designing selection for people without conventional credentials.
A director of the foundation, and an active builder with AI across all of her own product development work. She advises the foundation's work generally, and brings particular depth in applying AI to online marketing — useful to us directly, and useful to the businesses that come out of the program.
Our partner
The Children's Aid Foundation of Canada.
We have built and funded programs with the Children's Aid Foundation before — most recently Connections, which we seeded together and handed on once it could stand. They are our partner again on the residential program: in reaching young people, and in the clinical support underneath it.
The pattern is deliberate. They know these young people and the systems around them. We fund early and build. Neither half works alone.
2026
Three people we need to find.
The residential program opens in 2027. Before then we have to find the people who will actually run it. These are not conventional postings and we are not in a hurry to fill them badly — we would rather talk to the right person early than the wrong person soon.
Someone who can sit with four to six young people every day and guide real building work — shipping things with AI, for real clients, with real deadlines. Needs to be genuinely good at the work, and genuinely patient with people who are new to all of it.
Someone to run the house and the lives in it — the practical and human side of four to six young adults going through a large transition at the same time. A different skill from teaching, and almost certainly a different person.
Therapists and clinicians with real experience of trauma and of young people leaving care. This layer connects to the infrastructure Connections built; how it plugs in is one of the things being designed this year.
If one of these describes you — or describes someone you know well enough to vouch for — that is the most useful email we could receive right now.
Contact
Write to us.
Whether you're one of the three, know one of the three, or work with young people leaving care and want to tell us something we've got wrong — we'd like to hear it.
We're not fundraising publicly and there's nothing to sign up for. This is the design year, and what we need most is judgment.
elliot@noss.orgWe Know Foundation · Registered Canadian charity · Toronto