$557 million is being spent annually to help people facing problems here in Fairfield County: with the vast majority focused on health, education, housing and anti-poverty programs. If you’re receiving government support or are low income, there is a lot of help for you, but if you’re working and still struggling to make ends meet or you’re undergoing a major life transition, you likely never asked for help, don’t know where to find it, and you’re more likely to fall through the cracks.

We exist to empower and guide those who are motivated but struggling, and who, with some support, can unleash the amazing potential they hold and create opportunities to improve their lives.

The longest study ever conducted on poverty in America found that that the single most important factor between poverty and opportunity rested in one thing: having a second chance — not one’s zip code, not special investments, just a person investing in you and offering an opportunity.

Empowering someone to take advantage of the second chance isn’t just the right thing to do, from an economic standpoint, there is exponentially more value in helping someone become a contributing member of society. According to the Heckman principle (nobel laureate), every dollar invested in our work returns $7 to society.

You need to make the first step.

We’ll take the second one with you.

A look at our Programs…

Business & Career Literacy
We are creating an innovation hub that will provide for the incubation of new businesses; we provide job interview skills, help writing resumes and cover letters, and we’re looking ahead by investing in re-training to prepare our workforce for the AI economy.

Financial Literacy
We’re working with partners to provide basic financial literacy as a mandatory component of our work, which includes the importance of being “banked,” learning about credit scores and the importance of savings.

Life Literacy
This is the work that many non-profits don’t touch in an integrated sense, but what you pack down doesn’t get healed, so we work with partners to provide help for unresolved or crisis-related grief, trauma, loss and promote the need for resilience.

Health Literacy
People don’t live unhealthy lives because they want to, we do it because we don’t have access to better alternatives or don’t understand what they are. We go beyond the traditional health to include alternative views, with a special focus on mental health as a part of overall wellness.

Life Transition Support
Second Acts are often generated through major life transitions — retirement, divorce, the loss of a job, re-entry after incarceration, wanting to go back to school after dropping out, recovery — whatever life throws at you, we're here to find help but the key is, for this to work, you MUST be committed and must take that first step.