How A Sense Of Home Helps Foster Youth Create A Space Of Sanctuary
A Sense of Home
What if the key to ending homelessness wasn’t just a roof—but a sofa, a fridge, a toothbrush?
That’s the insight Georgie Smith discovered when a simple request for help turned into something much bigger. She and her partner were exploring adoption when someone in the foster care community reached out. What she found was a young man who had aged out of the system and was living on the floor of an empty apartment. No furniture. No family. No idea how to make a home.
“They didn’t expect me to come and design a home or anything,” Smith recalls. “They just didn’t know how home works.”
That one moment—what she describes as a random act of kindness—became the spark for A Sense of Home, a nonprofit that now creates fully furnished homes for young people aging out of foster care. Since 2015, they’ve transformed over 1,200 empty apartments into welcoming sanctuaries—and another 225 homes for survivors of California’s wildfires.
A Movement Born From Urgency
Smith didn’t set out to build a nonprofit. She tried to pass the idea along to more established organizations—but no one wanted to take on the “heavy lift” of trucks, warehouses, and logistics. So she did it herself, launching the organization with fiscal sponsorship and no initial fundraising. “I just did it,” she says. The need was too big to ignore.
And it wasn’t just anecdotal. As she researched further, Smith discovered that the inability to furnish a space often leads to tenancy failure and homelessness—a pattern recognized in countries like Germany and Scotland. “Furniture poverty leads to homelessness,” she says. “The inability to make an empty space function like a home leads to tenancy failure.”
Georgie Smith, President and Founder
Her vision was clear: give young people not just shelter, but the stability, dignity, and confidence to launch into adult life.
A CEO Drawn In By Purpose
Ken Grouf joined A Sense of Home as CEO in 2025, but his journey with the organization began long before that—with a deeply personal gift.
“I had done a home creation, which gave a former foster care youth into a home,” he explains. “I actually gave it as my Hanukkah present for my family, and I just fell in love with the concept.”
Ken Grouf, CEO
With a background that spans both corporate and nonprofit sectors—from co-founding Do Something and Kaboom to serving as Yahoo’s director of brand management and running a national retail chain—Grouf brings a rare mix of heart and experience. “There was a real need, not just in Los Angeles, but in various markets around the country and around the world for what we are trying to do,” he says.
Beyond Furniture: Education, Healing, and Belonging
A Sense of Home offers much more than beds and sofas. Through years of listening and learning, Smith and her team identified deeper needs: access to therapy, educational support, mentorship, and community.
Former foster youth often age out of the system with little guidance, facing isolation and trauma. The organization now partners with therapy providers and has launched an educational scholarship that’s grown to $20,000 annually, helping recipients pursue master’s and PhD programs often overlooked by traditional aid.
But the heart of their work remains home creation: each space filled with more than 330 donated items—“down to the toothbrush,” as Smith puts it. Some recipients arrive with nothing but a backpack. For many, it’s the first time anyone has shown up for them in this way.
A Model Companies Are Proud to Be Part Of
Corporate partners—from Ruggable and Living Spaces to Snap—aren’t just sponsors; they’re active participants. Volunteers help build furniture, pack room kits, and even host home creation events in their own offices. Some have gone further, developing custom products and embedding A Sense of Home into their company culture.
“There’s a real opportunity,” Grouf says, “for companies to embed this idea of a sense of home into their culture and DNA. They’re seeing corporate philanthropy and CSR as a profit center—impacting the customer experience, the employee experience, and the brand.”
The impact is mutual. “One of [Ruggable’s] favorite activities at their corporate retreat,” Smith notes, “was assembling room kits for us. There’s such ease of entry. Whether someone has an hour or two hours, they can still make a meaningful difference.”
From Emergency Relief to Everyday Rituals
When wildfires hit California earlier this year, A Sense of Home sprang into action. Their existing warehouse in Hawthorne was already at capacity, so they secured a second space and quickly scaled up to meet the flood of requests—over 1,000 applications came in almost overnight.
Starting a disaster relief program, Smith says, was just as hard—if not harder—than founding the nonprofit itself. But she felt the same pull: “I couldn’t just slowly wait for people to come to me.”
Today, A Sense of Home hosts hands-on home creation events every Thursday through Saturday. At each one, volunteers come together to furnish and decorate an empty apartment—transforming it into a warm, welcoming space for a young person aging out of foster care or a family recovering from disaster. Behind the scenes, the organization is also scaling its reach: building housing navigation services to guide applicants, forming referral partnerships with agencies like DCFS, and expanding a growing network of donors and brand partners to meet the rising need.
The First Time It Feels Like Home
At the center of every home creation is a moment—a feeling—that’s hard to put into words. A young adult walks into a fully furnished home that didn’t exist just hours earlier. It’s not just a space filled with couches and kitchenware. It’s a space filled with care, intention, and belief in their future.
“We’re here to honour the individual or the family because they’ve gone through something,” Smith says. “And we want to honour all that they’ve gone through and achieved—and that their dreams can come true.”
It’s not charity. It’s not a checklist. It’s love, delivered with dignity.
And for the person walking through that door, it might be the first time in their life they’ve truly felt it:
Welcome home.
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