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Aug 26

Horizon House offers more than a roof

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors
{see also: City has high hopes for housing-first strategy}

When it comes to fighting homelessness in Indianapolis, there’s a new mindset in town. And since early 2018, Lillian Herbers-Kelly and Horizon House have been on the front lines.

This intensive approach at Horizon House, for which there was no blueprint, involves a team assembled by Herbers-Kelly from the ground up.

“With Housing Trust Fund money, we have literally built it from scratch, which was kind of amazing to do,” said Herbers-Kelly, a trained social worker.

As supervisor, she leads a team of two housing navigators and six caseworkers. Each day, she and her team support chronically homeless individuals and families as they navigate the various issues that may seem trivial to the general public, but can be potential minefields for those more used to living in shelters or on the streets. It’s an example of the city’s housing-first strategy, and is one of three such programs in Indianapolis designed not only to find housing for people but to ensure that they are able to keep the roof over their heads. 

The approach actually begins when potential candidates for permanent housing complete a coordinated entry application. Before this coordinated system, there was a housing application, but each provider kept its own waiting list. Herbers-Kelly said it wasn’t efficient or fair and certainly not effective.

Candidates are helped with their applications by one of over 100 housing navigators at multiple agencies trained by the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention & Prevention (CHIP). These navigators’ work is different from those at Horizon House. Completing the application is complicated, so CHIP regularly trains and meets with these agency workers.

“If you’re doing those things in a system where you’re requiring a vulnerable resident to go find their own housing, fill out the application on their own and come back to you, that is not something that we can require our most vulnerable residents to do,” said Indianapolis Deputy Mayor Jeff Bennett.

After someone completes the application process and is deemed eligible for a rental assistance voucher, that’s when Horizon House gets involved.

Today, Horizon House works with 108 households, which include 155 people of which 20 percent are families. In the first year, the program worked with 60 people. Herbers-Kelly is proud of the fact that since the beginning, only one person has left the program.

Rodney Stockment, the city’s strategy director for the homeless, said it is a phenomenal success and cites national rates at more like 80 percent. Over time, the Indiana Housing Authority (IHA) has become more and more flexible, but he said just providing Housing Choice vouchers alone wouldn’t solve everything, the cultures had to mesh.

“Previously, IHA was about screening people out, and we managed to create a culture under Lillian’s leadership where the two cultures are learning to work together, and that’s why the vouchers have been so powerful,” he said.

“It’s just incredible to see that we now have a partnership with dedicated vouchers for people experiencing homelessness. It’s a beast to learn, and after a year and a half, we are still learning it,” said Herbers-Kelly. 

The housing navigators at Horizon House, according to Bennett, help cut through the bureaucratic red tape.

Alycia Broda and Danielle Washington serve as intermediaries at Horizon House for those approved for permanent housing. With the applicant, they help gather a long list of documents and complete voucher paperwork for an interview with the IHA. They hang on to the voucher until it is needed for a landlord.

Broda is Housing Quality Standard certified (HQS) and can also conduct housing inspections as a third party for IHA, which helps because the agency is overloaded with inspections.

Together with applicants, Horizon House navigators conduct placement searches and visit potential rentals. They help sign leases and do rental checklist walk-throughs and stay in regular communication with the IHA and landlords. They also spend time educating folks about leases, so they understand their rights, what they are agreeing to and understand IHA rules. This process takes anywhere from 30 to 90 days, with the goal of 30 days or less. All data is tracked on a CHIP dashboard to have ongoing data.

Another thing that Herbers-Kelly is proud of is that housing navigators do regular landlord check-ins.

“Landlords and property managers know we’re here, we’re not waiting for them to reach out to us if there’s a problem,” she said.

Horizon House communicates routinely with potential landlords about working in tandem with Horizon House’s services and benefits. In the past eight months, Horizon House has secured eight new landlords and property managers, which Herbers-Kelly said given the population’s previous eviction record is good.

“We try our best to develop new relationships so that people have more of a pool of options to choose from,” she said.

Over the two years, one thing that’s been learned, according to Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, CHIP’s executive director, is there isn’t a prescriptive model. When you are focused on the most vulnerable and chronic population, there has to be flexibility.

To that end, Horizon House doesn’t leave its clients. Along with permanent housing comes one of six case managers who ensure applicants are connected to service providers as needed.

It’s hard work and success is incremental. Herbers-Kelly shared an example of one client, a gentleman who has struggled with addiction. He is well-known in homeless circles and has worked with five or six agencies. His Horizon House team found him housing in a 55-and-up apartment complex. Initially, they struggled a bit with his placement because it removed him from the center of the city, but agreed that eliminating his external influences was a positive. Recently, he relapsed. But his case manager who was in touch regularly got him help and worked with the landlord to keep him housed.

After treatment, he returned to his apartment. “I know some people might not see that as a positive because he relapsed, but he has struggled with alcoholism so long. The fact that he didn’t lose his housing over the relapse is just a beautiful example of housing-first,” said Herbers-Kelly.

Another example was a female client who struggles with mental health issues and also lives with a special needs child. The family was staying with Family Promise, but couldn’t remain in the shelter because the child’s behaviors would put others at risk. Family Promise worked to temporarily house the family outside of the shelter. At her previous agency, this was one of Herbers-Kelly’s clients.

“It took a while to get her housed because she has several evictions, but I was in constant communication with Family Promise’s executive director explaining that we were close. She got housed, she’s done exceptionally well, and her child is engaged in services. We’ve had no complaints from the landlord.”

Horizon House has had the benefit of ongoing technical assistance from Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), a national organization that provides housing-first training. Locally, the agency has access to an online training center, attended a summit and conference and received assistance to develop additional documents needed for the program. CSH also conducted an assessment to determine caseload maximums.

Herbers-Kelly said because of varying levels of need, intense criminal histories and landlords with strict rules, caseloads are capped at 20 in order to provide quality case management and ensure that people are kept housed.

“That’s the ratio we need. I think we’ve shown over the year and a half that that’s working, so I feel strongly to not budge on that. You have to have to have the combination of housing with supports, and I don’t mean required services, I mean like someone that’s going to just walk alongside you and offer support, however that looks. It really matters to have someone in your corner.”

Aug 26

City has high hopes for housing-first strategy

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors  
{see also: Horizon House offers more than a roof}

Around the country, homelessness continues to be a chronic, complicated problem. Despite their best intentions, cities and agencies have struggled to find solutions to an issue for which there are no easy answers.

Rodney Stockment is well aware of the difficulty.

Since 1981, Stockment has immersed himself in federal housing rules and regulations. He has worked for nonprofits and government agencies at both the city and state levels. In Indiana,he’s helped craft five plans to reduce homelessness, all with varying degrees of success. Nationally, he has seen the community mental health system promised by the Kennedy administration never be adequately funded. He’s seen a sharp slowdown in the building of public housing.

So why now is Stockment excited?

For the past two years, he’s been the senior strategy director for homelessness for the city of Indianapolis. And despite a few starts and stops, he believes Indianapolis has a five-year plan that just might work.

Indianapolis’ Community Plan to End Homelessness, which was announced in 2017 and covers the period from 2018 to 2023, provides a checklist and demands action, Stockment said. If he has one frustration, it’s that it is a slow-moving process.

Indianapolis’ Community Plan to End Homelessness

The plan evolved as the result of a local funding crisis in 2016 that served as a wakeup call.

Since 1995, communities seeking homeless assistance grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) do so through a single application. In Indianapolis, the application is submitted by Continuum of Care (CoC), a regional or local planning body that coordinates housing and services funding for homeless families and individuals.

It was CoC’s 2015 submission that caused Indianapolis problems. In recent years, HUD has altered its priorities and requirements for how its grant money should be used. HUD’s priorities and requirements have evolved, but Indianapolis’ had not. As a result, the city’s homeless funding was cut by approximately 15 percent.

“It seems like that was probably due to the application just not measuring up to standards that the federal government had set. So the federal government (HUD) had been evolving in its funding priorities for years, and it seems like maybe our community was not responding to that evolution fast enough,” said Indianapolis Deputy Mayor Jeff Bennett.

Job number one that year was to work to get that funding back, said Bennett. First tasks were to dig into the application, the scoring criteria and the metrics that HUD uses. Then with support and funds from the Coalition of Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (CHIP), the city hired a grant writer with federal expertise who understood HUD’s requirements.  

