We Know Foundation · Toronto · 2027
A real home. A real way to build.
A residential program for young people aging out of foster care — pairing the stability of a home with the skills to build real businesses, using AI as a co-founder.
The idea in one breath
Four to six young people, one residence, six to twelve months. We provide the things a stable home quietly provides — housing, good food, health care and real clinical support, community — and alongside it, we teach them to do paid work and build businesses using AI.
The home isn't a perk wrapped around the program. It's the ground the program stands on.
Why these young people, why now
Lived experience is an asset. What's missing is a path.
Young people who've moved through the care system know, from the inside, which services fail and who they fail — knowledge no comfortable upbringing can teach. That kind of first-hand understanding of a broken thing is exactly where good businesses start. What's usually missing isn't insight. It's a way through.
Until recently, turning that insight into something real meant clearing a wall: you had to be a programmer, or hire one; you needed credentials, time, money. AI has lowered that wall dramatically. Someone who understands a problem deeply can now build a working product to address it. The barrier was never the wanting. It was the wall — and the wall is coming down.
How the program is shaped
A wide door, and a narrow one.
Everyone who joins starts the same way: learning high-leverage, transferable building skills and doing real, paid work for real companies. That's the wide end — shipping things, earning, feeling a real system push back. A subset go further. The ones who develop ideas of their own — often rooted in what they lived through — move into founder coaching, the way a startup accelerator works.
Operators first, then founders. You can't teach someone to ask their own questions until they've built something real with their hands.
The foundation we build on
Five things a home quietly provides.
A stable place to live, rented rather than bought so we stay nimble and keep costs low — so more goes to the young people themselves.
Good food, and the everyday food knowledge that fragmented childhoods rarely pass on — cooking and eating well as a skill you carry out, not a lecture you sit through.
Wellness woven through daily life — and underneath it, real clinical care: therapists, psychiatric support, crisis resources. This part isn't theoretical. It runs through Connections, the mental-health program We Know and the Children's Aid Foundation built and funded together for exactly these young people.
Clothes that work for everyday life, that let you be taken seriously in a room, and that let you be yourself. All three matter, and the program holds all three.
Peers who understand each other, a bridge into Toronto's tech and entrepreneurial world, and the quiet belonging that comes from building something alongside other people.
We've done this before
A proven way of working — built, funded, handed off.
We Know and the Children's Aid Foundation have built this kind of thing together before. Connections — a mental-health program for young people leaving care — was something we seeded, funded through its proof-of-concept, and handed off to larger funders once it could stand on its own.
That's the model here too: build it well, fund it to its feet, and let it carry on. This program is the next thing built that way. More on Connections →
The shape of the next two years
The design year — selecting, planning, building the partnerships, the residence, and the curriculum.
The first cohort begins. Then we learn, refine, and reach further with each one that follows.
The Children's Aid Foundation is our partner in reaching young people and providing clinical care. Joe Noss, who has been through Y Combinator and other accelerators, leads how we select and coach. Elliot Noss leads the project. More about the people →
Where you come in
The decisions that matter are being made right now.
A program like this lives or dies on its judgment — who we choose, how we support them, how we hold the human and clinical side while the building happens.
That's work for people who understand these young people deeply, sitting next to the people who understand building. There are very few who have spent real time on the first half of that sentence. We're in the design year, and the choices made in 2026 are the ones that shape everything after.
If any part of this resonates, we'd value your time and your judgment — even a few hours of it — in the room while these decisions get made.
Let's find a time to talkWe Know Foundation · Registered Canadian charity · Toronto