Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Today I'm honored to speak with a remarkable leader whose life and work embodies service, justice and hope for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. Bill Bedrossian is the president and CEO of Covenant House, a preeminent global nonprofit organization that provides immediate and long-term support for young people facing homelessness and who are survivors of trafficking.

In this conversation, you'll learn a deeper understanding of youth homelessness and what it takes to break the cycle. A powerful blueprint for purpose-driven leadership, a model for systems change. And finally, a reminder that real change begins with presence, persistence, and the belief that no young person is beyond hope. Bill Bedrossian lives his purpose boldly and his belief is simple, yet profound. Every young person deserves a safe place to sleep and someone who never gives up on them, so let's get started. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Bill Bedrossian:
Thank you. Thanks, Carol. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about Covenant House and the work that we're doing.

Carol Cone:
Well, I want to start out with, about your background, and I just wanted to say that whenever I'm interviewing a potential employee, my favorite question, so any of our listeners can borrow, my favorite question because it's related to you and why you do what you do is, what's the most important thing you've learned from your mother? And then I say, what's the most important thing you've learned from your father? And then what's the most important thing you've learned from your siblings? Because you have a lot of siblings.

Bill Bedrossian:
I hear you.

Carol Cone:
Can you talk a little bit about your family and your upbringing first because it's going to give our listeners a sense of your character.

Bill Bedrossian:
Sure, yeah. And thanks for allowing me to share. Definitely my family has been the driving force behind why I am doing what I'm doing today and who I am. If I can just start by sharing, my parents had me at a very young age, and I think that really shaped why they did what they did. And they, as teenage parents, I think they experienced a lot of people who chastised them and didn't think that they were capable of parenting effectively. And they really leaned into I think some characteristics that enabled us all and my family to be successful. 

I would see my dad come home from work and then watch him cut the old woman's lawn across the street because that was the right thing to do to be helpful. I would see my mom prepare meals for us and scrape buy on what we had, but still have the time to make homemade jam and deliver it to neighbors to be a good neighbor and to see what they needed to support them. And so that really just permeated through my entire childhood and really grew for them as they added resources to their their home situation, they began to take in other children. And it started with taking in pregnant teen women and then really expanded into becoming foster parents and adoptive parents. I don't know how many young people they fostered through the years or how many other kids just stayed at our house because they were in need, but they adopted eight of my 11 siblings. And it was just an amazing environment for me to grow up in because it exposed me to circumstances I would've not otherwise understood.

System issues around foster care, the systemic racism that led into the abundance of young people into foster care, how the crack epidemic really intertwined with racism and foster care system. All these things gave me great compassion and also combined with that, a purpose to want to do something about it, to try to fix things that had been broken so badly.

Carol Cone:
And that'll lead up to your amazing career. Please talk about this formative story where you were walking in the streets, I believe in Chicago, and that there was a homeless man, and he looked at you and you looked at him and it was like something happened that changed the total course of your career.

Bill Bedrossian:
When I was in college, I studied business. I wanted to be a stockbroker because I had a professor who had been a stockbroker and had great financial success, and he was so engaging. I just really enjoyed being around him in his classes, playing basketball with him on campus. And so I learned from him and studied for my Series 7 and wanted to work on the Chicago Board of Trade after college and signed on with an organization and started work after college. And one day on my lunch break, I was walking down LaSalle Street in the financial district of Chicago with lots of other people. And I was just in my own world, this was pre-smartphone, so I definitely wasn't on my phone, but I was preoccupied. And I sort of stepped over a homeless man who was asking for money, but I wasn't really paying attention. And basically he cursed at me to get my attention, called me a name, and I turned around and looked at him and said, "Did you just call me this name?"

And he said, "Yeah, you're walking by and your fancy suit with no problems and I can't even get something to eat." And as I was looking at him, he looked into my eyes, into my soul I felt, and I just started talking to him. I ended up giving him the few bucks I had to get a meal, but I couldn't shake the interaction that was so convicting that I had become so preoccupied with my own issues and problems that were so minimal that I couldn't even notice or pay attention to someone in desperate need right in front of me. And that didn't feel good. And I literally started calling graduate schools of social work and was able to get into Loyola University in Chicago and start my social work career within just a couple of months. And the rest is history. 

Carol Cone:
You had that epiphany moment, which some people today of all ages are saying, "What is my purpose and how do I find my purpose?" And I think the fact that you stopped, paused and had this connection to another human being and it sparked something in you, so congratulations, is that you found it and you followed it, that you left enough openness to really have it impact you. Let's talk about Covenant House. You've been CEO I believe since 2023, and a little bit about the origin story, but truly what does Covenant House do? 