“We just tried to put all the right people around the table over a period of months to turn in the best application we possibly could in that funding cycle. And that succeeded. We got a little bump, and the money back that we lost. And funding has increased steadily in each round since. It’s up 27 percent now over the last three years,” said Bennett, the deputy mayor of community development under Mayor Joe Hogsett. It also helped the CoC realize it had to diversify funding.

Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, who was named CHIP’s executive director last November, agreed.

“I think the reduction of funds did a lot of things, but one of the things is it helped us realize we cannot put all of our eggs in one basket. We cannot look to the federal government and HUD to be our sole funding source. We really have to build on our own local capacity and start to leverage local funding. I think that has helped kind of push collaboration and partnerships in new directions,” said Haring-Cozzi.

The bottom line, said Haring-Cozzi, is not just increasing the funding, but decreasing homelessness. One of HUD’s measurements is whether you are serving and housing more people.  

Strategic shift

Armed with a restoration of funding, the city has also made a strategic shift, said Bennett. By shifting to a housing-first strategy, and introducing technology to support data-informed decision-making and establishing a coordinated entry system, pieces are falling in place to get as many people housed permanently as quickly as possible. The goal is to get people off the streets and out of shelters. Housing-first is a coordinated-care approach that works to address the root causes of homelessness.

“We have never fully embraced housing-first as a community. But if you think about homelessness as a housing issue, then you can solve it with three pieces – housing, rental assistance and supportive services,” Bennett said.

Early in 2017, the mayor challenged the city to locate 400 additional housing units. Stockment, who was hired in June of that year, was assigned to help identify them.

What this did was to create a housing pipeline, and now the city requires developers who want the city’s support on applications for housing tax credits from the state or to use vouchers in affordable-housing developments to have a permanent supportive component.

“Not 100 percent of the units, but if you’re developing 100 units, can we get 10, 15, 20 of the 100? When we do that we can fulfill the pipeline and the commitments that we need for the five-year community plan. It’s roughly 200 units a year that we need to either continue to identify or to develop through new construction,” said Bennett.

In addition, there was a need to identify sources of long-term sustainable sources of rental assistance. In 2017, Alan Witchey, CHIP’s then executive director, worked with the Indianapolis Housing Agency (IHA) to identify ways to provide rental assistance not from HUD’s CoC grants, but mainly through housing vouchers that IHA oversees and deploys, Bennett said.

That led to the third part of the housing-first equation – with added housing, there was a significant lack of service-provider capacity. It was imperative to provide services for the hundreds more residents who had acute needs in order to stay housed.

Earlier this year, the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) announced that it would raise funds to provide supportive services for former homeless residents. Called the Housing to Recovery Fund, local service providers will receive funds in 2020 for outreach, housing navigation, help in getting benefits, negotiating with landlords and learning daily living skills.

“It’s $5.5 million over four years, and that’s going to enable us to create a flexible pool of service money where we’re doing a pay for success model where you don’t grant for activities, you pay for outcomes. And I think this money is going to allow service providers to have flexible money to do whatever it takes to keep people housed. It’s the most exciting thing that has happened to me in my career,” said Stockment. “We’ve got the bricks and sticks, the operating money from IHA for the first time in history, and now we’re getting the services lined up.”

Stockment said an RFP was issued for this pool in mid-July, with service provider responses due by the end of July. Right now these responses are being reviewed, and then service providers will be brought together to create a network.

“We will ask them, ‘Are you OK with us funding this network as opposed to you as individual agency?’ We will have this network of service providers that we can invest in. I’m really excited about this, it’s going to radically change the way we do work here. It’s going to really mix it up,” said Stockment.

“We’ve gotten largely out of the mindset of ‘This is my space, you cannot come into my space because this is what I do,’” said Bennett. “I think we have service providers who are now thinking differently about how they might partner with the housing provider or how the housing provider might now be willing to accept vouchers because there is a service provider attached to that residents. We were not as a community, forcing those connections,” said Bennett. 

In February, the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation announced a $74,900 grant to CHIP to fund the Street Reach Indy program. The grant will help nearly 150 people overcome the financial and health care barriers that often prevent them from finding permanent housing and provide financial assistance for security deposits, mental health or substance abuse treatment and other costs that are barriers that prevent individuals from obtaining permanent housing.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has also played a role with its homeless unit, sometimes called FLEX. Four officers are based out of the downtown district.

“They’ve been huge in particularly in terms of street outreach. They meet people where they are and really try to understand the complexities of the issues people are dealing with and work in true partnership with our homeless service provider community,” said Haring-Cozzi. When there have been problems with panhandling or increased homelessness downtown, they’ve been a pretty great resource.”

Embracing housing-first also meant that in 2017, the city launched a coordinated entry system with the goal to quickly move people from emergency shelters and match them with permanent housing. Two years in, CHIP is working to evaluate and then refine the process to shorten the time from when people first come into the system to get them connected with appropriate housing interventions.

In the last two years, there has been a reduction in the Point in Time (PIT) count number, which Haring-Cozzi said is the first barometer of success. Before the last count in January, based on what other cities were reporting, the city fully expected an increase. It’s actually has reached a five-year low, dipping below 1,600 with a 7 percent decrease from the previous year.  

“It was really eye-opening for us to see that what we’re doing is working. It’s been really encouraging because we can point to some real systemic changes in the last 18 months that we can attribute this to,” she said.

Bennett said the city is at a unique moment. The conversation has moved beyond scarcity of resources, and he believes it’s building trust with its follow-through and willingness to pivot when something hasn’t worked as planned.

“We have resources now. Now, it’s a challenge to deploy resources in as fast a time as we can. Let’s use everything that we’ve put on the menu over the last 30 years, and get more people housed permanently, as quickly as possible with high-quality services attached. Let’s just get better at the stuff that we’ve worked on in earnest over the last two to three years,” he said.

Jun 03

One workforce strategy: EmployIndy’s community-based career navigators

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Visit WorkOne Indy’s new location and learn about its services.

Attend the family-friendly open house on June 15 from 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. to check out the new facility and learn more about EmployIndy services. Bring your resume because there is a job fair during the event.

The address is: 4410 N. Shadeland Ave. (the former Carpe Diem charter school).

When Delores Mockabee found herself without a job four years ago, her emotions ran high. At times she felt hopeless and helpless, after her job was eliminated. That is until she spent time at the WorkOne office on Indianapolis’ westside. Each time she visited the office, she was greeted by passionate, caring and supportive employees.

Fast forward. Now, she is on the other side of the table. After taking advantage of WorkOne’s services, she landed a job with ResCare, a subcontractor for EmployIndy. She now pays it forward as a career navigator.

“Depending on the level of job you had, it is hard because it is like, ‘What are people going to think,’” said Mockabee. “It is a passion for me to be able to give what I got when I came to WorkOne.” Indiana’s network of American Job Centers is branded WorkOne.

In her daily work, she is one of 11 navigators who splits time at 19 satellite locations in Indianapolis. This position is designed to help connect the agency with people where they live. The navigators’ home base is WorkOne Indy, a full-service center that opened in January. Each has established a schedule to provide satellite personnel and clients with consistency. Mockabee’s sites are the Garfield Park, East Washington and Central libraries. While there, she works in the computer area and uses a large portable sign to identify the agency and its services.

“It’s been enlightening for me. Every library has a different culture. You have to figure out how you fit in, how you support and how you encourage. A lot of people who come here would not go to the eastside. Here, we’re able to offer services, and people are starting to know that we’re here and we’re available. I had a lady who came three times when I was here to help with her resume because she was computer illiterate.” Mockabee has also supported a pharmacist and a chemist, helping them develop individualized plans and utilize available resources.

Her first client created dental molds, but she was replaced with a machine. Mockabee said, she began with an Indiana Career Explorer assessment to identify her client’s strengthens, which is particularly helpful if people don’t know what to do next.

A navigator’s responsibilities don’t end after a client secures a job. There is a regular check in with the client for 90 days. Once the individual reaches that milestone, the case is transferred to another WorkOne staff person who continues the connection for a year.

Mockabee shared a story about one young man who completed the Commercial Driver Training, CDL certification. After a short time in the new job, he called her to say that he didn’t know if he could continue the travel to small towns. After reassuring him that they could find him another job, two days later he wrote: ‘I love my job, I make more money in one week than I make in a month.’ So, it really changed his life.

