Why we started, and why we kept going

It started with a question nobody was asking

The Foundation for Job Creation was founded in 2009, in the wreckage of the financial crisis. The IRS granted tax-exempt status effective March 26, 2009.

At the time, every conversation was about who caused the crash and who should be punished for it. Almost nobody was asking the question that mattered more to the people actually losing work: which companies are creating American jobs, and which ones only say they are?

That was the original mission — research it, publish it, and let people put their money and their labor where the jobs actually get made.

What we saw in the trades

The crash didn't just take houses. It took the workforce that builds them. Crews broke up, apprenticeships stopped, and a generation of young people who would have gone into the trades went somewhere else — or nowhere.

What followed in a lot of those towns wasn't a jobs story in the news. It was an opioid story. The connection between the two rarely got made out loud, and that silence is part of why this Foundation exists.

The rallies

We took it to the streets — a rally tour across 39 cities, making the case for American job creation in the places that had lost the most.

The major media covered none of it.

That silence turned out to be its own lesson. If the outlets that decide what counts as news weren't going to cover a story like this, then the answer wasn't to complain about it — it was to build somewhere the story could live. That's where Nujobi came from, and Newsweed.com after it.

Credits

The artist Mark Sahagian designed Mr. Job Creation — the Foundation's character — along with the brochures used through the rally years.

Where it stands

Self-funded since day one. Taxes filed every year since founding, in good standing, no exceptions.

Today the work runs in four directions: trade training through RooferSchool, homelessness research, community through TrailShrinks, and recognition for shelter workers through The Hikers Ball. Different doors into the same idea — that people don't need to be rescued, they need a way in.