Youth Peace and Justice Foundation to Hire Professional Staff, Moving Past All-Volunteer Model
- null null
- Oct 20
- 4 min read
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Youth Peace and Justice Foundation to Hire Professional Staff, Moving Past All-Volunteer Model: Strategic Shift Follows Rebranding, Enhanced Financial Transparency, and Collective Commitment to National Youth Mission Clarity
TEMPLE, Texas – Oct. 20, 2025 – The Youth Peace and Justice Foundation (YPJF), which operates as the public face (DBA) of the Uvalde Foundation for Kids, is launching a new two-year plan called, "Professionalizing for Impact" (P4I). This strategy will hire and compensate expert staff for key national roles, ending the organization’s reliance on an all-volunteer model for its central functions.
This critical transition is designed to guarantee the long-term stability, quality, and national scalability of YPJF’s peace and justice programs, which focus heavily on the needs of young people wherever they are—recognizing that violence is a cultural not merely an individual or situational crisis in schools alone.
This recent strategy, combined with the recent rebranding, current financial stability, and increased financial transparency, has prepared the Foundation to move forward aggressively in its national work.
From Crisis Response to Sustainable Mission
The organization’s current structure is the result of focused responses to national crises concerning students & young people:
* The Uvalde Catalyst (2022): Following the Uvalde tragedy, founder Daniel Chapin and leaders quickly formed the Uvalde Foundation for Kids. This entity holds the organization’s federal 501(c)(3) tax status and has been dedicated to addressing the immediate impact of gun violence on young people.
* The Rebrand for Scope (October 2025): Recognizing that the work expanded far beyond one event to include systemic peace-building and trauma prevention for young people nationwide, the organization rebranded to the Youth Peace and Justice Foundation (YPJF). This rebrand achieved crucial mission clarity around the broad scope of serving young people and ensured transparency about the full range of its work.
Crucially, the volunteer leadership unanimously agreed that to sustain this broader mission impacting young people, they needed to formalize operations.
The P4I initiative is the response to that need, securing permanent capacity for vital tasks.
Key Professional Roles for Stability
P4I will integrate compensated experts in national functions that require specialized, full-time commitment to serve the young people & communities we serve.
* Curriculum Quality: Hiring a Director to ensure YPJF's trauma-informed programs are delivered consistently and effectively across all chapters, directly addressing the diverse challenges facing young people today, regardless of their setting.
* Impact Measurement: Recruiting a Manager to implement data systems that move the organization beyond anecdotal success to quantifiable proof of impact on youth outcomes, a requirement for securing major institutional funding.
* Executive Leadership: Appointing professional management to handle large-scale fundraising, finance, and operational oversight, reinforcing increased financial transparency and accountability in programs serving young people.
Empowering Volunteers and Governance
This shift focuses solely on core national infrastructure and will not affect the hundreds of dedicated community-level volunteers or the volunteer Board of Directors.
“This transition is the ultimate act of valuing our volunteers,” said Daniel Chapin, founder of YPJF.
“The Uvalde crisis showed us that passion alone isn’t enough to fix systemic problems, nor the culture of violence impacting young people, not simply inside a classroom. The rebrand became necessary not just for transparency, but because our mission growth since Uvalde revealed a painful truth: we were constantly finding ourselves responding to events, which is the very thing we project as only an end result.
Our mission is fundamentally about prevention, about addressing the culture of violence and community disrepair that brings our youth to violence, inside and outside classrooms nationwide. Response to incidents is secondary. Furthermore, we as a Foundation realized that only a professional infrastructure can sustain the rigorous prevention work required to serve young people across the nation & the violence, the "Cultural violence," they and their communities face."
The subsequent, collective decision to professionalize, alongside our recent rebranding for mission clarity, and our focus on increased financial transparency, has prepared this foundation like never before, moving forward.
Our dedicated volunteer Board has been burdened with daily operations; by hiring experts, we are freeing our Board to focus entirely on strategic governance and oversight. We are guaranteeing that our pursuit of lasting peace and justice for young people is permanent and accountable, while providing our boots-on-the-ground volunteers with the professional support they need to maximize their local impact.”
The combined rebrand, current financial stability, and enhanced operational transparency flowing from this decision have strategically prepared the Foundation for robust national growth serving young people, their communities in the spirit of peace and empowering then to do the very same for their generation and those generations to come.
About Youth Peace and Justice Foundation (YPJF):
The Youth Peace and Justice Foundation (YPJF) is the DBA of the Uvalde Foundation for Kids. Founded in 2022, the 501(c)(3) organization is dedicated to providing comprehensive, trauma-informed peace-building and justice programming for young people across the nation, operating with a commitment to mission clarity, community engagement and financial transparency in line with our respected 501c3 operational charity status.