“We do support and help people. First thing is to get a job, then get a better job and then ultimately a career. Most exciting for me is working with people who end up in a career. This starts their future all over,” she said. And hers, too.

Besides partnering with libraries, EmployIndy has added sites at adult education centers sites in Warren, Washington and Wayne townships. CAFÉ on the city’s far eastside and Ivy Tech are other partner sites.

“These are potential clients. We want to be right there to catch them and help them with whatever else they need or help move them on to the next step of a career,” said Joe Backe, EmployIndy’s communication manager.

According to Backe, working in libraries has allowed the agency to not only expand its footprint, but removed some barriers. At the Shadeland WorkOne full-service center, for example, no one under the age of 16 is permitted in the building. That precludes people from bringing their children. But at a library, children can look at books, while mom or dad connects to services. At the WorkOne center, people can also be pointed toward a satellite location, which might be more convenient.

Those services can range from career development, to job searches, to skills development.

Although EmployIndy has been around since the 1960s in some form, and the Indianapolis mayor is responsible for appointing the members of the board. The board — with input from community stakeholders, residents, and EmployIndy partners, including the mayor’s office — is responsible for the strategic direction of EmployIndy. As part of the mayor’s initiative, the agency is working to be more neighborhood focused and target specific areas where unemployment, crime and poverty are higher, and residents may have given up hope of entering or re-entering the workforce.

Chief Operations Officer Marie Mackintosh joined EmployIndy three years ago, and was part of the team that designed the strategic plan to support the mayor’s initiative. She views the agency’s role as ensuring that residents are ready for the jobs and careers that employers bring into the community. One of the plan’s tactics was creation of the career navigator positions.

“People are not widgets, they are complex human beings. When you think about the fact that we’re asking our navigators to help those complex human beings who have so many different assets and strengths, but also potential barriers. Think about how much finessing that requires and the complexity of that,” she said.

Mackintosh said that another strategy was to consolidate the three centers located around the city into one full-service center. Housed in the former Carpe Diem charter school building on the eastside, the building can accommodate a weekly job fair for up to 20 companies, offer workshops and training and provide multiple services. An open house on June 15 will showcase the center’s services. It’s a family-friendly event, so kids under 16 may attend.  

Since the full-service center opened at the beginning of the year, another benefit has been an uptick in the number of people coming to the office monthly, which averages around 2,500 people.

Mockabee believes that bringing everyone under one roof has been good, and is a more efficient way to work. Part of a navigator’s job is to keep abreast of community resources that can be shared with clients. To facilitate that EmployIndy regularly communicates with other workforce development partners.

“We have monthly eco-system enrichment meetings where we bring together WorkOne staff and a growing number of neighborhood partner staff who are doing this coaching work on the frontlines. We talk about things like Gateway to Work, which is the new program coming out of the Family Social Services Administration in July. Individuals will be required to do more work-search requirements in order to keep Medicaid benefits. We want to make sure that we as a community don’t let anyone who is on Medicaid, drop off just because they didn’t work with a partner organization like ours to stay on,” said Mackintosh.  

EmployIndy’s graphic is a visual representation of organizations involved in the Marion County Workforce Ecosystem.

With unemployment low, one of the challenges for EmployIndy is that state and federal governments have been reduced. This year, the agency will face an 11 percent cut, however, what hasn’t changed is the need to retrain and develop skills of workers for this century.

“I try really hard to advocate for smarter, more efficient ways that we can try to help people that maybe don’t cost as much, but that are cool ways that we can connect individuals to ways to up skills,” said Mackintosh.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out how we work within the existing landscape of neighborhood organizations and offer our additional resources where it makes sense and isn’t duplicitous. So Delores might go to a library because Mary Rigg Neighborhood Center or Boner Center is down the street and they already do similar types of services through their Center for Working Families model.

“While they offer basic employment services, they may not offer a particular workshop. So, we would bring that workshop to the neighborhood or to other neighborhoods that maybe aren’t as aware of the things we do. We’re really trying to build that system and be hyper aware of the other organizations that exist in a particular neighborhood that we might be able to have some sort of a relationship. The question we ask is: How do we augment and work in a symbiotic way rather than a competitive way?” Mackintosh said.

One way is through workshops offered in tandem with partners. Rick Hightower, a career facilitator for ResCare, recently offered a 90-minute session at Fathers and Families Center for WorkOne. Males in the program are exposed to between 20 and 25 hours of workforce development workshops. That day the five males were exposed to the importance of networking, resume building and a variety of websites to look for jobs. Hightower’s rapid-based session provided the participants web-based sources of free tools. One, a job-scan website, matched a resume to a company’s job description. WorkOne also publishes a monthly learning events calendar, which lists as many as nine different trainings or meet-ups daily.

With Indiana investment in workforce development through its Workforce Ready Grants, career navigators can direct clients to some of the state’s most in-demand professions. Educating the community about Next Level Jobs Workforce Ready Grants, specifically that people in their targeted neighborhoods, is part of their work.

Mackintosh credits Gov. Holcomb’s administration for its pillar of workforce education and the governor’s workforce cabinet.

“It combines the efforts of the Commission for Higher Education, the Department of Workforce Development, business people and others to discuss some of these tough issues you’re talking about.

“In the last legislative session, they increased the funding for Workforce Ready Grants, which are state training dollars for people who don’t have a college degree to be able to reskill and the state will pay for it. It could be short-term certifications. They have to be in higher demand industries, so it’s advanced manufacturing, transportation and logistics, IT and business, health and life sciences and building and construction.”

“People are on this whole continuum of readiness for employment today. The plant workers who have been dislocated over the last couple of years, whether at Carrier or someplace else, what they have going for them is an incredible work history and ethic. I personally have great faith the average American worker could reskill and find better opportunities in this economy even today, if they can wrap their mind around that reality after they’ve grieved that the job they had for decades is lost.  But if we compare that to an individual who is maybe 19 years old, who comes from multi-generational poverty, who didn’t finish high school and doesn’t have the basic skills or role models to be able to hold down a job, that’s a very different sets of issues that we’re dealing with,” said Mackintosh.

One new opportunity allows career navigators to recommend individuals who they believe are ready for a better job.

“We have a team of business recruiters here on site at EmployIndy who receive all those referrals and look at the skill set of the individuals that are being referred and try to connect them to our employer partners. Whomever is serving in the capacity of that career navigator has the professional authority to say, ‘You know this person is really ready for an opportunity in logistics or an opportunity in technology or advanced manufacturing, here are the reasons why I think they’d be a great fit.’

“Every single person who is turned over to our recruiting team receives a phone interview, and then based on how that goes, we provide feedback to the navigators. We call all that work our referral portal, but it’s very clear what we’re trying to do, and I think that’s really special and still in its infancy.

Mackintosh said it’s modeled on a Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana practice to talent source.

“What employers want the most is strategies for how to get their talent pipeline sorted. They appreciate the work of EmployIndy’s career navigators and they are looking for us to do even more,” she said.

May 06

Youth councils get kids involved in government

By Feature

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

When you are in high school, you worry when the assistant principal calls you down to the office. Paige Kendall was no different. She was terrified when, as a freshman, her name was called over the PA. 

The reason for the visit, however, was anything but punitive. In fact, it was an honor. Greg Werner, the assistant principal at Southridge High School in Dubois County, had a proposal. Huntingburg Mayor Denny Spinner was interested in launching a youth council in the city, and he was looking for kids with leadership skills to help get the project off the ground. Werner wanted to know what Kendall and five other students thought of the mayor’s idea, and if they liked it, would they help recruit classmates?

Kendall, now a junior, obviously liked what she heard. In the three years since her angst-ridden trek to the assistant principal’s office, Kendall has not only helped recruit others, but she’s been an active member of the council which launched in 2017.  And for the past two years, she’s been president of the 12-member Mayor’s Youth Council, which launched in 2017. It draws its members from the only public high school in the corporation with a student body of 531.

Huntingburg isn’t the only Indiana community engaging young people in this way. A growing trend, voices of young people are being heard in 34 municipalities in Indiana. Aim, formerly called the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, supports the effort, and now offers statewide programs through its Youth Councils Network.

“Over the years, we have learned from many mayors and town leaders that youth councils are a fantastic way to connect with students and ensure municipal policies and programs take into account the needs of citizens of all ages. They are also a wonderful pipeline to recruit talented young people into public service, by showing them firsthand how local government works and how it can be a positive influence on people’s lives,” said Aim’s CEO Matt Greller.

