About Kids Deserve Dads
Kids Deserve Dads keeps fathers in their children's lives, and rebuilds the men those children need.
Our mission
Every child deserves a present, capable, committed father. And every father, no matter how hard the season he is walking through, deserves the support to become one. Kids Deserve Dads exists to close the gap between those two truths.
We meet fathers in the hardest moments of their lives, through divorce, separation, and the slow erasure of a dad from his own kid's world, and we give them the brotherhood, the tools, and the accountability to stay in the fight.
When a father rises, his children rise with him. That is the whole work.
The problem we exist to solve
Father absence is one of the most measurable, most expensive, and most overlooked challenges in America. The data is not ideological. It is demographic.
Nearly 1 in 4
American children grows up in a home without a father. That is roughly 19 million kids.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1960 to 2023 trend data
4x the poverty risk
Families without a father are four times more likely to live in poverty than married-couple families.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
2x the dropout rate
Children whose parents live apart are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families.
Source: McLanahan & Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent, Harvard University Press, 1994
Almost 2x as likely to be idle
Young men raised without their biological father were nearly twice as likely to be out of school and out of work at ages 25 to 29, even after controlling for income, race, and education.
Source: Institute for Family Studies analysis of NLSY97, 2022
These are not someone else's children. The cost of father absence is paid by all of us. So is the return on fixing it. The full research library, with citations, lives in our resources.
Who we serve
We serve the father in crisis. The dad sleeping on a friend's couch because he cannot sit alone in the home he lost. The dad who has not seen his kids in weeks and does not know how to get back. The dad who is one bad night away from giving up on himself entirely.
We reach him before he disappears, and we walk with him until he is steady enough to be the father his children are waiting for.
Serve the father, and you save the child. That is the leverage point no one else is working.
Who is eligible
Our programs are open to any father, and any man stepping into a fathering role, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, or ability to pay. The free tier of everything we do exists so that money is never the reason a dad stays alone. We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. Where a situation involves allegations of abuse or an active protective order, we stay inside the boundaries the court has set, always.
What We Teach
Our values are a curriculum.
Five virtues and four pillars, taught the same way in the free daily texts and the flagship intensive.
The F.O.R.G.E. Code
F
Freedom
O
Ownership
R
Resilience
G
Growth
E
Excellence
The Four Pillars of a Forged Father
The Vault
Wealth & Resources
From financial stress to sovereign command. Deploy money for purpose, not survival.
The Temple
Strength & Vitality
Strength signals safety. Your kids' nervous systems calm in a strong, steady chest.
The Kingdom
Family & Tribe
Be the benevolent king. Lead with presence, not just decisions. Refuse to be a visitor.
The Chalice
Inner Sovereignty
Master the inner world. You cannot pour from an empty cup. Generational protection starts here.
The Founder
Zac Martin
Father. Forged. Still in the fight.
Built a real estate company doing about a million dollars a year in volume. Looked like every measure of success the world hands out. The day before his son's first birthday, that life ended in a single text message. Five hours away, no warning, no goodbye.
What followed was law school with his son in his arms, drafting a shared parenting bill that died on the floor of the legislature, a denied bar license for advocating too loudly, and the slow understanding that no credential would matter more than the man he was becoming.
Today he runs the Morning Coffee Hour every day at 5:30 AM, coaches fathers through The FORGE, and is building Kids Deserve Dads into the 501(c)(3) and the movement that puts fathers back in their kids' lives.
Governance and leadership
Kids Deserve Dads is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, incorporated in Wyoming and South Dakota and recognized by the IRS. EIN 82-3510748. We file the IRS Form 990-N, the annual electronic notice for small nonprofits.
Our board of directors is growing. Founder Zac Martin is joined by:
Brian Arbothnot
Full bio coming soon.
Debra Hughes
Full bio coming soon.
Jason Frazier
Full bio coming soon.
Christopher Twiggs
Full bio coming soon.
Every director raises, not just governs
A board seat here comes with a fundraising commitment. Each director is responsible for personally securing at least $100 a month in donations for Kids Deserve Dads. If a director does not hit that number in a given month, they cover the gap themselves with a $25 personal contribution. No seat on this board is symbolic. Every director has skin in the fight.
The standard we are building toward is the one serious funders expect: at least five voting members, an independent treasurer who is not the chair, a majority of the board unpaid, written conflict-of-interest and whistleblower policies, and board review of organizational performance. We are actively recruiting to reach that number, and each new director and policy will be published on this page as they're seated and adopted.
We have completed the qualifications for Candid's Platinum Seal of Transparency; our public Candid profile is being updated to reflect it.
If you have governance experience and a reason to care about fathers and kids, we want to hear from you.
Nondiscrimination policy
Kids Deserve Dads serves fathers because that is the gap we were built to close, not because anyone else matters less. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, or ability to pay, in our programs, our hiring, or our volunteering.
We believe kids need their mothers too. Nothing in our work is against mothers. It is for children, and for the fathers those children are waiting on.
The Vision
500 Houses of Hope.
A planned network of sanctuaries where a father can land when his world collapses. A real bed. Legal support. A kitchen. Programs that put him back together so his kids can come home. This is the long-term vision the everyday work is building toward.
Safety
Real bed. Locked door.
Support
Legal. Coaching. Brotherhood.
Strength
Body back online.
Stability
Work. Boundaries. Life.