A Foundational Partnership That Provides Foundation 

Mary Beth Bylsma attended Thursday night’s Kraken game against the Edmonton Oilers with more invested than just watching her head coach husband, Dan, collect another win behind the team’s bench.

Bylsma has spent the past season doing One Roof Foundation (ORF) volunteer work focused on helping the team’s YouthCare primary charity partner with everything from serving meals weekly to homeless youth in a local kitchen to gathering donations for various projects from other hockey spouses. And so, when ORF celebrated the ongoing 10-year partnership with its annual YouthCare game night during Thursday’s 6-1 Kraken win, Bylsma and others were more than happy to highlight work being done and services made available.

An estimated 40,000 public school students statewide are living in homelessness or with housing insecurity.

“It’s not just offering a home-cooked meal,” Bylsma said of the volunteer kitchen where she works distributing food at the group’s downtown Orion Center. “They offer GED continuing education, counseling, a medical clinic. They offer clients outreach to help them not only survive, but to progress in the world where maybe they don’t have that support at home.

“There are counselors that can help you get your first job. I mean, when you’re 17 how do you get that first job when you’re on your own? The court system isn’t helping them do it.”

Helping homeless youth through the YouthCare partnership is one of three key areas — along with improving youth access to hockey and promoting environmental justice — targeted for assistance by ORF since its 2021 inception as the charity arm of the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena.

Youth homelessness is considered different from the adult version as younger people tend to couch surf between friends and not consider themselves homeless. Also, the brains of younger people often don’t fully mature until age 25, making the adult homelessness system less reliable for them and leaving them more vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking on the streets.

Founded in 1974, YouthCare was one of the first shelters to serve runaway and homeless youth on the West Coast. ORF raises funds for YouthCare and amplifies its message to fans and the broader community.

The partnership stems from a commitment made by Oak View Group co-founder Tim Leiweke to the Seattle City Council in 2017 to help eradicate local youth homelessness a part of the company’s agreement to undertake a $1.2 billion all-private overhaul of the previous KeyArena into the venue now known as Climate Pledge. A major partnership goal of ORF and YouthCare is to reduce to zero the number of homeless youth and young adults ages 25 and under living on King County streets the amount of youth living homeless on King County streets at any given time, estimated at roughly 1,800 people – with 70% of them sleeping outside.

ORF also helps YouthCare provide its job training, internships, and employment opportunities at various Kraken facilities.

“The Kraken’s support goes far beyond the ice — they’re helping build a future where every young person has a safe place to call home and the opportunity to thrive,” said Jim Laugen, YouthCare director of development and corporate partnerships.

The foundation hosted Laugen and more than 100 other YouthCare clients, staff and volunteers at Thursday’s game as well as representatives from other groups working to end youth homelessness through ORF TidePool programs, presented by WaFd Bank.

Net proceeds from the game’s 50/50 raffle and Anchor Auction were donated to YouthCare. And a YouthCare case manager, Soleil Kapralova, was recognized in-game as the night’s Hero of the Deep, with a $32,000 donation by the Bonderman family, owners of the Kraken, being made to the youth homelessness organization in her honor.

“The Kraken are more than a hockey team—they’re a force for good,” Laugen said. “Their commitment to YouthCare and the fight against youth homelessness sets the gold standard for community partnerships.”

And gestures such as the coach’s wife showing up weekly for volunteer kitchen duty – including on Thanksgiving Day – help make the partnership what Laugen feels is something unique.

“When the Kraken show up, they show up fully — with funding, visibility, and heart,” Laugen said. “Their partnership reminds our young people that the community believes in them.”

Bylsma said she doubts any of the teens lining up to receive meals from her and other volunteers are aware that her husband coaches the Kraken.

“It would be interesting to know what they’d think,” she said. “But no, they don’t know. They don’t call me ‘Kraken Mom’ or anything like that.”

Bylsma has shared her husband’s profession with a handful of other volunteers, including some full-timers she has utmost respect for.

“I give so much credit to people that are in there daily,” she said. “I mean, I float in and out. But they’re there every day.”

Bylsma said she has tried to do community work at every stop of her husband’s pro coaching career. When she heard about ORF, she immediately asked which of their multiple areas of community work she could help most in and was directed towards YouthCare.

Beyond the kitchen server work, Bylsma has helped organize donations from spouses and “significant others” of players and hockey operations staff to help YouthCare with a shift of its overnight facilities and beds to the centralized Orion Center location.

“The Orion Center already had the funding for all of the mattresses and the bunk beds and stuff like that,” she said. “But they didn’t have any of the linens and pillows and blankets.”

Bylsma sent out a mass email to the Kraken-affiliated personnel, who purchased the needed items online through an Amazon Wish List registry set up on behalf of YouthCare – which listed all items they needed purchased.

“Sure enough, they did not need anything once they gave us that list,” she said.

Bylsma and the Kraken significant others also donated items to YouthCare’s Christmas room, where youth clients are given a set amount of tokens to buy gifts – ranging from basic toiletries and other necessities, such as socks, to things like a winter coat or a duffel bag.

Bylsma and her husband and family members had wanted to appear together as Orion Center kitchen volunteers on Christmas Day, but all the sign-up spots were already taken.

So, she wound up volunteering on Thanksgiving Day instead. And what she experienced made her realize the work being done was truly needed.

“That was hard seeing a line of children – I call them children – waiting to get in on Thanksgiving Day. And I know it as the same on Christmas Day as well. That’s just hard. It really hits you.”

So, when she can help ORF and YouthCare give back, she does.

“I think One Roof has always done whatever it could,” she said. “It makes me proud to be a part of it.”