Huntingburg’s Kendall is also serving on Aim’s first Youth Councils Network state board and helped plan the annual Youth Summit that was held in February. For the past two years, the summit took place at Indiana University in Bloomington. This year nearly 200 young people attended the two-day event.

Another Aim program is its Youth Legislative Day, which took place in April. The event started at IUPUI and ended at the Statehouse. Part of the day’s schedule was to learn about the top issues being debated by Indiana lawmakers.

While each council’s number of youth representatives vary, as do the tasks they complete, the reason for their existence is similar. Communities from Fort Wayne to Loogootee/Shoals, Indianapolis to Princeton and Angola to Evansville increasingly are tapping into an effective way to allow young people to whom the long-term future belongs help plan for it.

So just what motivated Spinner to start a youth council in Huntingburg? It started with a simple question.

Mayor since 2011, his city earned a Stellar Community designation in 2014. This Indiana award began in 2011 and recognizes smaller communities, and now regions, that have collaborative plans for community and economic development and is annually given to two Indiana communities.

After Huntingburg received the award, someone asked the mayor if there was anything he would do differently. That question got him thinking, and he realized there was a gap.

“We did not have a lot of engagement from our youth,” he said. “So how do we fix that?”

It was at an Aim conference that he discovered a solution. While attending a session about mayor’s youth councils presented by several mayors and Jim Dittoe, he sought more information about how to get started. The NCAA had engaged Dittoe to develop a youth program, and he had also helped Frankfort’s mayor establish its youth council. Spinner realized a council could provide him ongoing input from his city’s youth. So, he, like Frankfort’s Chris McBarnes had done, invited Dittoe to submit a proposal.

“What Jim provided was that structure I was looking for. He had had experience with some other communities in forming the same type of organization. We followed his blueprint to get the first year together, and it provided to be very successful,” he said.

This week when Richmond launches its council, it will be the 21st municipality in Indiana that Dittoe has advised.

“I’ve had the terrific opportunity of working with young people who are very optimistic. They’re determined and they want to tackle the tough issues within a community,” said Dittoe.

“We want them involved now. Not just being told what to do, but coming up with ideas and solutions and the challenges of working with people in positions such as the mayor, such as the chamber of commerce. We want them directly involved so they learn by doing.”

And getting involved and learning is just what Kendall and Cameron Buschkoetter, a Southridge senior, have done. And the result has been to develop a passion for the community.


“We really want to focus on making Huntingburg the best it can possibly be and making us and other people come here, want to live here and make their life in Huntingburg,” said Kendall.

The council’s first project was to elicit more youth involvement in the “5-5-5,” a series of monthly 5K fun walk/runs that gives the community a chance to exercise with a group. Created by Mayor Spinner, they happen on the second Friday of the month from April through August at 5 p.m. Thus its 5-5-5 designation.

The mayor’s challenge to the youth council was more peer involvement. Starting with a survey, the youth council asked all the high school students what was missing. Their approach was through old-fashioned paper surveys distributed through the school’s homerooms. Then they tallied the responses. There were some surprises.

“There were a lot of people that said if (the runs) were more of a competition with teams, they would be more willing to do it. And honestly, we should have thought of that. Teenagers love competition,” said Kendall. The council created teams of four, and each month, the first entire team to cross the finish line won Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari Tickets. Over 100 students participated each month.

The youth have also named a new city road. One result of the Stellar designation was an overpass, which was approved as a city street. The youth council brainstormed names for it, and then submitted its choice, Progress Parkway. The City Council gave them a thumbs up. 

“They loved it, so we actually named the overpass in Huntingburg,” said Kendall.

With just over 6,000 people, the small southwestern community boasts the filming of a few movies, including “A League of Their Own.” And Buschkoetter, who has spent his junior and senior years on the council, said the city’s slogan “Like No Other” fits this close-knit community. He firmly believes that when he finishes at Purdue University, he will return. What he learned from this year’s project was patience.

This year the council was singularly focused on the My Community, My Vision program challenge. In its fifth year, young Hoosiers determine what their hometowns need to attract younger generations seeking vibrant living spaces. Each of the five communities selected were partnered with an IUPUI School of Public and Environmental Affairs’ graduate student. Huntingburg worked with Michael Hendrix. 

The youth council members worked to develop plans for a park in the community, and in April, presented their plans for a second basketball court and received $5,000 to implement a project. They also have presented their plans to the city’s Park Department, which provided them with cost estimates and have requested additional funds from the Dubois County Community Foundation.

Buschkoetter said it was a strenuous process that included meetings with a reviewer and creation of a PowerPoint to explain the project.

And while awards and accolades are certainly not the main reasons for these young people’s involvement, real dollar awards are making their projects reality.

At Aim’s recent summit, the Kendallville Youth Council won the excellence-in-youth-leadership award. The award honors a council that made lasting efforts to better its community and comes with $5,000 to support a community development project. The council opted to use the money on an alley improvement after learning about similar projects throughout the state. Communities like Frankfort and Angola have taken little-used alleys and turned them into gathering places for the community.

And adult politicians are benefitting, too. Mayor Spinner said the youth council meetings are the highlight of his month.

“They’re not afraid to tell me if they have a concern or what they think the community should be doing. Having the opportunity to have an open conversation with students in their high school is the most positive thing. It’s giving them an opportunity to learn more about the city, to learn more about how government works, to learn more about how to engage with other people and take a leadership role, they’re all positives,” he said.

“They can see that they can make a difference in a small community and they can have their voice heard, and they can have a real impact right here. And showing them the positive things that are going on gives them a feeling that this is a good community to be part of.”

The existence of youth councils has the potential to enhance civics understanding for many young people who are potential future leaders in the places they live.

That’s what happened in Frankfort. The mayor, Chris McBarnes, was elected at 23, and at the time was the youngest Indiana mayor. Early in his term, he contacted Dittoe about starting a youth council.

Now, Isac Chavez, a young man who was on that first Frankfort youth council, is graduating from college and returning to Frankfort, and he’s running for an at-large spot on the City Council (Election Day: Tuesday, May 7).

“It’s a terrific example of what can happen encouraging young people to become involved as leaders,” said Dittoe.

Apr 08

Effective altruism applies science to giving

By Feature

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Diehard punk rock fans may know Peter Murphy as the former front man for the once-popular British goth band Bauhaus. Bauhaus broke up in the early 80s, but Murphy is currently back on stage with a 40th anniversary reunion tour.

Getting excited? Getting your ear plugs ready? Calm down. This story is not about that Peter Murphy. 

This Peter Murphy teaches philosophy at the University of Indianapolis. He’s a bit more genteel, but in many ways, beats a philanthropic drum as loud as his namesake rocker.

Murphy, who teaches a graduate course at U of I called “Poverty, Ethics and Effective Giving,” trumpets a philosophy known as “effective altruism,” or more simply EA.

As part of the class syllabus, students are introduced to the tenets of EA, and their final assignment is designed to apply what they’ve learned. Each year, Murphy secures funds from local donors, and as a group, students must reach a consensus about which organization or organizations will be the recipient of those funds.

“When they try to persuade one another that this is the organization we should give money to, they always set up rules. (One is) you have to give evidence, and the evidence that you give has to meet some kind of rigorous standards,” he said, which is an EA hallmark.

But for Murphy this isn’t just a course. Over the past 25 years, his philosophy students have studied Peter Singer and other scholars who have written about poverty ethics. Murphy was introduced to Singer’s 1972 paper “Fame, Affluence and Morality” as a college student, but his interest in the plight of the world’s poorest people was actually sparked earlier by his brother.

“When my brother went to college in the mid-1980s, he brought home a book that was quite popular at the time called “How the Other Half Dies: The real reasons for World Hunger” by Susan George. It was a best-selling book in the United States, and it was reporting on how roughly half the people in the world were dying of easily preventable causes,” said the Canadian-born Murphy.

Curiosity led him to continue to investigate EA, which has Singer’s ideas at its core. EA, a philosophy and social movement, started in 2011 at Britain’s Oxford University and uses evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. It differs from other philanthropic practices because of “its emphasis on quantitatively comparing charitable causes and interventions with the goal of maximizing certain human values.”

“I really see effective altruism as the convergence of people in philosophy who have been interested in ethics with social scientists who came in with randomized-controlled trials,” said Murphy. “The trials have brought out a lot of surprises at least in international giving. There are all sorts of things that have turned out to be absolutely ineffective that are very counter intuitive.”

