Determining a use for the greatest good of the community.
Katharine's Foundation is developing solutions in which the St. Francis de Sales building, with its significant assets of space, land, beauty, privacy, tradition, successful alumni, and history, can offer programs built around its unique features.
Those features include:
- a historic tradition of human rights, opportunity and success
- a family of proud and involved alumni
- a school built by one of the most successful women of her time
- a sanctuary in the middle of 2300 acres along the James River

This facility offers features unlike any other

Area Concerns

- High Rate of Risk Factors in Urban Areas
(Risk factors include: violent crime. dropout rate. unemployment, poverty, violent and threatening school incidents, births to mothers with no High School diploma, teen pregnancy and founded reports of suspected child abuse)
- Risk factors in the cities of Richmond and Petersburg are up to fourteen times the
rate they are in neighboring counties
- Selected urban neighborhoods are completely saturated
      Many kids in these areas have no responsible parent, they live below the poverty line, most of the adults and older teens around them never graduated from high school, (yet many have been to prison and will probably return). There is little encouragement for education. These kids see many of the older girls become mothers while still in their teens. They see drug corners, shootings, and prostitution outside their front door. They never get an opportunity to see a better life.

- Dropout Rates
- In 2004, nearly 2000 children grades 7-12 in the Central Virginia area dropped out of our schools.
- Class enrollment from 9th-12th grades in City of Richmond Schools drops 45%
- Class enrollment from 9th-12th grades in City of Petersburg Schools drops 38%
- In the US, students who drop out, make 65% of what people with HS degrees make

- Teen Pregnancy
-Teen Pregnancy is now estimated to cost taxpayers $26 million a year in the City of Richmond alone
- 55% of the budget for Welfare, WIC, Medicaid, Child Welfare, and Juvenile Justice is spent on families begun by teens.
- The rate of teen pregnancy has dropped throughout the nation, but in the Cities of Richmond, Charlottesville
and Fredericksburg it has steadily risen.

- Foster Care
-The number of children in Foster Care in the City of Richmond is five times that of the surrounding counties and almost twice the number of comparable urban areas
The rate of founded reports of child abuse and neglect in the City of Richmond are nearly twice as high than they are in Chesterfield County, more than three times the rate they are in Henrico and over 30% higher than in comparable urban communities

Clearly, there is a need in the Central Virginia Community to assist children in high risk factor environments.
Schools are are hard pressed to compensate for the high risk factors which disable the child.
In many cases, it seems, the schools become disabled themselves, and this cycle of high risk factors continues.
Children most affected by a high concentration of risk factors, would benefit from a structured, positive environment, removed from the risk factors they face outside of school.