The Quiet Coalition

Inside a monthly meeting of the people doing the unglamorous work of building a future for Nevada’s foster youth

By Joey Charafi

LAS VEGAS. If you want to find the people who actually move the needle on child welfare in Southern Nevada, you will not find them at a press conference. You will find them on a Wednesday afternoon Zoom call, eating lunch at their desks, comparing notes on a job fair at Child Haven and a food handlers card class for kids in foster care. That is where the Child Welfare Action Coalition meets. I sat in last week as the chair of Stop the Traffic Foundation, and I left with the strongest impression I have had in months that Nevada’s child welfare professionals are not waiting on permission. They are stepping up.

The Coalition is a working group, not a fundraising vehicle. It is hosted by Annette and her team and pulls together a rotating cast of nonprofit leaders, foster youth advocates, school district personnel, and direct service providers from across the Las Vegas Valley and increasingly from the north as well. The structure is unfussy. A partner spotlight, a policy update, an open floor for collaboration, and a brief mental health and wellness exercise to close. No theatrics. No ask. Just the work.

The first spotlight on this call belonged to Chris of Share in the Joy. His organization holds an MOU with Clark County Family Services as their exclusive nonprofit fiscal partner for four annual events, including the June 10 graduation ceremony for foster youth, the Give Joy back-to-school drive, and the annual Easter event. Beyond those, Share in the Joy hosts three signature programs of its own. There is a Father Figurehood program that pairs men in the community with youth who do not have a positive male role model. There is an Empowering Joy program for women in domestic violence situations and their daughters. And there is a December holiday event with a twist that I had to hear twice to make sure I understood. The kids who come do not receive gifts. They choose gifts to give to the important people in their own lives. That detail tells you everything about how this organization thinks about the children it serves.

Chris also walked the group through a recurring program called Sharing the Joy Day at Child Haven, the Clark County emergency shelter for children removed from their homes. There are between eighty and one hundred and twenty children on the Child Haven campus at any given time. Once a month, Share in the Joy and a roster of partners come on site. They bring food. They bring volunteers. They bring connection. For older youth, they bring resources from the county’s Independent Living and Step Up programs, from Raise the Future, from EmployNV, from iFoster, from Rise Credit Union for financial literacy. The point of those connections is not abstract. It is the practical work of bridging a child from the day she walks onto the Child Haven campus to the day she ages out of care and has to make rent on her own.

A few months ago Chris started bringing in mock interview practice. The kids told him directly that they wanted the real thing. So in April, Share in the Joy hosted what he believes is the first job fair ever held at Child Haven. Nine companies came. EmployNV came with its youth hub specifically to help the employers manage onboarding and to connect the youth with job training and uniform assistance. The format was deliberate. It was not on-the-spot hiring. It was relationship first. Four kids walked out with job offers. Two of them had to choose between multiple offers, which Chris pointed out is a kind of agency these kids almost never get to experience. The county’s deputy director for Child Haven attended. The feedback was strong enough that Share in the Joy will run the same format for the June 10 graduation ceremony.

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The piece of Chris’s presentation that landed hardest with me was about food handlers cards. In Nevada, a food handlers card is the entry credential for a huge slice of the jobs available to a teenager or young adult. Restaurants. Casinos. Catering. Hotel banquet work. The Southern Nevada Health District requires it. For a kid in foster care, getting that card has historically been an obstacle. Transportation. Documentation. The cost. The reading level of the standard course material. Any one of those barriers can be the thing that keeps a kid from a job.

So Chris and his team built their own. Over the last six months they wrote a curriculum specifically for youth in foster care, including twenty one minute video modules for what Chris called the TikTok generation, a handbook, and a proctor guide. They submitted it to the Southern Nevada Health District. Minor revisions came back. Final approval is expected any day. The plan is to start with about five youth at the CASA Connection Center and then take the program to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, Foster Kinship, Eagle Quest, and the Child Haven campus itself. The leaders of those organizations have already signed on. This is what real coalition building looks like. One person identifies a barrier, builds a tool to remove it, and lines up the partners to take it statewide before the ink is dry on the approval.

