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Oct 17

Indiana legislation to watch: After-school funding bill

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Last year, 11 percent of Indiana young people took part in after-school programming. That is below the national average of 18 percent.

While before- and after-school programs serve nearly 45,000 Indiana children each day, they often operate with limited and patchwork funding from diverse public and private sources.

But that may be changing.

In the 2016 legislative session, Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, authored Senate Bill 251, the Out-of-School Learning Fund, to create a fund to give schools grants to pay for programs before and after school and create an advisory board to make recommendations about the fund to the Indiana Department of Education.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Robert Behning, R-Indianapolis, Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, and Rep. Woody Burton, R-Whiteland.

The bill passed both chambers and was signed by Gov. Mike Pence. It established an out-of-school learning advisory board for a three-year period. The advisory board is required to make an initial report on existing programs and recommends policies, procedures, funding levels and eligibility criteria to the General Assembly before Nov. 1.

“The after-school topic got on the agenda last year in the legislature, and the education committee under the guidance of Senator Dennis Kruse for the first time said, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at after-school education,’” said Bob Abrams, Indiana’s After-School Network STEM coordinator.

“Where it’s going to lead in this budget year, I don’t know, but for the first time, it was discussed,” said Abrams. “There are states around the country – Oregon, California and Maryland — where after-school programming is a line item in their state budget.”

“I’d say that for the initial foray into the legislature, it went really well,” said Paul Ainslie, managing director of I-STEM based at Purdue University.

“It isn’t just STEM. In fact most of it is really safety and security for kids after school. We don’t have that many kids in after-school programs, and quite frankly, there’s a lot of kids at risk because of that during that 3 to 6 p.m. after-school time.

“So I think that’s part of what’s being recognized,” he said.

Oct 17

STEM programs

By Feature, Programming

Here is information about four programs that have grown in participation in Indiana for after-school students.

IndianaFIRST, a nonprofit founded in 2001, is a growing robotics program in the state for K-12 students. This year at the high school level there are plans for three district competitions, with a final pool of 32 state finalists competing at the 2017 Indiana State Championship at Huntington North High School.

Contact: Renee Becker-Blau, executive director
http://www.indianafirst.org/

STEM Scouts, a national pilot program from the Boy Scouts of America, is focused on fun ways for girls and boys in grades 3-12, to learn more about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. STEM Scouts offers a scouting experience with less emphasis on the outdoors. There are labs around the state.

Contact: 317-813-7125
Address: 7125 Fall Creek Road North, Indianapolis, IN 46256 Email: stemscoutsindy@scouting.org
https://stemscouts.org/find-a-lab/council/1/indianapolis/#labs

1st Makerspace: A program just gaining traction. Begun in 2015, it connects formal and informal learning by providing hands-on “making” opportunities to enrich and add value to education in the STEM areas.

Contact: Kim Brand, president
Address: 1010 E. Michigan St.; Indianapolis, IN 46202
http://www.1stmakerspace.com/for-educators

CoderDojo: CoderDojo Indiana (CDI) is a regional partnership formed by the TechPoint Foundation for Youth, the CoderDojo Foundation, and coding clubs throughout the state. Initial funding for this program was provided through a partnership with Eleven Fifty Academy. CDI focuses both on helping to grow new CoderDojo sites as well as strengthening existing ones.

Contact: Courtney Lambert, CoderDojo State Coordinator
Address: 5255 Winthrop Ave. #150; Indianapolis, IN 46220
https://www.techpointyouth.org/coderdojo/

Sep 06

MicroGreens Project: getting rooted in Indianapolis

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors, Photo credit: MicroGreens Project

When Colleen Rocap shares her excitement about the MicroGreens Project, she often gets this question: How are you using microgreens in your work? But for Rocap, it’s not about salad shoots; it’s about working with kids whose families are SNAP recipients and teaching them to cook so they can “sprout” change.

“Long story short, it is a program that teaches kids living on a SNAP budget how to cook food for a family of four for $3.50,” she said. “Let’s be honest, if you’re 12, you’re not making most of your food decisions at home, somebody else is doing that,” said Rocap, the local MicroGreens chapter coordinator.