Effective altruism has also provided a framework for Murphy and his wife, Dana Harrison, for personal donation decisions.

“When we met, we were almost kind of at extremes, and for both of us individually, our personal charitable giving was really important. When I first learned about effective altruism, it was really challenging, and I definitely had a defense response,” said Harrison, who, when she met her now husband, had just left her role as executive director of Dress for Success Indianapolis. He challenged her to think about her investments based on scientific data, not just emotion, in order to do the most good.

The couple encourages others to learn about EA’s framework when making charitable contributions, and they also think it’s important that Indiana’s nonprofits are aware of and keep track of the movement.

Cindy Collier couldn’t agree more.

For the past 15 years, she has been a consultant to corporations, government, foundations, nonprofits, and prior to that, worked for Health and Human Services at the national and state levels. She believes that the EA movement is helping to harness commitment, good work and people’s desire to make a difference.

“Instead of just trying hard, we’re going to succeed more often, and I think that’s the really wonderful aspect of the whole movement. It’s not just caring and trying, it’s taking the caring and the trying, and really making change,” said Collier. She has read “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill, one of the co-founders of the EA movement, and has recommended it to friends.

“You want to feel good about helping people, but if the next year you come back and nothing has changed, that good doesn’t really feel so good when you haven’t really made a difference,” she said.

“We need to be more agile and try something different to get the results that we want whether it’s health, education, poverty reduction, no matter what the topic might be. If the needle’s not moving, we really need to think about investing in a different way to get different outcomes,” said Collier.

Harrison has often described the movement as “outcomes and evaluation on steroids.”

People who are EA followers believe in flexibility and open-mindedness, said Murphy, and are prepared to abandon a project if it isn’t working.

Local funders, too, have changed evaluations about programming to include data, but not yet to the level of executing randomized-controlled trials.

As a board member for Project Home Indy, Collier remembers the Women’s Fund asking for evidence that the group’s local model would work. As the first funder of a program for teen moms at risk of homelessness, it sent a due diligence committee to meet with staff.

“We have a lot of great foundations, and I have uniformly seen them ask those right questions, thinking about metrics. I have seen them ask what it’s going to be like after services, what’s the impact and what is being tracked. That really changes the culture,” she said.

Harrison thinks that at a minimum every nonprofit should research what models work before adding new programs in order to ascertain that its model hasn’t been disproven already in a dozen communities.

Which is why she was excited to recently learn about the work of the George and Frances Ball Foundation in Muncie. The foundation’s team just completed a study of 130 communities in the U.S. that have had cradle-to-career efforts. The team’s intention is to compare the components and identify what change happened. This is of special interest to Harrison as she serves as TeenWorks’ interim chief executive.

Daydreaming a bit, she wonders what could change if the foundation presents its findings to its nonprofit community and shares which models work and which don’t.

“How would nonprofit leaders react if the three things that worked they would never consider or the things that didn’t work were core to their programming? What is the impact of that and what is our readiness to hear those messages?”

Both Harrison and Collier believe applying EA’s model to areas like arts and culture would be difficult, and acknowledge that measuring poverty and education gains are easier than measuring enjoyment.

Small nonprofits don’t normally have researchers or statisticians on staff or empirically researched randomized-controlled trials.  However, they do see steps for nonprofits to take.

Collier has witnessed some funders asking: When we give you this money, what will be different?

“The nonprofit has got to be able to tell them, ‘Here’s what will change. Here’s the impact we can have.’  It’s thinking about the measurements and the expectations.’

“To me, the great part about this movement is not to make people cynical, but to make them more questioning,” said Collier, and she believes it will become a permanent way to determine what gets funded.

“When you are talking to donors, you are appealing to hearts or checkbooks to make an economic difference. But effective altruism is really about both. I think it’s a way to totally raise the bar about what we want to support.”

And while MIT and other social scientists are aware of EA, there has been limited application in the U.S. with most trials being done in developing countries.

One area, though, that Murphy and others have said is ripe for application is mass incarceration and sentencing. For people in prison or jail, it may be possible to lessen hardship in communities by cutting down the use of incarceration, and that is the leading conjecture of those in organizations that are based on EA principles.

“Do you get any additional deterrents by sending a person away for 10 years for cocaine rather than just 18 months or do they actually become a more hardened criminal if you send them away for 10 years? So, they’re trying to measure things like outcomes on families, employment rates and the economy in a local community. Oftentimes these young men if they can turn it around, they can be at their peak economic performance in terms of productivity and they can really be out there helping themselves and their communities thrive,” said Murphy.

He also believes there are good candidates in the community that meet EA’s principles and standards, making it a movement worth paying attention to.

Apr 08

What is effective altruism?

By Feature

Compiled by Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

The effective altruism movement started with a simple question: Was there a way to apply data and reason to altruistic acts?

In 1993, two economists Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster traveled to Kenya for a vacation. Both had studied economics at the University of Oxford, met at Harvard and married. At the time, Kremer was an MIT professor and Glennerster worked for Treasury.

While overseas, they visited a friend who was working in Kenya and wondered if there was a way to scientifically test which good intentions are most effective. Kremer’s friend worked for a Dutch charity that was providing child sponsorships in Kenya. The group was trying to improve school attendance and test scores. But which of their efforts were making a difference — uniforms, adding teachers, flip chart or textbooks.

Kremer suggested they try a randomized controlled trial to determine what intervention was most effective. They would monitor and collect data from 14 schools of which half would be a control group. By collecting data in all the schools, they could see which fared better. The idea hadn’t been applied to development world. Testing each program one by one, Kremer found that there was no discernible improvement and these interventions had no effect on student outcomes.

Then a friend at the World Bank suggested deworming to cure parasitic infections in children with an annual pill. Kremer did an experiment to see whether it had an impact on education. What they learned was that the program worked to reduce absenteeism, a chronic problem at these schools. What was more impressive is that in a follow up 10 years later, children who had received the medicine worked an extra 3.4 hours per week and earned 20 percent more.

Kremer’s revolutionary approach gained a following and saw dozens of young economists running trials of development programs. By then, Glennerster had become executive director of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT and by 2007, the couple cofounded the nonprofit Deworm the World Initiative, which provides technical assistance to developing countries’ government to launch deworming programs.

And according to William MacAskill in his book, “Doing Good Better,” it is a way of thinking about how to make the biggest difference and uses evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer.

MacAskill helped develop the idea while he was a student at the University of Oxford and defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

Effective altruism, according to MacAskill has five key questions:

  1. How many people benefit, and by how much?
  2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
  3. Is this area neglected?
  4. What would have happened otherwise?
  5. What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?

Initially, the movement was focused on individual-level charitable giving, and MacAskill also co-founded, Giving What We Can, with a fellow graduate student. The organization encourages individuals to give at least 10 percent of his or her income to the most cost-effective charities.

About the same time, two New York hedge fund analysts starting GiveWell, an organization that does in-depth research to determine which charities do the most good with every dollar. It compares for example how much good $1000 will do depending on which organization you give it to. GiveWell partnered with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz and started the Open Philanthropy Project.

In the process, the term effective altruism (EA) emerged as a community formed around these groups. Since 2013, EA has held conferences, run by the Centre for Effective Altruism at Oxford University. In 2015, the conference took place on Google’s campus in Mountain View, and in 2016 at the University of California, Berkeley.

Last fall, Vox Media launched Future Perfect, a new section to cover under covered issues. The twice weekly publication is inspired by the EA movement and is funded in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation.

Mar 25

Employee Engagement: The driver of company culture

By Feature, Human Resources, Indianapolis, Leadership

By Julie Struble, Charitable Advisors

Research repeatedly confirms that employee engagement drives organizational success. We know it’s important,but have trouble with misunderstanding of expectations and turn-over.  

At last month’s HR peer group, Tony Dill, owner of HR Partnerships, discussed employee engagement with HR professionals at the HR peer group.  With several decades of both HR experience and working for nonprofits, he has the perfect blend to understand nonprofit HR challenges. During Dill’s one-hour presentation, he clarified what engagement is and isn’t and how to develop your leadership team. If you missed the session, here are some highlights of his presentation. 

When you hear the term ‘employee engagement’ what comes to mind? 

A common misperception is thinking your staff is satisfied, happy and motivated.  You’ve garnered from organization satisfaction surveys that your staff is pleased with the benefits offered and with the work environment. While those are important, they don’t measure the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals. In part that may explain why a seemingly happy team member jumps ship when a competitor’s offer comes along.

