Inside the Six Months: How Azgari Foundation Programs Actually Work

The short answer: six months, fully online, 15–20 hours a week, tuition-free, with volunteer educators and a one-to-one mentor. One application covers all five career tracks, and a real person responds within two business days.

Who it's for

Young adults ages 16–25 who are aging out of foster care, exiting the juvenile justice system, or otherwise disconnected from school and work. You need internet access and a laptop — and if you don't have the laptop, tell us; we can help with equipment. If you're 16 or 17, we ask that a supportive adult knows you're applying, and we may need guardian or caseworker consent before enrollment, since some of our participants are legal minors.

The application and intake process

One online application covers all five tracks — Marketing, Bookkeeping & Accounting, IT Help Desk, Web Development, and Administrative Support — so an applicant doesn't need to know which one they want before they apply. The form takes about ten minutes and asks for basic contact information, age, a short statement of situation and goals, and which track(s) interest them. A real staff member, not an automated system, reviews every application and responds within two business days.

After the initial application, intake typically includes a short conversation (by phone or video) to confirm eligibility, talk through the five tracks in more detail, and make sure the six-month, 15–20-hour-a-week commitment is realistic given the applicant's current work, housing, or caregiving situation. For 16- and 17-year-old applicants, this is also where we confirm a supportive adult knows about the enrollment and collect any needed guardian or caseworker consent before a start date is set. Caseworkers, CASA volunteers, and PAL coordinators can use the same application form to refer a young person — selecting “I am referring someone” and providing the young person's name, age, and contact information so our team can follow up directly with them.

How the six months is paced

Each track runs six months at roughly 15–20 hours a week, deliberately set below full-time so participants can keep working a job, caring for family, or handling other obligations while they train. The pace is structured rather than self-paced end to end: participants move through a sequence of skill-building lessons and hands-on projects on a set weekly rhythm, with checkpoints where an educator reviews the work produced so far before the next stage builds on it. This keeps the program from becoming either a rushed crash course or an open-ended one nobody finishes. Because the program is fully online, the specific hours in a week are flexible around each participant's schedule, but the weekly cadence and checkpoints are not.

What “volunteer educators” means

Volunteer educators are people with real professional experience in the subject area — a working developer, marketer, bookkeeper, IT support professional, or administrative operations person — who donate their time to lead lessons, review participant work, and answer questions, rather than paid instructional staff. Concretely, that means the person teaching the Web Development track has actually built websites for a living, not just studied a curriculum guide. Volunteer educators are the ones who deliver the structured lessons and give direct feedback on the projects that become each participant's portfolio; they are distinct from the one-to-one mentor described below, though in a small, early-stage organization some individuals may serve in both roles.

The mentorship model

Every participant is matched with an individual mentor in addition to the track's educator(s) — one adult whose specific role is to be that participant's advocate and sounding board through the program and after it. In practice, mentorship means regular one-to-one check-ins (distinct from group lessons), review of a participant's portfolio work from a career-readiness angle rather than a strictly technical one, help preparing for and rehearsing job interviews, and support thinking through decisions like which job offer to take or how to price a first freelance project. Mentors stay reachable after a participant graduates rather than the relationship ending at a certificate. For young people who exited foster care or the justice system without an existing professional network or a family member to call for career advice, this relationship is meant to substitute for exactly that gap.

How progress is assessed

Progress in each track is tracked primarily through the portfolio of work a participant produces — deployed websites, a set of managed ad campaigns and their reporting, reconciled sets of books, resolved help-desk tickets, or completed administrative workflows, depending on the track — reviewed periodically by the track's educator against the skill areas the program is meant to build. This is deliberately closer to how a manager evaluates an employee's actual output than to a written exam. Readiness to move toward job placement or freelance work is a judgment call made jointly by the educator and mentor, based on whether the participant's portfolio and interview readiness would hold up with a real employer or client — not a fixed test score.

What happens after graduation

After completing a track, a graduate generally has three doors available: job placement support, in which staff and mentors help identify openings, prepare application materials, and make direct introductions to employers who are open to hiring an Azgari Foundation graduate; continued freelance work with mentor support through a graduate's first clients; or, for some, eventually building an independent practice once they have a track record — a minor and optional path, not the program's aim. We are candid that enrollment does not guarantee a job, a client, or any specific income; individual results vary with effort, market conditions, and personal circumstances. What the Foundation commits to is the training itself, the mentor relationship, and direct introductions — not a placement guarantee.

One honest caveat, given where we are: Azgari Foundation received its IRS determination as a 501(c)(3) public charity effective December 1, 2025, and our first cohort began training in 2026. We do not yet have graduates or placement outcomes to report, and we won't invent numbers to suggest otherwise. What is described above is the model we built and are actively running, not a track record we're claiming.

Apply or refer

The application takes about ten minutes. Caseworkers, CASA volunteers, and PAL coordinators use the same form — select “I am referring someone” and include the young person's name, age, and contact info.