But Rocap believes she can help change that, arming kids with skills and information.

Later this month, she will pilot the MicroGreens Project with 10 to 15 students from KIPP Indy College Prep Middle, a charter school on the city’s Eastside. Ronak Shah, a seventh-grade science teacher, has offered an after-school cooking club. Shah is working with Rocap to launch this effort.

“A lot of these kids have a single mother who works and a lot of the time are responsible for creating meals for their family. While they’re doing that, they can teach their younger siblings,” said Rocap.

In one class a week over an eight-week period, students will learn how anyone can shop for, prepare, and enjoy a healthy meal based on a total budget of $3.50 per meal per family of four.

“In the first class, the kids learn their knife skills and mirepoix. They’re learning how to chop the veggies and do everything safely, and how to use their cutting board. Then we’re taking all that stuff that they prepped, and freezing it to incorporate in the next lesson,” Rocap said.

Lessons use receipts from the closest grocery store to generate conversation about costs and how to stretch dollars.

“It’s nutritious healthy foods, but it’s all based on budgeting. So instead of just buying a packet of chicken that’s already been separated into different parts, we’re saying, ‘Here’s a whole chicken. It costs a lot less.’ We teach them how to take it apart and use over the course of this many weeks and incorporate it into this many meals.

“Buying in bulk is also a huge part of it and then not just telling them how to cook the food, it’s getting them to do it themselves. Giving them the skills, giving them the tools,” she said.

Every student in the program will get a cutting board, chef’s knife and measuring spoons. Under consideration, based on students’ needs, is giving them a crockpot or a cooking pan and a hot plate.

“Some kids don’t even have a stove. Based on what the need is, that’s what we want to give them,” Rocap said.

Started by then D.C. chef Alli Sosna, local wellness coach Rocap learned about the program from a tweet by Michael Pollan, an author and national food activist. She is adapting the program to meet area kids’ needs. Sosna, now based in New York, was in Indianapolis this summer to train Rocap and was a guest at a special event to raise awareness for the newly forming Indianapolis chapter of the MicroGreens Project. It was started to empower children to feel comfortable making healthy choices in the kitchen, at home and at the grocery store.

“The last class is a kind of ‘Top Chef’ final where we put a bunch of ingredients in front of the kids and say, ‘Get creative. However you want to do this.’ They’re all ingredients that they’ve already used and they’re familiar with them. But that’s just kind of like the fun thing they do in the end,” Rocap said.

In this pilot phase, she is soliciting input for the program. Some have suggested doing demonstrations in a grocery store with a different topic and food each time.

“There is just a huge disconnect between, I mean if you have the food available, that’s one thing. But people aren’t going to pick it up, if they don’t know what to do with it,” she said.

Eventually, she’d like to offer the program in community centers and other places where the need is, and maybe involve parents in the course.

If you are interested in learning more about the program, you can reach Rocap via email at rocap.colleen@gmail.com.

Sep 06

Status of hunger in Indianapolis

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors, Photo credit: KIPP charter school, courtesy MicroGreen Project

Dave Miner discovered a lot as a chemistry student in grad school. But it was outside the lab that he made his most poignant find. He discovered hunger.

It all started with a book — “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger” by Ron Sider — that Miner received from a friend. Never hungry a day in his life, Miner was inspired by the book’s message, and began what has become a 30-plus-year campaign of volunteer service to help those without food.

In 2009, starting with a diagram of how food was getting to the hungry, he approached Gleaners’ CEO Pamela Altmeyer. She said, “Oh, you sort of got that right, but you didn’t have this, you didn’t have this.” The two began planning an effort to bring major players together to help the large, complex system work better. At the same time, Cindy Huber of Second Helpings was talking with the mayor and trying to get a similar effort started.

The three connected, began informational meetings, and the Indy Hunger Network was born. The coalition has representatives from leading anti-hunger organizations in Indianapolis, both public and private, and seeks to ensure that anyone who is hungry can access nutritious food.

Until recently, Miner served as chairman of the Indy Hunger Network, and is now chairman of the nonprofit’s projects committee.

