The Foundation is committed to helping more low-income young people gain access to effective services and programs. It is also committed to helping nonprofit organizations sustain their operations over the long term and become enduring “institutions” in the field of youth development. Therefore, in addition to financial assistance, the Foundation provides targeted extra-financial support based on critical needs that organizations and portfolio staff identify. Though it is highly individualized and determined by grantees’ needs, the Foundation’s extra-financial support falls into four categories: talent and board development, peer learning, evaluation assistance, and other targeted assistance.

Talent and Board Development

Like many high-performing, high-growth nonprofits, the Foundation’s grantees face daunting challenges in recruiting and retaining top talent, implementing the best systems to support that talent, and continuing to strengthen their boards’ capacities to lead their respective organizations. To assist grantees in addressing these challenges, the Foundation has helped identify and provide funding for executive coaching and search, succession planning, organizational and leadership development, as well as board development and recruiting. The Foundation and its grantees continue to look for new and successful ways to provide such support. To this end, many grantees have found each other to be among their most helpful resources and “thought partners.”

Peer Learning

The Foundation works closely with the Research Center for Leadership in Action at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the Center for Applied Research to provide peer learning opportunities and support to our grantees. Annual grantee retreats have led to smaller peer-learning groups addressing a range of common problems, including performance management, strategies for providing effective employment services to young people, and ways to build leadership pipelines in their respective organizations. The Foundation has also provided opportunities for grantees to visit high-performing businesses (CEO's of grantees visited McDonald’s University in 2006, for example, to learn about its leadership development system) as well as non-profit organizations that are exemplars in particular areas. Foundation grantee Youth Villages hosted a two-day event showcasing its performance-management culture. In addition, Foundation grantees often connect directly with each other, in some cases forming working partnerships to deliver youth services. The Foundation considers peer learning one of the more effective ways to build a community of leaders who challenge each other and themselves to continue to improve their work.

Evaluation Support

Given the importance the Foundation places on performance measurement, strong and robust evaluation systems are critical components for a strong and capable organization. In addition to enabling organizations to accurately, and quickly, report on their performance, strong evaluation systems can also provide invaluable data that can be analyzed to make adjustments in programs and operations to further strengthen and improve the delivery of services to youth.

The Foundation provides an extensive range of assistance around evaluation and performance management to assist grantees improve their evaluation function. This includes underwriting the costs of outside experts to assist in sharpening and clarifying a theory of change, implementing a performance tracking system internally, and working with external evaluators to implement rigorous and independent evaluations.

Information about the Foundation’s own efforts to integrate the evaluation function throughout its grantmaking and operations is documented in the papers Mainstreaming Evaluation and Making Evaluation Work (Learning Series #2).

Communications

The Foundation on occasion provides support to grantees that are developing communications strategies. Several grantee leaders have received communications training from the Communications Leadership Institute. In addition, a number of organizations have worked closely with Andy Goodman, a specialist in helping nonprofits craft unique and compelling stories about their programs. Other grantees have worked on media outreach with Goodman Media International (no relation to Andy Goodman).

Technology

In conjunction with or following business planning, the Foundation often provides technology consulting assistance through a contract with NPower, which usually produces an IT strategic plan to complement the business plan. At other times NPower provides targeted assistance to implement a performance-management system. Foundation grantees are also able to take advantage of NPower’s discounted software purchase program.