Employee engagement = Emotional commitment + discretionary effort

In contrast, Dill sees employee engagement defined by emotional commitment and discretionary effort.

Typically, emotional commitment is tied to people whom we are closest with — parents, spouse or our children. But according to theHarvard Business Review, workplace relationships are important to create a sense of purpose and ownership. Close work friendships boost employee satisfaction by 50 percent and companies with satisfied employees outperforming the competition by 20 percent.

It follows then if engaged employees have meaningful relationships at work, as a leader, you also need to invest in your staff and get to know them and invest in building relationships. This starts on day one. In fact, Dill recommends employee onboarding should last 6, 12, maybe even 18 months and includes socializing the employee into your culture.  Some examples of what this would look like:

  • Ongoing, regular meetings with the new hire at least every 30 days to help with defining performance standards and meeting company expectations.
  • Solicit monthly feedback about the employee’s experiences, what would help him or her and how the work experience could be better.
  • Have socializing activities during work hours with new hires and current staff.  A group lunch is an easy way to accomplish this.

The other component of engagement is discretionary effort.  This is when an employee perseveres beyond what is expected and goes the extra mile. For example, those employees who are willing to complete a project under a deadline versus asking for an extension.  Another way to look at discretionary effort is someone who looks for innovative ways to do things. Discretionary effort is motivated by a passion and is often linked to the mission or the well-being of team members, or both.

8 leadership traits

If your organization wants to foster engagement where does it begin?  Right at the top of the organizational chart. Organizations with a culture of engagement demonstrate eight characteristics in their teams. The leadership traits are: self-aware, authentic, humble, trust, innovation, vision, passion and confidence.

During Dill’s presentation, the audience elaborated on the top three characteristics; their ideas are worth sharing.

  • Self-aware leaders continue to develop themselves professionally and personally. 
  • Authentic leaders interact with their staff and get to know them as a person.
  • Humble leaders are servants. Putting others first.

The management team needs to take ownership of these leadership traits and demonstrate them first. Dill reassured that your staff does not need to exhibit all eight traits. Yet, often, they will pick them up from the “trickle-down” effect. Driving employee engagement and developing a company culture often happens in tandem. 

It all begins with trust

Dill explained, as leaders embody the eight leadership characteristics, they become more trust worthy and authentic.  In return, staff will feel comfortable to share. As staff gains trust, it builds a two-way commitment between the manager and employee. When an employee feels safe enough to open up and share, a feedback loop is created. Open communication allows the manager more opportunities to clarify what the employee needs to focus on and this in turn accelerates the organization’s productivity.

Dill offered advice to embrace this change in culture. First, help each team member, even the hired hand in the warehouse, understand how their contribution is linked to the organization’s strategic plan, and ultimately, its mission.  Additionally, but equally important, have a conversation about how staff’s goals play into the overall plan. In the nonprofit sector, this is where things get a bit dicey.

As a leader, you’ll probably learn your staff’s goals revolve around learning a new skill, getting a promotion and increasing compensation — things that while commonplace in the for-profit community, are often a luxury for many nonprofits.  If your organization is on a shoe-string budget, the attendees offered creative ways your organization can help its staff achieve their goals.  Such as, If the employee foots the bill for a training, he or she can be rewarded with extra PTO time. Bring in an expert in your industry for an employee lunch and offer a free lunch-and-learn. Create an internal training program.

Remember, engagement discussions are not one-time conversations.  Most people need to hear something eight times before they own it. Be creative and communicate your organization’s message in a variety of ways.

Julie Struble is the marketing and sponsorship director at Charitable Advisors.  With the company since 2002 and with five years as a HR generalist, one of her responsibilities is to coordinate educational opportunities for the CA’s affinity HR peer group, and secure speakers with expertise to discuss the challenges in the nonprofit HR department.


Mar 11

Central Indiana Girl Scouts cookie campaign helps Kenyan kids

By Feature

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Editor’s note: Since this story was published, 900 Girl Scouts selected the Shoe that Grows as their reward, donating a total of 523 pairs to this Kenyan school and far surpassing the chapter’s 120 pair goal.

Samoas and shoes. What do they have in common? Very little, actually, but a group of ambitious and forward-thinking Girl Scouts in Central Indiana are out to change that.

Since early January, as they do every year, the Girl Scouts have been selling cookies. Lots of them. In Central Indiana, about 29,000 Scouts in 45 counties have been peddling their snacks and fulfilling our guilty pleasures. On average last year, each girl sold 184 boxes.

As the cookie season winds down, however, a first-of-its-kind project by the local council, the Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, is about to ramp up.

Traditionally, the girls and their troops earn group and individual rewards for being top cookie-sellers. By the end of this month, girls can select prizes, such as stuffed animals, sleeping bags, theme park tickets or trips with other scouts.

This year, however, the girls can earn shoes. Not pairs of splashy tennies or the latest Doc Martens. These shoes they earn aren’t for them, but for kids in Kenya.

Local Scouts will have the opportunity to forgo personal prizes and do something altruistic. Each Scout who sells at least 125 boxes may donate her “prize” to the cause. The reward for 125 boxes is equivalent to a half shoe to a Kenyan elementary student. As the number of boxes increases, so does the number of donated shoes.

These are, however, not ordinary shoes. These are Shoes that Grow, the brainchild of the nonprofit organization Because International. The shoes are adjustable and can accommodate five size changes. The shoes will be given to students at the Hope School, which is outside several small villages in northern Kenya. For kids in this African country, having shoes that fit — or even shoes at all — is not a given.

Ellen Winking, the vice president of membership and “cookie manager” at Girl Scouts of Central Indiana, heard about the program on a national news program and spent last summer conversing with local girls about this as a rewards option.

To help Girl Scouts understand how this unique footwear works, Winking used both an actual pair and a video to demonstrate. Both were supplied by Idaho-based Because International, which distributes simple, innovative products to help make daily life easier for people living in poverty.

The video shared the story of a 12-year-old girl in Haiti who could not attend school simply because she had no shoes. For local girls, it was an opportunity to learn that schooling could be denied for not having shoes.

Buoyed by the girls’ interest, Winking contacted Kenton Lee, founder of Because International, to discuss the possibility of offering the shoes as a reward, and the nonprofit staff agreed to give it a try.

“I was excited when they approached us with this idea, and we kind of brainstormed to see if it could fit. The partnership with the council is really unique, and I’m really looking forward to see what transpires. If it works, it definitely is something that I would encourage other similar groups to think about doing,” said Lee from his office in Nampa, Idaho.

This Central Indiana Girl Scout council’s goal for this year’s annual cookie program is to provide 120 pairs of shoes for students at a particular elementary school in Kenya. A part of the Girl Scouts’ training model is for each girl to self-identify a personal and troop goal for cookie sales.

“Adding the shoe is a slightly different twist because girls are forgoing a prize to do this good for others,” said Danielle Shockey, Central Indiana Girl Scouts’ CEO.

According to Lee, 400 kids attend the school in Kenya, but those are just the kids who have the ability to go to school. 

“There are even poorer kids, who live out in the rural areas surrounding the school. I would also like to give to local leaders extra pairs of shoes so as they identify more kids that don’t go to the school that they’d be able to help them by providing shoes if that’s a need that they have,” he said.

The Girl Scouts’ national office said while other troops have provided funds for causes like saving sea turtles, Central Indiana’s council is the first to offer this type of philanthropic reward option.

“I’m really excited about this opportunity with them,” said Lee. “This is a first. We’ve had other kids do more classic fundraising — lemonade stands, yard sales, mowing lawns or using their birthday — as fundraisers.”

Proper footwear, according to Lee, is a critical way of reducing the risk of injury, parasitic diseases and foot infections in Third World countries. For many, it is a necessary part of a school uniform. But, he knows, it doesn’t solve every problem.

“It is a very simple thing. But even a small thing, even something that doesn’t solve the entire situation, still makes a big difference,” he said. Lee estimates there are over 300 million children who do not have shoes, and countless more with shoes that do not fit. Sometimes they receive shoe donations, but children’s feet grow and they quickly outgrow donated shoes.

After attending Northwest Nazarene University, Lee thought he was destined to be a missionary. But since his religion requires a three-year commitment in the field, he traveled for a year, ultimately working in an orphanage in Kenya for six months in 2007 as a way to test his future path.