How many people are hungry in Indianapolis? According to SAVI, the Polis Center’s free data source, the poverty rate in Marion County well outpaced the state and nation, increasing 45 percent from 2005 to 2012 compared to a 28 percent increase in Indiana and 20 percent in the U.S. A Rutgers University survey commissioned by the group in 2014 identified that nearly 200,000, or 21 percent of the county’s residents, need some food assistance.

Through their work together from 2010 to 2013, the Indy Hunger Network increased the number of meals provided in Marion County by 40 million. According to Miner, the network is sort of the conductor of the orchestra. It wasn’t the network itself, but the individual food providers that had the biggest increase in meals.

And while the network has made progress, there have been some setbacks.

Since 2013, there have been reductions in food assistance to SNAP recipients. In Indianapolis, SNAP accounts for two-thirds of the food provided, so anything that happens with SNAP is a big deal.

An emergency provision that boosted SNAP benefits in the wake of the 2008 recession expired late in 2013. Miner said that amounted to about 12 million meals. “Since then, there’s been another change that resulted in a huge drop in SNAP in the last year. Some of that is good because it means the economy is improving, and people don’t need the help anymore or don’t qualify for it, but some of it is people who still need it but aren’t able to get it for whatever reasons,” said Miner.

Another change in 2015 in Indianapolis was the abrupt closing of the Double 8 stores. For more than 50 years, the grocer was there for the underserved. This has added to the challenge, but according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture map, Indiana has 500 neighborhoods that are considered food deserts, and 125 of them are in Marion County, so the problem was already there.

In March, prompted by the Double 8 closings and this national problem, Indiana Democratic Congressman Andre Carson, sponsored the Food Desert Act (H.R.4833) designed to provide loans to nonprofits and others interested in providing food access in deprived neighborhoods. The bill would allocate $150 million to the USDA that would be distributed as 30-year loans, with no entity receiving more that $250,000, to support the establishment or operation of grocery stores in underserved communities.

Although the bill has received positive response and support from some national organizations, it hasn’t moved in Congress. In an election year, any bill that adds government support can be a hot potato, according to Nathan Bennett, legislative director for Carson. Bennett is hopeful that it will gain traction in 2017.

These loans would encourage people to open grocery stores featuring healthy, unprocessed foods. The loans, which the USDA would provide to each state, would be available to nonprofits or for-profit ventures wanting to sell goods for prices at or below the local going rates.

“One of the biggest differences between this and other similar grant programs is you have to continually re-up the money, and that makes you subject to politics. That’s something that we’ve seen with a lot of these programs over the last couple of years. You have great programs in place, but they’re subject to that political dynamic and so they’ve been defunded or flat funded or funded at a level that’s really not workable,” said Bennett.

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Since its start in 2009, Indy Hunger Network has initiated programs to enhance access to healthy food. Some of its efforts include:

Starting in 2013, by doubling Supplemental Nutrition Access Program (SNAP) purchases on local fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets up to $20 per day, Fresh Bucks was designed to incentivize healthy eating.  This year, Gleaners and Kroger were awarded funding to pilot a program at Kroger’s store on Linwood Avenue.

Pantry Partners was created as a collaborative effort designed to develop a network of leading pantries across Marion County. The effort is led by Gleaners with support from Interfaith Hunger Initiative, St.Vincent de Paul and Indy Hunger Network.

Summer Servings, a USDA’s Summer Food Service Program, is administered by the Indiana Department of Education, it provides meals and snacks to anyone age 18 and under during the months that school is not in session. Indy Hunger Network has provided outreach and marketing to increase summer participation.

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The proposed legislation has a competitive element to it. An application would receive bonus points if the plan includes hiring workers who reside in the underserved community, sourcing food locally, offering classes or education to the public, demonstrating expertise in the grocery industry and not selling alcohol or tobacco.

“Those are actually bonus points on their application if they have plans for those. We cannot tell them not to sell alcohol and tobacco because in a lot of areas that’s the most profitable product or set of products. So as long as they’re providing the food, that’s all we’re really looking for, but if they’re able to make it work by hiring people and by not selling alcohol and tobacco that’s for the better,” said Bennett.

