I’m Interested in Youth
The first set of materials below is essential reading for anyone interested in increasing the impact of nonprofit organizations focused on serving children and young adults. Our "Deeper Dives" section provides additional detail on specific organizations and successful initiatives, and also offers insight into overcoming the challenges of providing high-quality youth services. Our "Additional Resources" section includes links to selected third-party resources that provide valuable insight into the youth field. Please also visit our education section for related materials.
Getting Started:
(Bridgespan Group)
The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation first commissioned The Bridgespan Group to study growth in U.S. youth-serving organizations in 2004. The findings offer useful insights for youth-serving organization aspiring to grow, and for funders supporting these organizations. (This link will take you to the Executive Summary, where you can also access the full White Paper and related materials.)
Increasing Efficiency without Hurting Quality
(Stanford Social Innovation Review; Alex Neuhoff, Robert Searle)
This article examines how three youth-serving organizations became more efficient without sacrificing quality. Teach for America, Jumpstart, and Year Up all standardized their best practices, invested in essential people and processes, managed their costs, and tracked their progress to create "more bang for the buck."
The Decisions That Matter Most for Nonprofit Organizations Looking to Expand
(Bridgespan Group; Kelly Campbell, Mandy Taft-Pearman, Matthew Lee)
Are you sure that replicating is right for your organization? And if so, are you ready? This paper examines the potential benefits and difficult challenges that confront organizations looking to grow through replication and features several youth-serving organizations as examples.
What It Is and Why It Matters
(Bridgespan Group; Kelly Campbell, Betsy Haley)
The business-planning process offers a nonprofit decision makers a rare opportunity to step back and look at their organizations as a whole. This paper describes the benefits of business planning for nonprofit organizations and includes youth-serving examples such as MY TURN and Larkin Street Youth Services.
Deeper Dives:
(Stanford Social Innovation Review, Kelly Campbell, Rita Louh)
You know that your program is having an impact; how much more can it accomplish? This case study explores how the management team and board of The Steppingstone Foundation—an organization that helps prepare urban schoolchildren for educational opportunities that lead to college—tackled that question and developed a growth plan.
(Bridgespan Group; Margaret Boasberg, Barbara Christiansen)
In 2003, MY TURN (aMerica’s Youth Teenage Unemployment Reduction Network, Inc.) developed a three-year business plan focused on growth. Within two years, the organization had knocked that ball out of the park. This case study illustrates how MY TURN’s leaders developed a plan to build on the nonprofit’s success, while being mindful of its capabilities and needs.
(Bridgespan Group)
One of the chief components of the white paper "Growth of Youth-Serving Organizations" was an in-depth look at 20 youth-serving organizations that had experienced significant growth in recent years. This link provides a list of all twenty of those cases.
(Bridgespan Group)
As they grow, many non-profit organizations struggle with the issue of defining the set of programs they should offer to maximize their impact. This case describes how Harlem Children’s Zone dealt with—and overcame—this difficult hurdle.
Additional Resources:
Many third-party resources provide valuable insight into the field of youth development, child services, and related research. Below are several we recommend highly.
This research group's website provides resources for those interested in topics related to economic programs for children and families, child welfare and well-being, youth development, community development, education, and related policy research. All of its papers, studies, and research are available for free, and can be easily searched by topic and author.
Provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Kids Count is an online database that tracks the well-being of children across the nation and state by state. Indicators tracked are from the Kids Count Data Book and include such areas as education, health, health insurance, poverty and more. Each area is broken down to further focus users' research efforts.
A project of the National Collaboration for Youth, this website provides a digest of up-to-date research and policy briefs on youth development.
This nonpartisan research center studies children at every stage of development. The organization provides free access to papers, research briefs, reports, speeches and other publications on its website. Focal research areas include child poverty, child welfare, fatherhood and parenting, marriage and family, and youth development.
Located within the U.S. Department of Education, the NCES collects and analyzes data related to education and provides free access to a national database of test results and other education indicators.