You may know, if you read PLANADVISER, that adviser Shane Hanson has been busy. In August 2023, he left a role with one of the major recordkeepers to start his own advisory, Freedom Fiduciaries. In April of this year, his firm launched its own back office plan adviser system, Freedom 360.

What you may not know is that Hanson has been busy on another front: building up his charitable organization, Freedom Youth Foundation, which has leveraged volunteers, donations and Hanson and his family’s own time to bring fun, learning and housing to hundreds of foster youth.

The organization began, in some ways, with basketball. Hanson had played at the college level at the University of California, Davis, and later captained his team at Chaminade University of Honolulu.

Shane Hanson

After graduating, he got an offer from the United Nations to run a basketball peace camp in Novi Sad, Serbia. For 10 days, Hanson set up and oversaw a youth basketball league with about 150 kids from this war-torn area. The goal was to teach the kids that they could all get along.

“At the end of the 10 days, kids were crying and hugging and exchanging their Facebook pages and phone numbers,” Hanson says.

The experience was transformative for Hanson, who, after returning home to the U.S., decided to start his own sports league for foster youth who face difficult obstacles not of their own making.

“I thought: Kids need parents, they need role models, they need guidance. My heart was pulled toward doing something,” he says.

Above and Beyond

In November 2011, Hanson started an organization to run sports clinics for foster children in Camarillo, California, in partnership with a foster home called Casa Pacifica, which housed more than 80 foster children. At that point, Hanson was working as a retirement plan adviser and getting married. But he continued to use his free time to run sports clinics with foster youth focused on teamwork, leadership, community and life lessons.

“We were introducing them to different sports to get them active and engaged, and encourage all the positive things that sports can bring,” he says.

The programs “exploded from there,” Hanson says. In the following years, Hanson partnered to start up another California-based program in Orange, CA at Orangewood Children and Family Center which housed another 80+ foster youth, and later one in Boise, Idaho, linking up with the state’s health and welfare services department. Eventually, he took the program abroad to start clinics in Tijuana, Mexico, and Manila, Philippines, again syncing up with foster organizations in those locations.

The program was 100% volunteer-run, with Hanson overseeing the operations and leveraging donations—including some from the adviser space. One donor, Hanson says, was SageView Advisory Group, who partnered with Shane in 2017 to split the cost to build a new sports complex in Mexico. That same year, together they hired a full-time athletic director that still runs the programs, working with over 300 youth a day.

Meanwhile, his background in retirement planning and finance have led him to see that the kids, who often did not have adult role models, could use another kind of training: financial education. So, starting in 2021, Hanson introduced financial education programs through the foster networks.

“We have curriculums that we can take the kids through to teach them about money, budgeting, banking, etc.,” he says.

Here again, Hanson has leveraged partnerships, sometime working with local credit unions to work up relevant content.

The group is also helping kids identify career paths and develop job skills.. This is done through human resource partners that can assist with writing resumes and conducting mock interviews, Hanson says.

Expanding Services

Recently, Hanson has used donations to help provide housing in areas that do not have enough for foster children. In New Payette, Idaho, Hanson’s program recently worked to rehabilitate a 16-bedroom senior facility into a youth home. That included, according to Hanson, having it repainted and designed to be more “homey and less institutional.”

Now, Hanson estimates his nonprofit provides services to some 4,500 kids a year in total spanning over 4 locations. In October, Freedom Youth Foundation is opening a 2,000 square-foot headquarters in Boise to have a place to run the operations from and hold classes like financially literacy, employment training, career fairs and more. The facility, in partnership with the GAP and other stores, is fully stocking a clothes closet called “Parker’s Closet” named after Hanson’s daughter.

In addition, a donor is covering the cost of a full-time director of operations who has been a part of the program for three years now. This ensures every dollar donated goes directly to the youth the program serves, Hanson says, as well as keeping it a grass roots, community based nonprofit.

A lot of the work, Hanson says, comes from great volunteers. On the housing project in Idaho, for instance, a woman named Mary Irby, who is retired, has stepped in to help organize the project and help the kids settle in. With commitment from people like Irby, as well as Hanson’s wife and four children, he says the organization has “grown beyond my wildest imagination.”

“Our goal is to build kind of a franchise model,” he says. “If we have the foundation set, we think that we can do more. We’re always open to talking to other people about joining the team or setting something up in their own community.”

Overall, though, the mission of helping kids through sports, stemming from Hanson’s own time spent on basketball, remains at the core of the organization’s mission.

“When you think about sports, it’s really a microcosm of life,” Hanson says. “You have to work toward something with other people. … These children have been through unbelievable things, some things that we can’t even comprehend: Abuse. Neglect. Abandonment. Just terrible things. And our job is to show them, when they step on the court, that everybody’s the same. Everybody’s on one team, and you’re working toward a common mission.”

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