While the bill slowly makes its way through Congress and is not set in stone, Bennett encourages input from the nonprofit community.

“We would like to hear from anyone who is interested in being on the team. If people have better ways to approach this, we’re very interested in hearing from you,” he said.

The Indy Hunger Network, which has been an all-volunteer-led organization, has made some changes, too. With 200,000 people needing assistance, the nonprofit recently hired Kate Howe as its paid managing director. A biologist by training, she has experience with Midwest Invasive Plant Network, a collective group, and most recently, served as board chairwoman of the Mid-North Food Pantry.

“I think we’ve all come to realize that we’re all novices at this kind of effort,” said Miner. “I think there’s huge power in bringing people together, getting clear on what the common objective is, but it’s a very special kind of deal. Nobody reports to you, everybody’s there literally as a volunteer. So I think we’ve come to realize that there’s wonderful power in the collective impact model, but also it’s a specialized deal and a unique challenge.

“We’ve made a ton of progress, but there’s still some more obvious things to do. I’m really pleased at how everybody has done and stayed in there.”

This fall, Indianapolis can showcase its efforts when it hosts the national Hunger Free Summit. The event, on Oct. 5-6, is typically held in Washington, D.C. For more information about the summit, click here.

“It will be good to feature Indianapolis,” said Miner.

 

 

Aug 01

LISC: bridging the skills gap

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Over time, Centers for Working Families has learned that with the right tools, families can take small, deliberate steps that change their financial footing from unstable to solid. But families also need access to higher quality jobs, higher wages, better benefits, steady employment and opportunities for advancement.

To acquire those jobs, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) realized that there were basic skills gaps that must be filled and plans to use a federal grant to do just that.

“We just got a smaller Social Innovation Fund grant to support an adult education program to bridge the skills gap,” said Tom Orr, senior program officer at LISC.

In January, the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), part of the Federal Corporation for National and Community Service, awarded funding to three Indianapolis Centers for Working Families — John Boner Neighborhood Center, Mary Rigg Neighborhood Center and Edna Martin Christian Center. A fourth center, Southeast Community Services Center, receives private funding.

Overseen by LISC, the SIF grant funds Bridges to Career Opportunities, which teaches core skills such as math, reading and English as a Second Language in combination with “soft skills” like interviewing, teamwork and conflict resolution. The coursework is organized by specific industries’ or sectors’ employment needs in order to prepare participants to succeed in subsequent technical-skills training. In the next 12 months, the goal is for nearly 200 people to receive these services.

This local effort is part of an $11.3 million SIF grant to the national LISC office, which developed the Bridges to Career Opportunities program and began piloting it last year. The goal is to “prepare low-wage workers for careers in local growth sectors.”

 

Aug 01

Program helps families become financially savvy

By Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Ten years ago, Terri Ottinger was laid off, raising two elementary-aged daughters alone and trying to save the family home from foreclosure. Ottinger and the girls’ father had split, and more than anything, she wanted to keep the house they had owned together to give her children a stable lifestyle.

Not knowing how she could ensure that, she saw a flier for the Family Success program and applied to take part. A decade ago, that program, located at the Hawthorne Center on Indianapolis’ Westside, changed her life. What the program taught about budgeting and credit has stuck with her.

It helped her stabilize her finances, and since then, she has purchased a different home on her own, gotten a job with Wayne Township schools, started a savings account and paid her bills on time while boosting her credit score to over 700.

Today, the Hawthorne Community Center is one of eight Centers for Working Families in Indianapolis. Started with an Annie E. Casey Foundation grant in 2004, and originally called Family Success, the center was housed at Washington Community High School.

Indianapolis was a logical pilot site for the Family Success program, an outgrowth of the Casey Foundation’s Making Connections project. That work was already happening locally through a collaboration with Community Solutions Inc., a local community development consulting firm. Lena Hackett, CSI’s president and founder, said the Baltimore-based foundation’s research showed a strong link to fragile families being successful if they could optimize all of their revenue streams and have access to quality financial coaching.