Bill Bedrossian:
Well, Covenant House was founded in 1972 by a Franciscan priest who really noticed back in the early seventies how many young people didn't have a place to go at night and really started doing outreach to them and then develop our first house where young people can live. And it really expanded from there in New York City, just some really generous donors gave us our first campus, which happened to be formerly a women's prison on the corner of 10th and 41st. And I think really found connection first through people who are Catholic, but beyond that, people who cared about young people. And I think that's the story now, is really our supporters have become so diverse for the reasons that they want to support our young people. We have so many young people who experience homelessness as a result of coming out of foster care or coming out of poverty or because of family rejection for being LGBTQ or experiencing mental health issues.

And so I think we've now become this beautiful place where people from all different backgrounds want to help young people for very different reasons, and we have a purpose that they all believe in. And so what we try to do is just meet the needs of young people who don't have families that can support them. Generally, we're working with young people between the ages of 18 to 25 because that's how states or cities define quote unquote "youth" but in other places it's different. Like some cities it's starting at 16 or 15. And often we have programs where we have young mothers with their children as well. And of course in our Latin American programs, we're working with young people that are much younger that are experiencing human trafficking or coming through the migrant trail and lose their parents and don't have anywhere to go, so we're working with young people of all ages who don't have a family to support them.

Carol Cone:
It's not just a night or a bed, it's much more comprehensive services, so can you talk about the breadth of the services, and then after we go through that, I want to pause and talk about the scope of what you do.

Bill Bedrossian:
Sure. We really try to create a home-like environment for young people in the 34 cities that we serve around the Americas. And there's some similarities at each of these quote unquote "homes". Some of them are huge. In Toronto we have over 300 young people living in one campus, others are small. In Anaheim, California, it's 25 beds. But the commonalities are in what we are enabling young people to do, so they can stay as long as they need to while we are helping them through whatever challenges they're experiencing. For some people it's as simple as I just need to get on my feet, get a job so I can afford my own apartment. For most others, it's much deeper than that. They've experienced trauma that has resulted in some mental health challenges or has resulted in them not being able to finish their education for high school.

And so we really work with them where they are to achieve their goals. It could be education and employment support. It could be mental health support. In many of our campuses, we have medical clinics right on campus so that they can get support from nurses and medical doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists. Ultimately, we are trying to fill the gaps that were left by the families that they came from. And so we really try to engage the communities around us in helping us do that. We know that once a young person leaves us, if they don't make connections in the community, they're back in isolation that they started in, so we really rely heavily on volunteers to come in to work with our young people, to do fun things with our young people and to mentor them so that they have relationships beyond the staff and the peers that they meet at Covenant House campuses.

Carol Cone:
And I'm curious, you talk about volunteers because as we continue in this discussion, I think a lot of our listeners are going to say, I really want to volunteer. This is an amazing opportunity to mentor and work with youth. How do you train your volunteers?

Bill Bedrossian:
It's a great question. And we really have two different types of volunteers. We have volunteers that come in on one or two off situations where they will just do a service project or an activity with the young people. And so that's one type of orientation. And then the other is much more purposeful, and that's when a volunteer group wants to stay involved and really connect with young people. We do orientations, we do background checks. We really try to engage people around, what do you love to do? Because we'd love you to do that with our young people because likely they haven't ever experienced that before. And two, if they see you joyful doing what you love to do, that's going to give them an opportunity to be joyful. We have people who come in and do everything from game nights to bible studies to basketball to arts and crafts. I remember one time in Hollywood we had a group of grandmothers who came in and wanted to teach knitting, and I thought, there's no way anyone's going to do this.

Carol Cone:
I bet you had a lot of people take it up.

Bill Bedrossian:
We had seven young men-

Carol Cone:
Great.

Bill Bedrossian:
... who just loved sitting with these grandmas because they didn't have grandmas in their lives, and they-

Carol Cone:
That's so lovely.

Bill Bedrossian:
... just love the opportunity to sit with them and hear from them and have people say nice things to them and encourage them. And it was a wonderful experience, so we really just want people to do what... Live out their purpose with our young people so that they get to see that joy.

Carol Cone:
I want to pause for a second and talk about the scope of Covenant House because it is significant, listeners. 57,000 youth reached across five countries, 862 nights of safe housing. I think it was last year that was in your report, 1.8 million meals served. One in 10 young people will experience homelessness at some point in their lives. This isn't just a modicum issue, this is a mainstream issue. 19,000 on-site medical visits, 3400 screened for human trafficking. Partners, you have over 70 partners that range from the NBA, NFL, Chick-fil-A, Accenture, Cisco, Ulta Beauty.

