Making solutions

Project Solution last week had an open house with the Reno Bighorns that featured basketball, hip-hop music and dancing, art and food that exploded expectations, raising some $22,000 in their first fundraiser in 10 years. The facility as located at 1090 Bresson Ave., and can be reached at 870-1112, or through www.projectsolution.org. Palkin Zed is executive director.

What’s Project Solution?

Project Solution is a nonprofit that helps homeless and at-risk kids in Reno. We start with kids as young as 8 or as old as 24. We’ve got a recreational facility off of Vassar and Wells. We provide recreational services after school, [and] educational resources. We really want to teach job skills and training and entrepreneurship, but really right now, we just provide a safe place for kids to go to after school where they can hang out with their friends, play basketball, learn some dance, do some art, get some help on their homework. We want to increase a lot of our programs and start offering gardening classes and cooking classes and just more services.

How did you get involved in this?

I got involved about two years ago when people from the board of directors from Project Solutions kind of heard about my company, what we do, and just knew a little about my background and needed some help to revamp the nonprofit. They were having some issues so they asked me to come in and clean up a few prior problems and find some more resources.

Which company did they find you through?

They found out about JDRow. We do business development and strategic marketing consulting mostly to engineering companies and startups. … And that point, the nonprofit needed a new strategy to come up with a new direction. We had very few kids coming to the building and only had one service, which was open-gym basketball. Over time, we added over 30 services, trickled in more kids, made a bigger impact, we’ve been trucking forward, improving the services and getting more resources in for these kids. Since December of 2012, we’ve become completely volunteer-run. We lost one of our partners who provided us employees. They had to leave because of budget issues. And so we didn’t have any employees to provide the services so it became completely volunteer-run with people of different ages [and with], community members stepping in to help with the facility to ensure we could still keep services open for these at-risk and homeless kids.

Can kids just show up there?

Yeah. Kids just show up. We have a little participation agreement where they say, we're going to behave while in the building, and we're going to act in a positive manner, but besides that, we don't really require too much. All the resources are free for the kids. It's been fantastic since we became volunteer run because kids didn't understand that concept of what a volunteer was. We explained it to them and explained our financial situation and then they got it and then they were, “How can I volunteer?” We have about two-and-a-half acres and no custodial staff. So our kids help with taking out the trash, mopping the floors, sweeping, cleaning up. Whatever we need, they're always willing to help. We're open Monday through Friday, and sometimes we'll open up on Saturdays. Even on Saturdays, we'll get about five or six people just come up. Last few weekends, there have been about five middle-school girls come up to me and say, “Can we volunteer?” They just live in neighborhood, and they'll come in and mop the floors, and they'll clean the kitchen. They're just eager to help and eager to learn. It's really been a great experience. It's been stressful to go from having employees and partners that have money and keys to the building to becoming entirely volunteer-run, but it's been one of those opportunities since we had the courage to push forward. We've seen the community blossom. We've seen more resources come in. We've seen people really put in a lot of extra effort. Seeing the positive response from the kids has been fantastic.