Today, there are 80 centers in more than 30 cities around the country managed by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the largest organizations supporting projects that revitalize communities. A recent indepen­dent study by the Economic Mobility Corporation found that Center for Working Families participants have greater success meeting their financial goals.

The key to their positive outcomes? The centers do more than simply offer employment assistance. Locally, to meet the needs in neighborhoods, more focus has been put on credit and budgeting. In addition, United Way is now a funding partner.

Tom Orr, senior program officer at LISC, has overseen the work in Indianapolis, and started with Hackett at CSI. He said the costs per center are $150,000 to $175,000 annually.

“We always say it’s not just another program, just a new way of organizing services for low-wealth or low-income families. It’s a bundle of services that consists of financial coaching, employment and career coaching and income supports broadly defined. Oftentimes it can mean the difference between stability and living on the street,” said Orr. He said it helps people get steady, living-wage employment, boosts their credit ratings and increases net income and net worth.

There are three main services bundled together: one-on-one financial counseling, employment assistance and help accessing public benefits that supplement work income. Clients are coached over the long term. LISC believes that no single strategy combats all the complex and deeply rooted factors of poverty, and holds true for individuals struggling to balance a household budget.

In January, United Way took the lead on financial sustainability for LISC’s model. LISC had had the benefit of significant federal funding for many years, but that is no longer available. Local funders also played key roles.

“We had local funders who really got it, the Clowes Fund, the Indianapolis Foundation and Pulliam Trust. Without their help, I don’t know that we could have done this,” Orr said.

To ensure ongoing support, Orr said he learned it was important to clearly communication to funders that this change doesn’t happen overnight.

“One lesson we learned is that this work takes a long time. The anecdotes that we share through the network are that this work takes two, three, four or five years for families really to make significant progress. And it’s not a straight line. Oftentimes, it’s just one step forward and one step back,” said Orr.

LISC provides opportunities for the eight centers’ staffs to network. All three coaching strands – employment, financial and supports – have roundtables to share information, peer exchange and in-service training. With the exception of the financial coaches who meet monthly, each group meets every other month. Site managers meet quarterly.

Over time, the process for a nonprofit to become a Center for Working Families has evolved and gotten more rigorous. It includes a pitch to stakeholders who help determine its inclusion. The newest organization to offer services is PACE, a nonprofit that “provides a variety of services to help offenders, ex-offenders and their families to lead productive and responsible lives in their community.”

According to Rhiannon Edwards, the executive director, the initial conversation was in 2009, when LISC was looking for an Eastside partner.

“At that time, we felt like, ‘We’re not really ready for that. We’re still trying to navigate what services our clients need to really be successful.’ So even though we’ve been doing this for a long time, we really looked at our data. We don’t just want to have an employment program, we wanted to figure out exactly what makes our population successful,” said Edwards. “We’ve realized as we’ve grown, we were delivering all the services that are being delivered in the Center for Working Families sites, other than the financial coaching.”

Once PACE decided there was potential, the first step was to apply for a planning grant to determine how the program could work with its existing services. Initially staff members worried that serving all of their clients might be impossible. Annually, PACE has 1,500 new clients.

“We were saying, ‘We’re a little nervous because our world is very different from the other organizations’ world.’ We want to make sure we’re not making a mistake trying to do this,” said Edwards. With the help of a consultant, the nonprofit created a logic model to serve as a road map for staff.

“People come to us in so many different times in their life, they’re not all ready to go down the Center for Working Families track. We deliver the same service that we delivered before we got this designation, we just have a process that decides when we enter them into the Center for Working Families database,” said Edwards.

Key to the program’s success, Orr said, is hiring skilled financial coaches. These are people who have the ability to work one-on-one with families on their finances and help with budgeting, credit repair and debt management.

“Credit is just a big deal. We’ve learned a lot about it over the years. It affects everything. People with bad credit pay more for everything. It affects their employment, it affects their housing prospects. There are just lots of ramifications to having bad credit. Moving credit scores is still a slow business. It might take a couple years or more,” said Orr.

