Our mission
The mission of the 21st Century Fund for Delaware's Children
“To help children define their strengths, improve their self-esteem, and build a sense of hope for the future.”
We pursue that mission in one specific way: by paying for experiences that a child receiving services in Delaware would otherwise miss — a season of a sport, an instrument and someone to teach them, a place on a team, a ticket to prom.
What the mission means in practice
Three clauses, each describing something we can actually cause to happen for a specific young person.
Define their strengths
A child who has been defined by their circumstances gets to be defined by something they chose. The one who plays trumpet. The one who is fast. The one who can draw.
Improve their self-esteem
Being good at something in front of other people changes how a young person sees themselves. That is not a side effect of what we fund; it is the point of it.
Build a sense of hope
A season that runs to its end, a performance, a prom — each is evidence that things can be looked forward to. For a child in crisis, that evidence is scarce.
Why this mission, and not a broader one
Delaware’s state agencies and community programs are built to keep a child at risk safe, housed, fed, treated, and in school. Those systems do hard work and they do it well.
What none of them is designed to pay for is the fifty dollars for a league registration, the instrument rental, the deposit for a class trip. When a family is in crisis those are the first things to go, and nobody treats them as urgent except the child.
We could have written a mission about ending child poverty in Delaware. It would be a better sentence and a worse organisation. A small volunteer-run fund that promises everything helps nobody in particular. Ours is deliberately narrow so that it is deliverable, and so that a caseworker reading it knows immediately whether we are the right people to ask.
Our mission commits us to
21St Century Fund For Delawares Children Inc has pursued this mission since 2005 as a 501(c)(3) public charity registered with the Internal Revenue Service under EIN 20-2869892.
Where the mission came from
The fund was established in 2005 as a partnership between people working inside Delaware’s child services system and private donors who wanted their giving to reach a child directly rather than pay for overhead.
The people who started it were not theorising. They were the ones taking the phone call about a girl who had made the team and could not afford the registration, and finding that no budget anywhere existed for it. The mission is written the way it is because it was assembled from that specific, repeated, solvable problem.
Two decades on, the wording has not changed and neither has the method. An adult who knows the child writes to us. We check the request, and we pay the provider. Nothing about the mission requires the fund to grow, to run its own programs, or to become anything other than fast and specific.
That is unusual, and deliberate. Most organisations broaden as they age. Staying narrow is how a small fund keeps its promise to answer before a deadline passes.
How to tell whether we are living up to it
A mission statement that cannot be failed is not worth publishing. Ours can be checked against things that either happened or did not, and the people best placed to check are the caseworkers and teachers who write to us.
If we answered after the deadline, we failed. If a family was asked to front money, we failed. If a child had to explain their circumstances to us directly, we failed. If you have experienced any of those, tell us — that is more useful to the fund than a thank-you note.
We publish figures only when we can evidence them. Where a statistic would be convenient but unverified, this site says nothing instead.
Fair tests of this mission
Who the mission serves
Children and young people up to age 21 who are receiving services from a Delaware state agency or community program.
In practice that means young people connected to Delaware’s child services system or to community programs across New Castle County, Kent County, Sussex County. Requests reach us through the adults who already know the child — a caseworker, a teacher, a counsellor, a program director.
The test we apply
Does this help the child find out what they are capable of? If the answer is yes and the barrier is money, it is worth asking us about — whatever category it falls into.
See the mission in practice
The four areas we fund, and how a request becomes a grant.