During a walk with children at the orphanage, he noticed one girl whose shoes didn’t fit, which sparked an idea that he jotted in his journal. Homesick, he returned to Idaho, but his idea percolated.

“It really was just kind of a random idea that popped into my head just based on the situation, based on the context,” Lee said. “You know the orphanage couldn’t afford to buy the kids any new shoes, and yet their feet were always growing. And then from that point, I had an idea for a growing shoe, but I had no idea how to make it happen. That’s what took the six years.”

First he tried and failed at designing a prototype. He tried to give the idea away, but after multiple rejections from shoe companies, he found a small shoe-design company in Portland, Oregon.

“They loved what we were trying to do and took us through about a yearlong design process. Then we made about 100 prototype pairs that my wife and I took back to Kenya and put in four different schools,” Lee said. “We had kids try them out for about a year, got some really good feedback, and then we made our first official batch of the Shoe that Grows. It was essentially just a hobby at that point. I had a few thousand pairs in my guest bedroom, and I tried to get them out to people I knew working with kids. It was just kind of a small part of my life at that point.”

Now, the shoe is in 100 countries, mainly near the equator including parts of Central America, through sub-Saharan Africa, East Africa, and a bit of Asia. Overall, the nonprofit has distributed almost 250,000 pairs in the last four years and has worked with over 1,500 partner groups or distribution partners to deliver those shoes.

To simplify distribution, the Because International has begun to identify factories closer to the need. Right now a Kenyan factory is working to produce a sample. If all goes according to plan in 2019, the shoes for the Kenyan school will be made at that factory in Mombasa and shipped to Nairobi. Haiti and Ethiopia also have manufacturing plants.

Lee said his organization doesn’t attach any strings to the shoes for either the recipients or the donors. Recipients are not required to send thank yous or Skype with the donors.

“Above all else what we want is for the local people — the leaders and the kids receiving the shoes — is for the shoes to be a benefit to them and be a valuable resource. But if the Girl Scouts want to make contact with the school and vice versa, we’re happy to make the connection.”

Besides sending shoes to Kenya, girls who select the shoe reward will receive a patch, which includes the Shoe that Grows logo, a heart designed from a footprint. For Girl Scouts earning patches and badges for successfully completing requirements is something of honor.

For the Girl Scouts, philanthropy certainly is not new. CEO Danielle Shockey, herself a Girl Scout alumna, said it’s embedded in everything the organization does.

“Philanthropy is really just part of our DNA, and the whole idea of making the world better place is our mission statement. I’ve never met a troop who doesn’t think about some kind of community service project,” and the cookie program provides troops with annual funds to be able to do this. At the younger levels, girls think about how to give back to the local community, and as they get older, they begin to think about the world around them.

According to a study at Arizona State University, altruistic children do grow up to be altruistic adults.

Since 2009, the Girl Scouts in Central Indiana have been involved in Operation: Cookie Drop. Customers are asked if they would like to purchase additional boxes to be distributed to soldiers stationed at military bases across Central Indiana, to military veterans and for the first time this year, to local first responders. Last year, the scouts delivered 96,000 boxes to Stout Field to military families.

“They are really glad to meet the girls and physically move the boxes together. We are purposefully making sure that they’re seeing the effort and the result. I think we do some very deliberate things, as much as it is a part of the things that they earn and their badges and the gold awards, we also want it to be intrinsic too,” said Shockey, who became CEO in January 2018.

Both Lee’s nonprofit, Because International, and Girl Scouts working to earn a Gold Award have a goal of solving societal problems.

In the case of Because International, they have expanded efforts and now have a mosquito net called Net Buddy for distribution in countries where malaria is a health concern. Lee, the founder, is also working with a colleague on a new program, the Pursuit Incubator, to help other entrepreneurs pursue ideas for products. The group’s efforts revolve around using small innovative products to fight poverty.

And as Girl Scouts stay with the organization and reach their teens, they have the option to earn a Gold Award, the organization’s highest award. Last year, locally about 30 girls achieved the Gold Award.

“To earn the Gold Award, a girl must find a community challenge where she thinks she can make a difference. So when we say it’s part of our DNA, girls are constantly thinking about the world around and how they can make it a better place and it manifests itself differently. Troops think about it, girls think about it and also if they want to have our highest award, they have to think about it in a very big way.”

Shockey shared the example of a Zionsville sophomore’s project. She saw the documentary about Holocaust survivor Eva Kor; and her message of forgiveness touched this 15-year-old teen.

“Soon after there was the school shooting in Noblesville and she thought my community really needs this message of forgiveness,” said Shockey. “And they needed to hear it directly from Kor.”

So working with her school superintendent, she planned two programs. At one, Kor would speak to middle- and high-school students, and offer a similar program in the evening at a local church. The proceeds from the 500 tickets sold were donated to Zionsville’s Lunch Angel Fund, a program that pays off student lunch deficits and provides needy students with extras they cannot afford.

The teen didn’t stop there, Shockey said, because she wanted a sustainable program.

“So she worked with WFYI to build education kits about the Holocaust. Now every history teacher in Zionsville has a Holocaust kit to use with future students,” said Shockey.

The leaders really walk the talk of girls leading the way, and so they will wait to see how successful and how popular it is before making additional plans and connections.

“Did girls make it part of their goals? I think at the end of this year, it will be pretty telling. Take Operation Cookie Drop that started over 10 years ago. It’s now 96,000 packages,” said Deana Potterf, the chief communications officer. Who could have imagined.

Feb 25

Nonprofit Excellence: the change Welborn wants to see

By Feature, Leadership

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

For over two years, Candice Perry has worked to develop nonprofit leaders. In her position as the Welborn Baptist Foundation Nonprofit Excellence Officer, her key responsibilities have been to strengthen nonprofits executives and develop a talent pipeline. The foundation is based in Evansville and serves the Tri-state area.

Perry has carved out several approaches for this work. Some times for invitation-only programs, and at other times she or another program officers may identify an organization that needs a consultant to strengthen its efforts.

“The organization may be telling us in their application that they need funding and programming, but we also know that they aren’t going to be successful, if they don’t also put some effort into creating a fundraising plan. So we invite them to share a little bit of information with us, so that we can then connect them and finance the opportunity for a consultant to work with them,” she said.

The foundation has also partnered with Indiana University’s School of Public & Environmental Affairs (SPEA) to create the Next Generation Leadership Academy. The program’s six modules cover governance, finance, fundraising, evaluation, marketing, communication and strategic planning.

“We reached out to organizations that we are familiar with and asked their leadership if they have a next-generation participant or someone in the wings whose skills they would like to build and strengthen.” New executive directors who don’t fall into that category, but need to gain strength, might also be invited.

The academy is being offered a second time, and isn’t just limited nonprofits that are grantees. Indiana University instructors come to Evansville and spend two concentrated days covering a subject. Over the course of nine months, the cohort covers all the topics and participants receive a certificate upon completion. With the group size limited to 15, the program lends itself to interaction.

“We want to offer it not every year, but perhaps every other year or according to the need. There are a lot of organizations in our footprint that are not aware that we’re doing this or that it is an option. It gives us an opportunity to continue to know organizations that we really haven’t had the pleasure of knowing or understanding,” said Perry.

Perry also realizes the importance of developing board members. As a cohort-learning series, it offers Sustain-abilities. An executive director and a board chair are learning partners and spend three full-day sessions at the foundation. Between the in-person sessions, there are webinars with a consultant who is the series facilitator.

The two primary focus areas are fundraising and building an organizational culture. An organization is invited back, if progress is shown and there is an interest to continue.

“What we have learned is that executive director and that board chair have taken back their learning and shared it with the rest of the board. There’s this embedding of information that starts to occur,” said Perry.

This particular series was an experiment that the foundation had started prior to adding Perry’s position.

“It was one of the pilot offerings that helped inform them that we need a Nonprofit Excellence impact area. There was a space that we need to fill,” she said.

At the time, Perry was an executive director and attended the pilot with her board chair.

“I can tell you first hand that I saw those aha moments that my board chair was having throughout that series,” said Perry. “I saw the change that occurred in that board chair and how it translated to how he ran our board meetings, our development of our board members, the way that board chair interacted with the other board members, staff and myself. There was a definite shift that occurred for the organization that was strong enough and still is there today, even though that board chair and I am not there. It has continued for that organization.”