Four years ago, LISC’s Chicago office developed a model called the twin-account program as a credit-building tool. A client applies for a $300 loan at a credit union that is a locked account. Monthly the client makes a $25 payment until the loan is paid off. The payments are reported to the three credit bureaus.

“At the end of the term, if they’ve paid all their payments on time, we’ll match. They then have $600 that they can use to invest in crediting building or pay down their debt. We have been fairly flexible in how they use it, we don’t want them to blow it, but we encourage them to use it so they can invest in a secure credit card or pay down debt or put it in a savings account. The coach works with them to make that decision,” said Orr. “If a person understands or can see that they’re making that kind of progress even if it’s modest, just moving from the 500s to the low 600s, they think, ‘Well, what else can I do to bump it further.’”

In the past five years in Indianapolis, 13,335 individuals have received one core service, and 10,285 have received bundled services. Of this number, 1,849 increased their credit scores. According to Orr, an estimated 53 percent of the people return for services, and key to this return is providing some type of on-going programming.

“If they’ve established a relationship with a coach, that’s what we want. We don’t want a case that is ‘closed.’ If the person is engaged in healthy budgeting, they may have passed the point of crisis, but working with a financial coach in that same way that people work with a financial adviser on their long-term financial goals. Especially, if they are beginning to put money away in a 401(k) or 527 college savings account, they’re growing assets and managing them. That’s what we hope to see,” Orr said.

Edwards said one of the hurdles they are learning how to overcome is how to get client buy-in. At PACE, a client doesn’t start with financial coaching. Most would never go to a financial coach because they have multiple priorities – finding a place to live, getting a job and re-entering society.

“So the first time the financial coach meets them is usually in the job readiness area, where he’s like, ‘Look, you wonder why I’m here talking to you? Here’s why I’m here talking to you. You are here to get a job, but you have bills, you already have financial commitments. You’re going to come in here and say, “Give me any job.” But in reality, you need to figure out what you need to make so you can pay child support, so you can pay probation. I’m here to help you figure out.’”

PACE started the program in January, and currently its financial coach has a caseload of 50. Most clients arrive without bank accounts, and that is part of the service that is provided. Workshops include sessions with banking partners to help clients open accounts.

“Before Center for Working Families we were trying all these different things to make sure that our clients didn’t go back to jail. Which is still what we’re doing, but now they can say, ‘Hey, you’re still working. Why don’t you come in and let’s do your budget again and see where you’re at, and see if you’re ready for something else.’ It’s just different mechanisms for us. So it gives us some different tools to pull out of the toolbox to figure out.”

While initially Edwards was skeptical, PACE’s criminal justice partners have been open to financial planning. She thought they would wonder why the nonprofit was doing financial coaching when they should have been getting clients jobs or off drugs. Once a client completes a budget, determining what can be paid to the courts, a copy of the budget is sent to probation and parole.

“And that’s good because Probation and Parole is getting their money and the system can keep moving, but then they can really see that the client cannot pay $100 a week, they can only pay $40,” said Edwards.

“They’re not like other people where you can say, ‘Do you want to buy a house?’ For a lot of them, it’s like, ‘Yeah, right. I’m nowhere near that.’ You cannot come at them with some of those big ideas. You’ve got to come a little bit smaller. So it’s being able to say, ‘Well, we can do a budget and see what we can do with your home detention fee,’ then they buy in. Then we can come back and say, ‘OK, let’s look at your credit report.’”

Edwards said that while the population her staff works with has other issues, ultimately all CWF clients have similarities.

“All our populations are coming from the same place, and that’s poverty. It takes a lot of work to get someone out of poverty. Now the road they travel is very different. But I think it’s all the same thing. They’re traveling that road and you just have to help navigate those barriers along the way.

Remember, Ottinger? When enrolled in Family Success, she took a tax course. Every year since then, she and her daughter volunteer at the Hawthorne Community Center. They, along with other volunteers, complete Hawthorne area-residents tax forms for free. She says that it’s her community service and desire to pay it forward.

