10,000 by 2032: The Promise We Couldn't Keep Alone

Submitted by: HR GIVERS powered by myTOD

We knew it before we ever hired our first employee. When myTOD was founded five years ago as an Orange County talent solutions firm, our founders built a simple promise into the business model itself. For every client placement we made, one underserved youth would receive direct support toward building a career, from mentorship and mock interviews to career readiness coaching and professional attire. The practical tools that often stand between a young person and their first real opportunity. That promise came with a number attached almost immediately. We committed to supporting 10,000 underserved youth by 2032.

We knew from day one that we could not reach 10,000 young people by ourselves as a startup of twenty people. We had the conviction and the financial model built into every placement we made. We did not have the hands, the expertise, or the reach to deliver that support ourselves at any real scale. It was always going to take a community far larger than our own team to make a difference this size.

What we did not expect was how quickly the hands would show up, and where they would come from. Long before HR GIVERS existed as a named community, colleagues in the HR world started asking to help. A Chief People Officer we knew from an industry event asked if she could sit in on a mock interview session. A VP of HR mentioned, almost in passing, that he used to volunteer with foster youth and missed it. These were not formal partnership meetings. They were individual HR leaders, unprompted, raising their hands because the work resonated with something they already believed about their own profession. The people who spend their careers seeing potential in others often have something real to offer young people who had no one else looking for it in them.

Those individuals came to the table first, before any institution did. It took us longer to realize that if we gave them a structure, a name, and a shared mission, we would have something far more durable than a handful of volunteers. That structure became HR GIVERS, an invitation-only community for HR Directors, VPs, CHROs, and Chief People Officers across Southern California who believe their leadership does not stop at the office door.

Human resources leaders are, on paper, an unlikely volunteer force for youth homelessness and foster care support. They are not social workers, and most had no formal background in youth development when they started. What they had was something we had underestimated: professional fluency in exactly the skills that stand between a young person and a job offer. Mock interviews are second nature to someone who has conducted hundreds of them. Resume feedback is not a favor to an HR director. It is simply Tuesday. A LinkedIn profile review takes a recruiter fifteen minutes and can change how a hiring manager sees a candidate before they ever meet.

The unlikely partners on the nonprofit side were just as essential, and just as unexpected in how they found us. Organizations like Samueli Academy, Orangewood Foundation, Stand Up for Kids, Just in Time for Foster Youth, San Diego Youth Services, Cristo Rey Orange County High School, Merge Opportunities, and Working Wardrobes were already doing extraordinary front-line work with underserved youth long before HR GIVERS existed. What they lacked was not passion or programming. It was direct access to the kind of professional expertise that only shows up inside a corporate HR department. We did not bring them a new program. We brought them people who already knew how to run one.

And then came the sponsors we did not expect to need this early. Firms like Marsh McLennan Agency, UKG, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, and the Leets Consortium saw a community of HR leaders organizing around a cause and wanted their name attached to it, not as a marketing exercise, but because the work was real and their own people wanted to be part of it.

The numbers tell part of the story. HR GIVERS has grown to more than 275 active members. We have built more than 15 formal partnerships with nonprofit organizations across Southern California, and together, across myTOD's placement model and the HR GIVERS volunteer network, we have supported more than 2,500 underserved youth toward our goal of 10,000 by 2032. What started as informal favors between colleagues now runs on a real calendar of more than a dozen annual events, from mock interview days at Samueli Academy to fundraising tournaments like Battle of the Paddle in San Diego and Orange County to an annual awards gala that puts the spotlight on the leaders and nonprofits doing the work.

The bigger change is in how myTOD itself operates. We no longer think of community impact as a line item funded by placements. HR GIVERS became its own organization and its own city chapters, now active in Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, running on its own operating rhythm independent of any single client contract. Our original 1:1 placement promise is still the financial engine underneath everything. The actual delivery of career readiness support, including the mentorship, the mock interviews, the workshops, and the professional attire drives, now belongs to a community of HR leaders who show up because they chose to, not because a company assigned them to.

That is the honest, ongoing challenge of this model. We are coordinating the volunteer time of busy director-level executives across four regions, aligning the needs of more than fifteen nonprofit partners who each serve different populations and stages of youth, and building a sponsorship base strong enough to fund events without ever charging the young people we serve or the nonprofits we support a dollar. We have not solved all of that yet. We are still building the systems to make it easier for a new HR leader in San Francisco to plug in the way one in Orange County can today.

But the core lesson has already proven itself. We could not have imagined, five years ago, that the solution to reaching 10,000 youth would not come from hiring more staff or writing bigger checks. It came from discovering that an entire profession, human resources, was already full of people who wanted exactly what we were building, and who simply needed to be asked to the table.