Announcing Graves Ventures
Last year we got to see one of our first big audacious goals, PERIS Hill, become a reality. The idea for PERIS began long ago. For 25 years Denise Graves, one of the founders and board members of the Graves Foundation and my mother, served as guardian ad litem for youth in foster care. During that time, she witnessed too many of the kids she worked with age out of foster care with limited to no support. She was very troubled by the obstacles they faced in launching into adulthood, particularly with housing.
Data backs up what Denise saw firsthand. According to a study by Chapin Hall, University of Chicago, 36% of young people aging out of foster care experience at least one episode of homelessness by age 26. Locally, the Wilder Research Center’s 2015 Study on Homelessness found that 54% of the homeless youth surveyed had been in an out-of-home placement. While foster youth are more likely to experience homelessness, Minnesota lacks sufficient appropriate housing options and supportive services for these young people to find stability and future success.
When my family formed the Graves Foundation, we were committed to creating the kind of housing that would address these issues. Six years ago, we hired consultants to research national best practices and to facilitate conversations with non-profit leaders, frontline social workers, and youth themselves to better understand how we could help. The effort was a family project (my uncle helped us secure land and advised us throughout the process on development) until, six years ago, we hired Kyrra Rankine to accelerate this work and to embed it in the neighborhood where we had secured property: Lowry Hill.
From there the story is one of tax credits, public-private partnership, and lots and lots of hope and hours. A youth advisory council guided the work every step of the way. The Link stepped in as our onsite service provider. Volunteers of America came on as property managers, and we have continued to build partnerships and processes to make the vision a reality.
The result is PERIS Hill, a new-build, beautifully designed, modern, affordable housing community that provides supportive housing and prevents homelessness for youth aging out of foster care. After six plus years of creative collaboration, PERIS opened last fall and currently houses fifteen youth. PERIS Hill is supported and championed by the PERIS Foundation.
We learned throughout this journey that ideas like PERIS don’t become realities without significant investments of time and dollars. We want to see the kind of change that comes with long-term work and partnership, and we’re thrilled to launch Graves Ventures to codify our commitment to these high impact projects.
Each Venture evolves in its own way but all of them are established within relationships of deep, mutual trust. They are time-bound partnerships, initiatives, or campaigns and are invitation-only. Ventures work occurs alongside and separate from our grant-making and was created as a means of supporting entrepreneurial work, risk-taking and innovation in launching projects, organizations, or solutions that otherwise would not exist.
While we haven’t always called them Ventures, the Graves Foundation has been building relationships with innovative community leaders since our founding, identifying opportunities for longterm investment in outsized impact. Through Ventures, Graves partners with change-makers, bringing financial stability, staff capacity, and networking to take on bold ideas.
This year, we’re launching two Ventures, impacting the rebuilding of East Lake Street and solidifying services for Opportunity Youth. We look forward to walking with the leaders guiding these projects, supporting the growth of their ideas, and celebrating their successes.