Feb 15

Detroit PAL breaks ground youth complex at Old Tiger stadium

By Feature, Programming

By Adrienne Roberts, reporter, Detroit Business Daily News |

The Detroit Police Athletic League announced it raised $12 million and will be able to break ground in April on its new youth sports complex and headquarters at the site of the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

“For many years, the corner of Michigan and Trumbull and Tiger Stadium was where many young athletes began incredible careers enabling them to give back to their communities,” says Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. “It’s meaningful that this site will honor many of those individuals while becoming the newest complex for more Detroit kids to receive the kind of mentoring and support through sports programming that Detroit PAL provides.”

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Feb 08

Framing: the art and science

By Feature, Legislation, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors |

In 2012, a staggering 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States — the largest number in the 54 years the U.S. Census has measured poverty. This figure has increased or held steady for 11 of the past 12 years.

The reasons are varied, but one contributing factor resonates: Over the same period of time, incomes have stagnated or declined. And with more people earning less, the need for human services has increased, while funding for these services has not.

So what’s a hard-working social service agency or nonprofit to do?

Irv Katz, the former president of United Way of Central Indiana, has spent his career in the human service field. He is now interim president of the National Human Service Assembly (NHSA), a Washington, D.C.-based association of more than 80 of the largest national nonprofit human service organizations.

Katz believes nonprofits have to somehow change the narrative, and change the mindset of funders — both government and private — that social services are a “need” instead of simply a “want.”

In recent years, Katz has witnessed the increase in need, but he also realized that the arguments for services were ineffective and falling on deaf ears. As Congress moved to support one program, nonprofits were asked to recommend another to be cut.

“It started happening about five years ago, where the public policy council of the National Assembly recognized that nobody had any positive legislation going forward. We were just fighting to keep funding levels at best, but it was really being cut, time and time again,” said Katz.

“We’re dying a death by a thousand cuts, and we need to do something different. We need to get people’s attention in a way that citizens can go, ‘Wait a second, I believe in this,’” he said.

Katz believes current communication practices were achieving diminishing returns. So the choice was either to change course or become irrelevant. His group chose the former and is now dipping its toes into the waters of science and psychology with a concept called framing.

Katz’s group became aware of framing and the work of neuroscientists’ work to understand the brain’s architecture. What neuroscientists had learned was that new concepts as initially understood are fixed in an individual’s brain and information pertaining to the concept is viewed through that frame. Scientists also have learned that changing that initial frame is difficult.

For example, a widely held view is that funding for human services is charity. Namely, if there is enough money to go around, that’s fine. But if not, such programs are expendable. Katz is working to change that perception.

“We quite frankly thought that reframing might be a pathway out of the issues that human services were facing — the lack of recognition, the lack of attention, the lack of understanding,” said Katz. “We’re not building a frame by consensus, we’re building it based on research. So we actually went out looking for framing experts.”

Enter the Kresge Foundation and a planning grant. The idea resonated with the foundation because it had actually started a similar dialogue with grantees. In 2013, the National Human Services Assembly contracted with The FrameWorks Institute and began by researching the public’s perception.

“The research that the FrameWorks Institute really identified is that there is a huge gap between public perception and the understanding of people in the human services field. The public tended to think the individual was the cause of the problem, and the individual is responsible for addressing the problem. The experts tended to see that there was more of a societal context. These also included the very significant structural aspect, that it was literally not the individual in terms of causes and solutions and responsibility. And that’s just huge,” said Katz.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation joined in supporting this effort and together the foundations have not only supported the NHSA’s work, but helped fund a re-framing tool kit. In November, Building a New Narrative on Human Services was released. It includes a collection of framing research, recommendations, and sample communications designed to help explain the importance of human services.

While the tool kit is new, Katz is hopeful it will change the conversation.

“Hopefully people will realize this is a new and better way to talk about this whole enterprise of humans helping one another thrive,” said Katz. “I’ve been really pleased and amazed that the wonderful and positive reception that we’ve gotten almost everywhere we’ve gone,” said Katz.

NHSA is beginning to share the narrative and tool kit in workshops with state and local human services coalitions and national entities. Marketing and public policy leaders Assembly members will be introduced to the tool kit at scheduled workshops at sessions with their peers.

