Embrace Washington hosts 24-hour basketball game at Spokane Hoopfest, raises $105,000
Spokane’s Embrace Washington raised $105,000 through a 24-hour Hoopfest basketball game, supporting foster children across Eastern Washington and expanding awareness of resources for vulnerable youth.
By Ethan Bakogiannis | FāVS News Reporter
SPOKANE, Washington — While many 3-on-3 basketball games at Spokane’s legendary Hoopfest last around 25 minutes, one game at the annual basketball mecca in late June lasted much longer. In fact, there was one game at this year’s Hoopfest that lasted for an entire day.
Embrace Washington, a nonprofit charity providing resources for children in foster care, raised $105,000 after hosting a 24-hour basketball game at this year’s Hoopfest.
In conjunction with Hoopfest and its suite of child-focused charities, this was Embrace Washington’s second shot at a 24-hour game for charity in Hooptown, USA. The Spokane-based nonprofit more than doubled its donations received compared to the inaugural Embrace Hoopfest event in 2025, raising both money and awareness for its mission of providing aid when there are gaps in resources for children and families in the foster care system.
“They have a lot of unique needs,” said Dr. Terri Crafts, CEO of Embrace Washington. “Every child that enters the foster care system has a unique story as to how they entered the system, but none of those stories are pretty.”
Building a 24-hour basketball game
Embrace Washington relies solely on grants and donations to fuel a variety of programs that serve around 2,000 foster children each year throughout 13 counties in Eastern Washington, making fundraising events vital for the organization. Before Embrace Hoopfest, Crafts said she was seeking to add a nontraditional fundraising event to the organization’s schedule.
That’s where Jason Reinhardt, a local community connection in a Spokane church came to Crafts with a big idea. Aware of Embrace Washington through a foster family at his church, Reinhardt pitched a 24-hour basketball game for charity after seeing the same kind of event in action after playing in one himself in Boston.
Given Spokane’s deep, cultural roots to basketball and Hoopfest’s youth sports-focused charities, and Embrace Washington’s close connection to the city, Crafts and Reinhardt knew this event would be a natural fit.
“Everybody knows about Hoopfest, it’s massive, and obviously they’re focused on youth, and then Embrace Washington is supporting disadvantaged youth from a different perspective,” Reinhardt said. “So I think it is a good marriage of just helping kids, helping kids that are in tough situations through Hoopfest.”
Once off the ground, Reinhardt was key in organizing the event from a logistical perspective. Planning for potential weather, conjuring jerseys, scheduling breaks and ensuring food, beverage, towels and bathrooms are present is all a part of the job, as well as recruiting connections to play basketball for 24 hours.
Embrace Hoopfest receives its donations through its players. Once a player joins through an invite-only system, each has a personal goal of raising $1,000 from their personal network. While 35 players last year raised over $39,000, 58 participants this year raised $105,000, which was split evenly between Hoopfest’s charities and Embrace Washington.
Reinhardt and Crafts were also able to secure their first corporate sponsor for this year’s event in Thrivent, a financial services organization. Gaining more corporate sponsors is a goal for the Embrace Hoopfest event in its future iterations.
Aside from a 169% increase in donations, a doubling in the scale of the event meant more volunteers, more participation, more attendance and more eyes on Embrace Washington.
“Obviously the fundraising is important for Embrace Washington and for the Hoopfest charities that the money goes to,” Reinhardt said. “But I think getting just a societal awareness of what I’ll call a crisis in the foster care system is something that I was totally blind to until two years ago, and am learning more and more about it every day.”
Embrace Washington
This crisis, as Reinhardt calls it, is what Embrace Washington works toward solving. Embrace has grown steadily since its inception in 2014, now hosting a handful of programs, holding fundraisers and fulfilling special requests of foster children and families.
Growth has been spurred by addressing the needs of those in the foster care system. The formation of Embrace Washington’s HALO program, or Healthcare Assistance for Little Ones, helps meet the needs of children with complex medical cases. For example, while the state may provide a wheelchair to a child who needs one, they may not provide a ramp for easy access to a home — that’s where Embrace steps in.
“These kids, again, a lot of them are disabled,” Crafts said. “They have very complex medical care and needs, and there is a significant gap in what insurance will and won’t cover, and so our requests for that, which we did not have a medical program for, were just skyrocketing. And so we created that program to meet that need, and that’s kind of how Embrace has grown throughout the years. Just as we’ve seen a need, as we’ve talked to the specific stakeholders in the community, we have grown very intentionally and strategically to meet that need.”
