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Our Current Client Partners | |||
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CURRENT JOURNEY MAPPING SUBSCRIBERS Journey Mapping is an on-line tool that encourages participants to log on to a secure site and record key data, while reflecting on their work. Rich numeric and narrative data are generated Albuquerque Public Schools This large public school system in New Mexico was awarded a multi-year federal grant to promote safe and healthy school environments. Journey Mapping is being used by the program staff to track, reflect on, rate, and report their work with each of the schools in the district covered under the grant. Arizona AmeriCorps All current AmeriCorps grantees in Arizona are using Journey Mapping to obtain bi-monthly feedback from their members related to their program experiences and personal growth. Twice yearly, supervisors/mentors use the tool to reflect on the impact of the members on their organization. Buell Early Childhood Leadership Program, Denver, CO Twenty fellows each year are being prepared to be leaders in early childhood development programming in the State of Colorado. They maintain journals where they reflect and share their experiences during their year-long fellowship related to coursework and their home organizations. Passage Theater, Trenton, NJ This community-focused theater works with young people to write and produce culturally relevant theater offerings. The director of the program and adult mentors maintain journals where they reflect on student growth and experiences and rate their skill development. The 52nd Street Project, New York, NY This is an after-school homework help and mentoring program. The staff person responsible for the program maintains active journals on all children participating in the program and charts their skill development. United Church of Christ Journey Mapping is an integral evaluation component of the First Call Pastors program in New England. Pastors assigned to their first church maintain personal journals where they regularly reflect on their journey through narrative entries and self-rating of skill mastery and milestones reached. Selected members of each congregation periodically go on-line to reflect on the progress of their new pastor and the pastor's impact on congregational life. Recent Client PartnersASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty) ASTEP connects performing artists with children growing up in poverty to awaken the intense joy of creative expression. ASTEP currently has programming in South Africa, India, Florida and New York City. For two years, SEED functioned as an on-call coach for the director of operations, providing the talented leadership of this young organization with methodology and technical assistance to clarify vision, and strengthen team-building and infrastructure. SEED guided ASTEP to develop new evaluation protocols, enabling staff and volunteers to capture and share transformative results in substantive reports that are unusually dynamic and useful. www.asteponline.org Chicago Youth Programs (CYP) After a first round of work with SEED that was funded by the State of Illinois in 2008, CYP pursued additional funds and was able to secure a grant from the Gap Foundation that sponsored a staff retreat, Six-Month Stretch and SEED Diagnostic in 2009. Then in 2010 the Gap Foundation sponsored 16 coaching sessions for the Director of Programs. This award-winning organization was founded 25 years ago and is largely sustained by volunteers. Its mission is to improve the life opportunities and health of at-risk youth. SEED assisted CYP to improve cross-site communications and to develop a culture of consistency, openness, mutual respect and support across departments. The dynamic, young director, Elizabeth Higgins, became a more effective leader and coach, fostering teamwork and shared leadership, and unleashing further capacity across this agency that dramatically improves the health and life outcomes of Chicago youth. www.chicagoyouthprograms.org/ Division of Community Health and Prevention (CHP), IL Dept. of Human Services SEED began working with 70 community-based youth development agencies across Illinois, in May 2008. The SEED Diagnostic was conducted with all 70 agencies working in areas of teen leadership, college prep, and after school education to identify strengths and growth areas in their work. An aggregate analysis was produced to give the Division a much clearer sense of what is happening and what is needed to improve organizational performance and impacts across the State. Under the same $200,000 contract, SEED also engaged seven promising agencies to enrich their creativity, accountability and effectiveness through use of the Six-Month Stretch. These agencies all showed dramatic progress over six months of monthly Intention Tracking with SEED: Alternatives, Inc, Chicago Youth Programs, Center for Family Services, Erie Neighborhood House, Patriots Gateway Center, Ray of Hope Center of the Arts, and United Neighborhood Organization. The entire project was carefully documented and assessed as a model for SEED to potentially reach many more community-based agencies via third-party government funding in the future. www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=31754 Domestic Workers United Founded in 2000, Domestic Workers United (DWU) is an organization of Caribbean, Latina and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York, organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end exploitation and oppression for all. DWU programs include Nanny Training, Basic Computer Literacy, Leadership and Advanced Leadership Training. The SEED Diagnostic was engaged by a team of staff and board leaders (who are themselves domestic workers), who appreciated the opportunity to consider and come to swift agreement on a range of pivotal issues around which