As colleges across the United States opened for fall semester, incoming freshmen and their parents across the country completed that very American of rituals: preparing for the big dorm room move with massive shopping sprees and online orders to buy just the right supplies that will make the new dorm room feel like home.

For Jill Franklin, program manager of Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services’ Independent Living Program (ILP) and a fourth-generation member of Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the upheaval of dorm room shopping began on May 1, as it has for the past six years, after high school seniors receive their college notices on “Decision Day.”

Since 2018, Franklin has been coordinating “Dec My Dorm,” which supports college-bound youth aging out of the California foster system by providing essential items for their dorm rooms. Now run as a joint project with assistance from Calabasas-based nonprofit Connecting a Caring Community (CCC), Dec my Dorm is chaired by recently retired CCC director of operations, Phyllis Shinbane, and managed by CCC’s executive director, Lisa Kodimer (to whom — through Jewish geography — Franklin was introduced at the funeral of a friend’s mother).

“One of our big pushes is to try to get the [foster kids] to go to college, or any post-secondary education,” said Franklin. “Research shows that if they go to any post-secondary education, they’re much less likely to fail, as many foster kids fail after they leave the system.”

Franklin spearheaded the volunteer project after hearing a former foster child, now a graduate student at UCLA, speak during a tour of the college for foster children about her experience on her first day at the college when she arrived on campus alone from her group home with all her belongings in a trash bag. The only thing that kept her afloat that day was that there was a note there from the Guardian Scholars at University of California, Berkeley and some welcome presents of granola bars and a bottle of water, Franklin recalled.

“It got my little brain going that this is not OK. I had never thought about it,” she said.

All California public colleges are required to have on-campus programs to support foster children, sometimes called Guardian Scholars or Resilient Scholars, she said, and now many private schools have started similar programs on their own initiatives.

But in addition to lacking the financial resources, young people who have been in foster care all their lives — shuttled from group home to family home where everything has always been set up for them — also have no awareness of what is initially needed to set up a dorm room, Franklin noted.

“They don’t realize that a dorm room is a blank, a blank space. It’s a bed with no bedding. It’s a desk with no desk supplies, no desk lamp, no towels, no nothing,” she said. “By the time [the Independent Living Program] sends our funding, it’s months. The kids can’t be there with no towels and no pillow for months while we’re waiting to go through county bureaucracy.”

The Jewish concept of tikkun olam ingrained since childhood kicked in. That first year, Franklin started a wish list of basic essentials including towels, bedding and mattress pads for college-bound foster children on her Amazon account and shared it with friends and acquaintances.

“I said, ‘Hey, guys, did you know that foster kids go to college and they need all the same stuff that you’ve already bought for your kids, for their dorms, or you will buy in the future for their dorms. So let’s do this.’ People bought stuff and everything got sent to my office, and the thing went bonkers,” she said.

Her “little Amazon list” then morphed into a shopping spree for 21 college-bound foster children on a budget of $500 per person from an initial donation from a Jewish businesswoman who has asked to remain anonymous. It has since blossomed into a more extensive Amazon list that includes all the dorm essentials and then some, for items ranging from a $10 whiteboard that students use to leave messages for one another the first few days of class before they have had time to swap phone numbers, to more expensive bedding sets and tool kits for some 120 to 130 youth every year. The coordination for the sorting and storage of the items is complex and is done with the help of CCC volunteers — including the donation of storage space in a warehouse owned by one of the volunteers.

The traditional festive event to distribute the items was held this year on July 14 and included a taco truck, ice cream cart, a pair of game tickets for each student from the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation and custom-made signs with names of the colleges the students will attend donated by business owners Joseph and Lynne Wahl, who also gave several $1,000 scholarships in memory of their late son Emerson to students taking on music studies.

“One of the things that has always been important is that the youth get to pick their own bedding. Because most of the time in their lives, they’ve just been told, that’s your room. Go sleep,” Franklin said. “So we’ve always had them choose their own bedding, their own towels, and their own throw blanket so that the room looks like them, reflects their personality and who they are.”

So on the day of the event, the youth arrived thinking they were coming to pick up only those items, said Franklin, but then they were surprised with a slew of other items including the 76-piece tool kit, mattress pads, dishes, cups and bowls, and plastic utensils packed neatly in a bag, a mesh shower caddy filled with toiletries, thermos flask cups and a backpack full of school supplies.

“We don’t just give them their stuff, we celebrate them,” said Shinbane. “They didn’t always matter, and we want them to know they matter.”

“As we loaded Eddie’s four full duffle bags into his car trunk, I was overwhelmed by the number of items he had just acquired and even more so by the dignity you and your team give to Eddie and the other students,” a college counselor named Fay wrote in a testimonial about the event. “For foster kids who’ve too often dragged their belongings from place to place in a black garbage bag, to start their college journey entering their dorm room carrying new items in crisp duffle bags is huge. The impact of ‘Dec My Dorm’ went beyond Eddie; his younger sister witnessed it all and you’ve planted ambition in her.”

The project has gained such momentum, said Shinbane, that this year the wish list was sold out already three weeks before the event and in some future plans they hope to be able to expand the project nationwide.

“We are a largely Jewish, largely affluent community,” said Shinbane of CCC. “Most of us are parents. It has opened our eyes to how our children are… just blessed and not every kid is. This was a wake-up call for us. Our community really loves helping now in the foster space because it’s just such a relatable way to give back. It’s on our radar, it’s in our lives. These kids did not have a stable support system and managed to get themselves into UCLA and Stanford. That’s pretty darn amazing. We can all have a hand in sending these kids to college.”