I want to ask you, because many of our listeners want to go into non-profit management or they're at a non-profit or they want to partner with one, what are some of your key insights to lead a large non-profit? 

Bill Bedrossian:
I think for me, when you think about leading a non-profit, what people underestimate is one of the biggest roles of the CEO to be effective is raising money, so if you don't like asking people for money, it's going to be really hard for the organization to be successful. We tell our site CEOs and for myself, we spend between 60 and 70% of our time raising money, and that looks differently. It's not asking people, it could be developing relationships with your local congresspeople because that's potentially a funding source through the federal government. It could be meeting with foundations, talking to people. It just is really deliberate time about getting awareness out there to people who have the capacity to help.

Carol Cone:
Thank you, I want to talk about part of the heart and soul of how you manage Covenant House. You have these five guiding principles, and I'd love you to talk about them. 

Bill Bedrossian:
These values are really interchangeable with not only who we are as an organization, but how we work with young people. And so they�re immediacy, sanctuary, value in communication, structure and choice. And I think those are the things that really help guide our young people in their journey through, but also how we interface with them. And so as you talk to the statistics, there are 4.2 million young people in the US and Canada alone who are going to experience at least one night of homelessness, so this is an immediate challenge that our young people are faced with. And when they hit the street, it's not a situation where they get to think about what they might do from here. If they don't figure out a place to sleep safely, there's going to be a trafficker. There's going to be somebody that tries to take advantage of them really quickly, so that immediacy is required in how our staff receive young people and also one another in how we do the work. I think maybe one of our most important values is sanctuary, and that is giving young people just a safe place to be.

Communication obviously is key, and I think it's not just how we communicate with one another, a lot of communication is listening. And we've gotten better as an organization, the better we've been able to listen to young people. And I'd say there's things that we did for the first 40 years of our organization just because we always did them and they worked 40 years ago, and the young people have been telling us that doesn't really work anymore. And so what we've committed to is really having active feedback loops with our young people, with our staff so that they can constantly tell us, "Hey, is this working?" Oh, it's not, then we better change that in order to make sure you have what you need. And also what's the data telling us?

Structure, sometimes it goes without saying like, well, you're housing so many young people, you got to have structure. I look at it differently. The way that we talk about it with our young people is really about any loving relationship has structure within it. You can't just do whatever you want to whoever you want and expect to maintain positive relationships. And it's the same thing at Covenant House. We want the best for you, and because we love you, there are going to be some boundaries and some guidelines and some behaviors that are maybe not acceptable within this campus. 

And then finally, choice. Ultimately, none of our young people are going to be successful if we tell them what they need to do. They have to tell us what's important to them, what they want to do. And it's my favorite thing about working with young people. I hear so many audiences talk about how helpless they feel about working with homelessness, but whenever I talk to a young person, I've never met one that didn't have a dream or a belief that there was something better for them. And that's the leverage we have. The minute they walk in the door, they can tell us something better that they want, and we use that, their dream as the motivation and the framework for how we support them on this one size fits one because every young person has a different dream and a different background.

Carol Cone:
Oh, that's brilliant. You talk so much about love and compassion and you're unlocking and you're embracing, and that every young person is different-

Bill Bedrossian:
Absolutely.

Carol Cone:
... which is fabulous. And you're living these. I love that their values and behaviors. You have a vision to end youth homelessness by, I believe, 2035, and it's called The Journey Home. Can you talk about one, why is it important to set that goal and then what are a few key elements of the journey home?

Bill Bedrossian:
Well, first of all, if you don't name it, it's never going to be possible-

Carol Cone:
That's right. It's got to be branded.

Bill Bedrossian:
... so we started there and said, this is the future state that we all want. Is this possible? Yeah, it is possible for these reasons. And so I'll share a little bit about that. I'm not delusional enough to think that by 2035, there's not going to be a kid on a corner in Chicago that doesn't have a place to sleep. But what I do think is possible is there is enough resources in the US and in Canada to have a safe place for every young person who needs it and the resources for them to thrive. That's not a question. We know the resources that it's going to take. One of the biggest challenges in America has been we've done a really poor job of counting how many young people are actually homeless each night and then allocating appropriate resources to support them. One of our goals is to really help craft a unified federal definition of youth homelessness so that it can be counted and then we can allocate resources to it. And that's how the federal government managed through veterans' homelessness.