The foundation is now working to create a Board Leadership Academy. The concept is to equip board members to better engage with a nonprofit by explaining what is needed of them and what questions to ask when considering joining a board. Perry started investigating this option by going to other entities that were offering board trainings and then look at what fits the Evansville community.

“And where we landed was going to some specific businesses that are well-known in our community for supplying people to serve on boards, and we worked with their HR departments,” she said.

Each corporation supplied three participants for a consultant-led, one-day training. Each potential board member was assigned to a local nonprofit for three months to receive an introduction to services and learn about the organization’s financials.

“They’ll be treated as if they were onboarding that organization. But there’s no expectation that they join that board.

In three months, together with the corporation’s HR person, they will discuss how has this changed perspectives about community engagement.

The Welborn Foundation sees itself as a critical contributor to Evansville’s nonprofit leadership development.

“Everything the foundation does has an evaluation plan around it, so hopefully we can watch the needle move and the community will see the change,” Perry said.

Feb 25

Grants can help with capacity building, too

By Feature, Leadership

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

When Rev. Donovan Coley joined the board at the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission in 2006, he felt the organization had lost its way. The agency, established in 1903, was doing good work, he said, but its impact on the community was limited, and it didn’t have executive leadership.

“By the time I got into my second year on the board, I could see that we were spinning our wheels. There was no strategic direction. We were not addressing at a deep level the root causes of homelessness. We needed an executable plan of action to serve the clients in a way that’s truly transformational,” he said.

Coley wasn’t alone. The entire board realized it needed to do some serious work to competently lead the organization. Without a CEO, the board had taken on some day-to-day responsibilities, and it had gotten to point where it was often toxic.

So what did the board do about it? One of its first moves was to name Coley chief executive officer of the Rescue Mission and president of the Rescue Mission foundation. Another step was to look for financial assistance to help strengthen the organization from within. The nonprofit wanted to take a good, hard look at itself.

Enter the Fort Wayne-based Foellinger Foundation with a capacity-building grant. It was the first of five capacity grants the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission received from Foellinger.

“I think it was one of the best things that the Foellinger Foundation ever did was to come alongside the very heart and soul of an organization. It was their smallest grant, but yet, I believe it had the greatest impact because they focused on organizational health,” said Coley who became executive director in 2008. “The grant gave us that expanded capacity to really serve at a higher level.”

Four years ago, GrantCraft, a service of the New York-based Foundation Center, released the report “Supporting Grantee Capacity: Strengthening Effectiveness Together.” In the report, capacity building was defined as “fundamentally about improving effectiveness, often at the organizational level. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with other terms like organizational development, institution building and funding plus.”

Rev. Donovan Coley on capacity building. It is simply increasing an organization’s ability to maintain relevance, expand impact, enhance growth and affirm sustainability. So I would say, capacity building is when an organization takes seriously their mission and their vision and they are committed to doing what they do for the long term, and by having the right kind of leaders, right kind of strategic direction, the right kind of structure, the right kind of metrics and just having the right kind of tools to really guarantee that they’re people will be served at the optimum levels.

While not all foundations award capacity grants, both the Foellinger Foundation in the Fort Wayne area and Welborn Baptist Foundation in Evansville do. 

Cheryl Taylor, the Foellinger Foundation’s executive director since 2001, said that since 1992, the foundation has supported capacity building efforts in Allen County, but has not always used that term.

“Our theory of change is that the stronger and more effective the organization is, the better they’re going to be able to serve their clients, customers or consumers and that the stronger, more effective, more adaptive leaders are, the better they’re able to serve the people they’re targeting,” she said. “For us, capacity building is the focus on the internal development of the organization and how the organization itself get better.”

Last year, the foundation, which was 60years old, reviewed its capacity-building grants. In the last decade, it has awarded area nonprofits over $3.5 million as a part of a larger initiative. Part of what it wanted to learn was the impact these grants were having, and to assess how to improve the process.

“Evaluation is part of the foundation’s culture. Dollars are limited, and the question for ourselves was, ‘Why should we fund that?’” Taylor said.

Taylor also believes if a grant category is important, the foundation has an equal responsibility to explain why.

The Welborn Baptist Foundation has a similar focus on improvement. Both Welborn and Foellinger belong to a national organization, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, which offers conferences and includes sessions about capacity building.

Two and a half years ago, Candice Perry was named Welborn’s nonprofit excellence officer. Perry’s position was added after Welborn staff members and board members had spent time evaluating the foundation’s three funding areas and long-term goals.

“We don’t call it capacity building because there are a lot of different entities using capacity building, and it means something different. What Welborn wants to see is more effective leaders creating lasting impact in their organizations within their service sector, the larger nonprofit sector and ultimately the community. We want to see a nonprofit achieve sustainability, impact and mission fulfillment by strengthening their leadership,” said Perry.

But it’s difficult. Foellinger’s Taylor believes that in order for a nonprofit to ask a program officer for help, there needs to be a level of trust.

“There is an element of fear in this,” Taylor said.  She said nonprofit leaders may worry that it reflects poorly on them if they come to a foundation and say “I need help looking at staff training or I need help on financial sustainability.”

But that’s not how Foellinger views it.

“Foellinger has been vocal for years that that is not going to affect your request in its regular cycle. In many respects, it helps you, because it indicates that you care,” said Taylor.

Taylor knows that not all capacity grants will be successful. She cited several organizations that investigated mergers, and after a fair amount of time, determined it wasn’t right.

“I’m fine with that, you looked at it and made the decisions for your organization,” she said. “In my opinion, one of the distinct opportunities that private foundations have is to essentially serve as the research and development function for the nonprofit sector. They often can be a little bit more flexible.”

Foellinger’s yearlong review resulted in refinements of its capacity-building grant   framework. The foundation recognizes that it needs to provide ongoing education to potential grantees and consultants about the value and importance of strengthening an organization’s foundation (For more information, see Capacity building grants: a new process).

No longer will the foundation simply ask grant applicants if their organizations have done any infrastructure work, but now will ask how the efforts have impacted regular operations, and essentially how what was learned was applied.

Moreover, the actual application process was formalized. Unlike most of the foundation’s grants, application questions for capacity building are not posted on Foellinger’s website.

“If we’re going to have the investment, rather than us just saying, ‘Here, answer these three questions,’ we formalized the process to make it more personal and specific,” said Taylor.

Now, a single program officer fields all requests, and then after a conversation with the nonprofit, tailors application questions specific to the nonprofit’s desired use of the funds.

Foellinger believes that it’s important for a grantee to have some skin in the game, and nonprofits that agree to commit some of their own money to a certain project can make a stronger case for support, although there is flexibility on the amount and type of commitment. Its capacity-building grants are turned around within 60 days.

Coley, of the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission, said the initial grant was critical and helped focus the mission’s work. It has changed its model in the emergency shelter and removed the revolving door practice. It has expanded its mental health services and developed multiple programs, including a long-term program that currently serves 70 people and invests in individuals, that Coley says transforms their paths instead of just warehousing them.

“As the organization became healthier, the foundation provided an opportunity for us to nominate a board member and to talk about the impact of the capacity-building grant on the organization, and one board member, Imogene Nusbaum-Snyder, won a prestigious award and the organization won a Better Business Torch Award.

“So I would say we just continued to become healthier and then that positioned us for other foundations and other funders to say, ‘There’s something going on over there,’ and now we’re in the midst of a $23.1 million capital campaign, and of all the major foundations have actually stepped in to say, ‘We would like to invest in the Fort Wayne Rescue Mission.’

“I cannot imagine where Fort Wayne Rescue Mission would be without the capacity building grants. I would encourage any organization to focus on that which is most important – capacity building.”

In the Evansville area, Perry has seen organizations moving to deeper conversations between board and staff to create a culture of learning.

“They are learning to put focus on mission and vision and aligning their resources to that vision. They are starting to ask questions that they didn’t ask before concerning how to prepare, how to plan, how to develop themselves. I’m hearing more executive directors say ‘You know, I understand that we’re not being strategic about how we’re using evaluation. Their thought process is going deeper than just service provision,” said Perry, who was the executive director of the domestic abuse service agency for nearly eight years before her current role.

She’s also seen more synergy between executive directors and boards.

“Everything we do has an evaluation plan around it, so hopefully we can watch that needle move. What we also want to foster is collaboration among sectors. We want nonprofits to be invited to the table, where they can influence community change by sharing what the needs are,” she said.