Embrace Washington strategically takes no state funding due to an inconsistency in funding and a large administrative burden that comes with accessing these funds. Many times, Crafts describes requests from social care workers or families in the system who know about Embrace as “emergent” in need. This in-house funding provides the organization more freedom and flexibility to respond to needs that often require fast turnarounds, such as providing beds to children in foster homes in order to keep sibling groups together.
“We’ve even provided as much as a double-quad bunk bed so we could keep a sibling group of eight together so that there was a home that was willing to take them,” Crafts said. “We were going to make that happen so those kids weren’t further separated and traumatized.”
Crafts said Embrace creates child-centric programs focused on providing resources, both physical and emotional, because foster children tend to be otherized and often result in ‘poor outcomes.’
“For example, 60% of men in federal U.S. prisons are former foster kids that have aged out,” Crafts said. “The girls represent the highest demographic of sexually trafficked victims in the United States, and so all of these issues that we as a society see — we’re very reactive to whether it’s homelessness or drug abuse or domestic violence — the statistics show that those are aged out foster kids that didn’t get the resources and have their trajectory changed. And so our organization is really built on being proactive and giving these children a chance to change that outcome and thrive.”
Helping foster children with a ‘Wish’
Akin to HALO’s aim to solve gaps in medical care, Embrace Washington’s education program wants to help plug holes in foster children’s education.
“The statistics for children in foster care graduating high school are pretty bleak,” Crafts said.
“Less than half of children in foster care ever make it to high school graduation, and the stats get really woefully worse after that in terms of them actually going to college. And we would like to change that. And a lot of that has to do with just the transitory nature of foster care.”
This transitory, unpredictable lifestyle that often accompanies a child’s journey through the foster care system is one of the main challenges that Embrace was created to solve.
“A lot of these kids have what’s called ACES: Adverse Childhood Experiences. So that’s basically their lived trauma, and one of the things that has been demonstrably shown to help reduce the effects of adverse childhood experiences is positive childhood experiences, and so that’s what the Wish Program is meant to do by funding opportunities for children to attend summer camp, to play sports, to learn to play a musical instrument, to take swimming lessons, to have equine therapy, to go to art camp — anything that a child wants to dream and hope for, but the the financial burden is too much for the family. We want to be able to give the child that opportunity.”
Community Connection
Crafts said her and Embrace Washington’s mission are all about being the change in the community that you want to see. In Spokane, this is especially important and makes the organization’s connection to the community through events like Embrace Hoopfest critical.
“We’re one of the number one cities in the entire state that has children that are being brought into care on a daily basis,” Crafts said. “So that really is a huge reason that Embrace was founded in Spokane, and why we serve these 13 counties here locally is because we’re number one for all the wrong reasons. We’re the area that has the most need for these kids, and so we work really hard to collaborate with not just state social workers but other organizations that serve children here in the community.”
Crafts said this strong community connection is what made Embrace Hoopfest’s success this year so significant, helping the organization grow both financially and in terms of awareness throughout Eastern Washington for the variety of obstacles it aims to address in the foster care system.
The CEO described Embrace Hoopfest as a “beautiful success in every measurable standard,” from attendance, to support, to financial achievement and to its marketing, emphasizing the community’s ability to rally behind Embrace Washington’s mission.
“I just think that really speaks to what an incredible place Spokane is to live, because the community does step up, and they were stepping up with the understanding that this is going to go to support children in this area, that this money is going to directly affect the outcomes and lives of our most vulnerable and traumatized and underserved children, children that are in need, and create positive childhood experiences for them,” Crafts said.
Reinhardt emphasized the simplicity of Embrace’s 24-hour event, saying anyone with an idea supporting a cause such as this can accomplish great things in their community.
“I think the thing that’s inspiring is that a small idea can impact a lot of a lot of people’s lives,” Reinhardt said. “And it’s not just the people that are benefiting from the contributions and the dollars, but just the people becoming aware of needs that are out there, and then the volunteers and the participants that are that are actively engaging in helping this community — it’s cool to see because this isn’t a rocket science type of idea. This is people saying, ‘Hey, let’s just go play basketball for 24 hours and raise awareness for something.’”
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