I think one of the biggest issues in homelessness and many of the social issues, but especially in the United States, is we do not allocate enough resources to prevention. And so we're very reactive to a problem, and then we throw a bunch of money at something to try to solve it, but we never address the root causes. And because of that approach for really decades and generations within the foster care system thinking about homelessness, the end result is every year it's getting worse. Between 10 and 12% more people are experiencing homelessness in the US every year. And so these are solvable problems.

Carol Cone:
You talked about housing and affordable housing, and one of the things that I really love about Covenant House, you innovate and that you have gone into the field of building homes with partners. Is it the Linden Commons and can you share with our listeners if a young Christian's going to need the housing, how they can afford this?

Bill Bedrossian:
One of the misnomers of affordable housing is that it's not affordable. It's affordable for a very particular segment of the population that is really upper middle class if you look at the definition of affordable for housing and the income that you need to be able to afford it. And this was really highlighted for me when a young man in Los Angeles, he came to us and gosh, Derek did literally everything we at Covenant House and Society asked him to do. He went back to school, he got a job, he got an internship, he got another job. He saved his money. He moved through our housing continuum from shelter to transitional housing to rapid rehousing. And when he was able to move into his own apartment, despite having two jobs, the only thing he could afford was in a very unsafe neighborhood in Los Angeles in a dilapidated apartment that I would've never allowed my own boys to live in.

And despite that, this horrible living situation, he was so kind that whenever one of his friends was experiencing homelessness, he would let them live there. This is a young man who's literally doing everything we could have ever wanted him to do, and yet he was living in what I would call squalor. And that just wasn't right to me. And a normal economics says, well, you should be spending 40% of your income on rent, so for our young people, if 40% of your rent is $800, but an average one bedroom apartment is $1,500, we have a problem here.

That means you're going to have to spend all your income on rent and you can't afford how to live, so we developed a concept that said you can pay rents based on what you afford. And the way that we were able to do that was to get very generous donors to help us develop some apartment complexes so that we were unencumbered with debt, and despite the rents being lower, they were able to cover the operation costs of the maintenance of the building. Now, this took some amazing partners and funders, but also property management companies who wouldn't normally think, hey, we're involved in the homeless space. We've got an amazing property management company who is donating their services to help our young people understand what it's like to live in the real world and have to work with a property management company to pay rents to have things fixed in your home, so it's been an amazing experience.

Carol Cone:
It's brilliant. I want to talk about another innovation, it's more of a fundraiser and it's an awareness builder, that's the sleep out. It's a great idea. I've had a few people do it. It opens their eyes. Can you explain briefly to our listeners what that event is and how does it do as a fundraiser, as well as an awareness builder?

Bill Bedrossian:
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving across the 34 cities we're in and many others, we do what's called a sleep out. And for one night we ask people to sleep out quote unquote "on the street". Really, you're sleeping in a safe environment around a Covenant House that we help set up. But the idea is that we're not trying to replicate homeless. We're sleeping out in solidarity to raise awareness of the 4.2 million young people that are going to experience homelessness for at least one night this year. We have people who are the CEOs of large corporations, we have the general manager of the Yankees, people who this would be very unusual in the course of their normal lives to be sleeping out on the street of New York or Chicago or Anchorage or wherever it might be. As the result, when they ask their friends, when they ask their peers, their coworkers to financially support them, it's much more impactful than asking for support to run a 5K.

People want to know, "Why are you sleeping on the street? It's going to be 24 degrees." And then the communication after the night about what it felt like and thinking about how a young person would have to get up in the morning and find a place to clean up and get dressed and go to work or for a job interview without being able to charge their phone or whatever that might be. It really creates a level of compassion that you may not have had before, understanding all the aches and pains and the sounds and the sights throughout the night. 

Carol Cone:
It is brilliant, and it's so visceral. I now want to just pivot to partnerships because you have a lot of partners. Is the issue that appeals to them that you should never be homeless or are they worried about the issue? How do you make it so engaging that they want to be a partner with you for a long time?

Bill Bedrossian:
Well, I think there's a number of factors. One, I do think every partner we have cares about the issue, and they're either brought to it because of homelessness or because of human trafficking, something our young people's experience that really resonates them or resonates with their business. If you think about Delta Air Lines, they're really serious about trying to be a partner and ending human trafficking. And so the work that they do with us is not just helping them to have the right information to be able to communicate in airports and to their team members, but it also gives their team members a way to actively engage. And because we're a national or international nonprofit, a company like Cisco or Accenture or Delta who has hubs all over where we do, they have employees engaging in a similar mission in 35 or 40 different places. And so it really creates momentum and purpose for those organizations versus doing it in just one city that your organization might be in, so that is a great benefit for us that we do have this national presence.