Jan 25

Why outcomes matter

By Programming, Sponsor Insight

By Zachary S. Kester, JD, LLM, CFRM, at Charitable Allies |

Many nonprofit organizations are pretty good at tracking activity data, such as how many children they served, how many meals they served, or how many people completed a class or training offered.

Increasingly, these numbers alone are becoming insufficient to secure funding for programming efforts. Though “what we do” (outputs) certainly matters, many funders want to know the “why it matters” (outcomes) behind the programming they support.

Outputs measure what we do. Outcomes measure effectiveness and behaviors changed.

Outcomes can be notoriously difficult to measure. As nonprofit leaders, we spend almost all of our time delivering our programming. We deliver meals, work in the clinic, and build the homes. We naturally think in terms of outputs. Consciously thinking in outcomes requires that we slow down, assess our programing and its effectiveness, and implement tools to help better measure effectiveness.

Here’s why they matter. Outcomes help:

  • Tell your story more effectively
  • Demonstrate your value to funders
  • Get clarity around the organization’s purpose
  • Measure the effectiveness of your programming
  • Avoid unintended consequences

Recently, I worked with a food pantry on outcome measurements. Food pantries can be notoriously difficult to identify and measure outcomes. We identified that just over six percent of those using the pantry used it 10 times a year or more (a household can visit up to monthly), and under 20 percent used it five to nine times a month.

This meant that nearly 75 percent of patrons utilized the services of the pantry four times or less per year — when their car broke down, when a medical issue arose, or at another similar time.

With this data, we were also able to put systems in place to measure whether this would change over time, and whether it would change due to referrals or other activities of the pantry.

Ultimately, however, this pantry’s staff was able to explain to naysayers or potential funders that it was not “creating dependency,” but instead meeting a need in a way that moved people towards independence.

Oftentimes when I begin discussing outcomes with some nonprofit managers, I hear excuses about why they should not have to take the steps necessary to begin measuring outcomes. These excuses range from the cost, to being pulled away from programming, to believing that outcomes really are not important.

At the end of the day, these managers need to decide if they care enough about the people they serve and about their programming to do what it takes to make it better.

zackester Attorney Zac Kester provides generalist and strategic nonprofit legal and consulting services. He holds a Master of Laws, a post-law school advanced degree, in which he studied the unique needs of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations. His legal and consulting career has focused on nonprofit organizations.

With highly experienced legal, accounting and training personnel, Charitable Allies provides all manner of legal and educational services for boards, officers, management and staff of myriad charities throughout the sector. From basic one-time questions about a single matter to training for boards and officers to complex reorganization or merger of activities, Charitable Allies is your go-to cost-effective provider of legal services to nonprofit organizations.

Contact Zac Kester, executive director, at 317-429-1649 or zkester@charitableallies.org with any questions.

Substantiation

http://www.strengtheningnonprofits.org/resources/guidebooks/MeasuringOutcomes.pdf https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2013/07/02/using-outcomes-to-measure-nonprofit-success/ http://www.nten.org/article/measuring-and-reporting-nonprofit-outcomes/ http://managementhelp.org/evaluation/outcomes-evaluation-guide.htm http://nonprofit.about.com/od/nonprofitmanagement/a/How-Nonprofits-Can-Measure-Outcomes-And-Why-They-Should.htm

Jan 19

Prioritizing services for high-needs adults

By Feature, Programming

By Anna Cielinski, Senior Policy Analyst, Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success |

As the New Year begins, states have an opportunity to set policies that will improve employment and training services for low-income adults through their Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) State Plans. These plans are due to the Departments of Labor and Education on March 3, 2016.

According to the updated Information Collection Request (ICR) regarding WIOA State Unified and Combined Plans, state plans must describe strategies to prioritize employment and training services for “public assistance recipients, other low-income individuals, or individuals who are basic skills deficient.” CLASP applauds this clear call for robust implementation of the priority of service provision for high-need adults. This strengthened policy, for which CLASP has advocated, will help ensure that states serve low-income people.

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