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The second partner spotlight came from Hunter Kane, the executive director of the Foster Care Chamber of Commerce, who was sneaking onto the call between teaching periods at the school where he works as a music educator. May is Foster Care Awareness Month, and Hunter’s organization had built a full month of events to mark it. A foster care night at the Las Vegas Lights FC soccer match. A hiring and resource fair at the Boulevard Mall. A STEM fair at the Pearson Community Center. A Star Wars themed night at the Aviators baseball stadium. More than thirty partner organizations involved across the series. The Foster Care Chamber works specifically with youth aging out of the system, ages fourteen to twenty four.

Hunter described a monthly working dinner he convenes called the Village Table, held the fourth Wednesday of each month at the CASA Connection Center. A professional chef, who Hunter mentioned is currently filming with Gordon Ramsay, has been cooking for the group. Anyone working in the foster care space in Southern Nevada is welcome at the table. The point of the meal is to get the people who run these programs to break bread together so that when a kid needs something one organization cannot provide, the next call is already a friend on the other end of the line.

Constance, who runs Players Creation, joined to add a piece on the May 10 hiring expo at the Boulevard Recreation Center. Her organization, founded in 2018, runs three transitional homes for young people aging out of foster care between the ages of eighteen and twenty four, plus food provision for foster families across the valley. “We like to be known as the hiring force behind young people in need of a job,” she told the group. The hiring fairs are now monthly because, as she put it, that is how urgent the need is.

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Annette took the floor for the policy portion. The Coalition is not just service delivery. It feeds into the legislative process. Assembly Member Brown-May has stood up several task forces working through the interim toward the 2027 session, and the Coalition is organizing its work around eight focus areas that mirror the lived experience of foster and kinship youth: education and workforce, life skills and financial empowerment, housing and safe transitions, mental health, transportation, resource navigation, civic engagement, and community impact and data.

That last one, data, is where my own work intersects most directly with what this Coalition is building. At Stop the Traffic Foundation, we have spent considerable time mapping the gaps in how Nevada tracks and shares information across agencies on missing children, sex trafficking, and child exploitation. The same fragmentation that makes it hard for a foster youth to get a food handlers card is what makes it hard for a county social worker to know that the child she just lost contact with has surfaced two jurisdictions away. The Coalition is approaching the problem from the prevention and stabilization end. Our foundation is approaching it from the interdiction and recovery end. The middle is where these efforts have to meet.

There was no grand declaration on this call about that intersection. There rarely is. The work happens through introductions in the Zoom chat, through someone offering laptops for the June 10 graduation ceremony, through a teacher in his prep period offering to help another nonprofit set up Zoom for their northern partners, through a young woman on her third day of work being introduced to the call as a future mentor. The renovation foundation’s Kim Renner offered her organization’s laptop donation to Chris’s graduation event in real time. That is how this network grows.

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I have sat through a lot of meetings in this state. Campaign meetings. Policy roundtables. Donor briefings. There is a particular feel to a meeting where the people in the room are doing the work for reasons that have nothing to do with the next election or the next quarterly report. This was that kind of meeting. The closing exercise was a one minute breathing prompt, led by Annette, with the explicit acknowledgement that the people on the call were going to need it. Most of them probably went straight back to work.

Two things stayed with me from the call. The first is that Nevada’s child welfare infrastructure is not a single system. It is a federation of small, mission driven organizations, each one filling a gap that the formal system cannot reach, each one held together by a handful of people who keep showing up. The second is that the gap between what these professionals know how to do and what current resources allow them to do is the policy story of the next legislative session. They have written the curriculum. They have built the partnerships. They have run the pilots. They are waiting for the rest of us, the candidates, the donors, the coalition allies, to back the play.

Stop the Traffic Foundation will be at the table for that work. So will every organization I heard from on Wednesday afternoon. Nevada’s child welfare professionals are stepping up. The honor of this work is being able to step up alongside them.

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Joey Charafi is the founder and chair of the Stop the Traffic Foundation and a Republican candidate for Nevada State Assembly District 8. Stop the Traffic Foundation is focused on combating child trafficking and supporting interdiction efforts in Southern Nevada.