Hawaii nonprofit receives $2.5M from Bezos fund to expand housing programs

Residential Youth Services & Empowerment, or RYSE, an Oahu-based nonprofit that serves youth experiencing homelessness, received a $2.5 million grant from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez from their Bezos Day 1 Families Fund’s annual leadership awards.

RYSE is the only Hawaii organization to receive a gift this year from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund, which announced the 2025 grant recipients on Monday. Thirty-two organizations across the country and in Guam received donations totaling $102.5 million.

RYSE officials said this donation marks the largest gift it has received to date. The organization was founded in 2018 and provides wraparound services including shelter, food, healthcare, education and employment support for houseless youth.

RYSE said the funding will go toward developing housing programs that serve young families over the next five years. The programs will create safe spaces for children and will be integrated with early childhood education and family-centered services.

RYSE Executive Director Carla Houser told Pacific Business News that the funding will fill a gap in resources for the organization to serve youth who are parents.

“We have over the last seven, eight years really tried to respond to the lack of developmentally appropriate and truly affordable housing for young people who are often aging out of systems of care, aging out of foster care systems, or are part of generational homelessness,” Houser said. “And one of the areas where, in all of our growth, that we still were lacking resources was for our youth who were parenting. … This funding will allow us to start to provide housing specifically for our parenting youth.”

Houser said RYSE has several different housing programs that address various subsets of houseless youth, including those who are suffering from mental illness, victims of trafficking, or are struggling with addiction, as well as emergency housing. Until now, she said, housing that serves parenting youth “was still missing from our inventory of housing.”

“This next five years of support really helps us solidify and build upon these resources to strengthen our young families,” she said.

Houser said RYSE is in the process of renovating a property that Hawaii state Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto donated to the organization about a year ago into housing for the new programming.

The Bezos Day 1 Families Fund launched in 2018, and its annual leadership awards provide gifts to organizations and civic groups that help families experiencing homelessness. The fund has issued 280 awards totaling more than $850 million to organizations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.

With this year’s gift to RYSE, Hawaii organizations have received a total of $21.5 million from the fund since 2019.