I think the other thing is, we really try to listen to our corporate partners and figure out what do your employees want to do? How do they engage? What's the frequency? And so we can create opportunities for them.

Carol Cone:
It's the treasure. It's a young person. They've got the future in front of them, and if you could just help them that they can fulfill or begin to live their dreams. What's your favorite story? I'm sure you have many, many, many, many of youth who you've worked with, but do you have one that you always... You've given us a few I love, but one more that truly brings out the essence of the challenge and going through the Covenant House system.

Bill Bedrossian:
Yeah. Like you said, I could tell you a hundred stories that just inspire me, but I like to share about Chad because I think Chad was pretty typical of a kid who we experienced, and it's not just this bullet train to success, it's lots of missteps along the way. And so Chad actually came to Covenant House multiple times, didn't want to follow the rules. He wanted to use drugs, and he wanted to party and he didn't want accountability, so he would come for a little while when he was in desperation, then he would leave. And he woke up one morning on a bench in Santa Monica, probably had been to Covenant House four or five times before and just thought to himself, "There's got to be more for me than waking up hung over on a park bench with nowhere to go and no one that cares about me. And the only people that I've ever known that have consistently cared about me in my life are the people at Covenant House."

And so he walked in that next time, maybe it was his sixth time, I don't know. And he decided this time's going to be different. A lot of the staff didn't believe it was going to be different. They thought, well, we'll see Chad for about 30 days and then he'll go back on his roadshow. But he didn't. He became a medical assistant at a local convalescent center. He was a really bright boy. He noticed that, hey, the people who are working as medical assistants, they are in a grind. This is a hard life, doing hard work. I love caring for people, but I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my life, but I really like what that nursing supervisor's doing with their job. He went out, he got his education, he got his certifications. He went to college, he became an RN. And I remember the first time he drove up in his brand new Prius, he had moved into his own apartment and he was just beaming with pride coming home because we were the home for him to show how well he had done.

And since that time, he is just continued to thrive. He remains involved at Covenant House. He comes back and volunteers. He'll share his story, what we ask him to, but more importantly, he's got a stable home, stable relationships, a great career, and I'm just so proud of him. He may never be quote unquote rich by the world's standards, but man, that kid is living the dream and I'm just so proud of him.

Carol Cone:
That's a great story. Thank you. We always ask our guests, how are they integrating AI into their work, into their planning, their operations or such? I'm just curious about, because it's only getting more and more and more of our lives, so how are you using it?

Bill Bedrossian:
Look, I think it's a real opportunity for us. When I talked about prevention, we can't ever have enough social workers to get into people's homes and connect them with the right tools and resources. I think that's a huge opportunity for us. We are piloting some things, right now we're piloting an AI technology in Vancouver, British Columbia, where we're trying to get young people to come to our app and say, here's how you can connect to resources, here's how you can get in touch with us and using artificial intelligence to talk them through what their situation is. But we want to do so much more to really find out how we can connect families in crisis to the resources that are out there, but they just don't have accessible to them so that we can keep more kids at home.

Carol Cone:
This has been an amazing conversation. Covenant House is not just a bed, it's an entire approach to truly love and solve and advance youth across our country and in five countries and 34 cities, so it's wonderful. I always give the last words to my guest, so how do you want to leave it with our listeners, Bill? Again, we've got funders, we've got academics, we've got young people who want to go into the field, foundations. What do you want to say to them?

Bill Bedrossian:
For me, it's just about leading with compassion and thinking about how fortunate each of us are born into the situation that we are and how that could have been so different. It's by some providence that we're in the situation we're in and that homeless youth is not. And so for me, that's always level setting why I'm here, who I need to be working with, and what I can do with the resources that I have to be able to help others. And so I think just leading with compassion and understanding is an opportunity for all of us to be more effective.

Carol Cone:
That's beautiful. And really being open to getting in touch with your own personal purpose-

Bill Bedrossian:
That's right.

Carol Cone:
... which the amplifies and accelerates your trajectory of satisfaction and compassion. Bill, it's been a fabulous conversation. I can't wait to see how the Journey Home is going to be evolving. And in a year or so, why don't you come back to the show and let us know the progress you're making because I'm sure it'll be great? Thank you so much for joining us on Purpose 360.

Bill Bedrossian:
Thank you, Carol. Appreciate you giving this opportunity.

Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney and Carol Cone On purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson are crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.

This transcript was exported on Jun 18, 2025 - view latest version here.



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