they have recently been at odds. Having won huge legislative victories this year, DWU is on tract to realize significant one-year gains with regard to three systems level targets. The board chair describes the diagnostic process as "a very smart way to do strategic planning… It is giving us insights to see where we are and where we are going." www.domesticworkersunited.org Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies For FPWA's annual conference at the NYU Kimmel Center, in April 2010, SEED designed and moderated a community forum in which some 200 member agency representatives participated in a rich dialogue on the theme of collaboration. FPWA chose this theme to shine light on the successes and challenges for not-for-profits working with other organizations. Instead of a traditional panel where experts make long speeches and then listen to a handful of questions from the audience, SEED designed a forum in which seven "catalyst presenters" were invited (and coached by SEED in advance) to open the dialogue. The event achieved full participation and elicited the collective wisdom among FPWA member agencies regarding "what works" and "what would work better" to make collaboration more doable and powerful. Read the summary report Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) GGE is committed to improving the physical, psychological, social and economic development of girls and women. Through education, organizing, and leadership development, Girls for Gender Equity encourages communities to remove barriers and create opportunities for girls and women to live self-determined lives. Beginning in November 2010, The New York Women's Foundation sponsored six months of capacity-building for GGE. GGE leaders gained clarity as a team about strengths, growth opportunities, current impacts, a five year vision of success, and one-year priorities to advance the vision. SEED also worked with GGE staff to deepen their communication skills, with the aim of eliciting new discovery in each other and in the next generation of leaders the organization is cultivating to extend GGE's mission. www.ggenyc.org LEAP (Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership, Inc.) LEAP is a youth development and educational enrichment program based in New Haven, CT, with a mission to develop young leaders (ages 7-23) to achieve positive academic and social outcomes training and mentoring children living in high poverty urban neighborhoods. LEAP is an AmeriCorps Program. Sponsored by the Starfish Group, LEAP made use of the SEED Diagnostic, a half-day "creative stretch" workshop and ongoing assistance with evaluation in 2008, to expand its Leaders-in-Training Program (LIT). The program succeeded in doubling the number of the middle and early-high school aged participants. www.leapforkids.org Muslim Women's Institute for Research & Development MWIRD is a faith-based, community service organization focused on hunger relief, health education, transitional needs of new immigrants and inter-faith work. Founded in 1997, the organization initially began by opening and operating a food pantry at the Mount Hope Mosque, in the Bronx. The SEED Diagnostic was a useful tool for staff to affirm external impacts and also to identify some key opportunities where creative attention could be focused to unleash latent potential in the staff team. A customized visioning workshop guided staff to define what future success will look like and how the vision could take shape in stages. SEED Planning was used to define one-year benchmarks related to a new "penny philanthropy community investment initiative" that emerged as a key organizing strategy to build internal capacity at the neighborhood level in the South Bronx. www.mwird.org Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition As a membership organization, NWBCCC is a leader in the field of youth-driven community leadership development and community organizing for social, economic, environmental and racial justice. A diverse, intergenerational membership strives to embody core values of honesty, integrity, strength and courage. Many leaders have benefitted from the agency's services, and become inspired to serve in various staff and board roles. Their approach to community organizing utilizes non-violent confrontation, negotiation, and principled compromise. The New York Women's Foundation sponsored SEED to offer capacity-building for the agency, during the last six months of its five-year partnership with the foundation. The SEED Diagnostic enabled the leadership team to assess its full scope of programs. A subsequent visioning workshop clarified three over-arching areas to focus program design and data collection in the organization's next phase. www.northwestbronx.org Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA) PHEA was created in 2000 to further the development of higher education in Africa. Its foundation partners include The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Kresge Foundation. The central office of PHEA, based at New York University, applied the Six-Month Stretch in 2007 to maximize the value of collaboration among these partners. www.foundation-partnership.org/index.php Ray of Hope Center of the Arts Ray of Hope Center of the Arts, located in Chicago, IL, is a community-based arts organization that draws out the artist in individuals, and engages young artists to promote peace in their local communities. Like many community-based arts groups, Ray of Hope has developed an effective program, but not yet a sustainable organization. Beginning in the summer 2008 and continuing through January 2009, Ray of Hope was one of seven youth development programs in Chicago guided by SEED to stretch their perspectives and increase their impact. A generous donor then sponsored the SEED Diagnostic for Ray of Hope in February 2010, which proved an efficient means to identify progress, renew the leadership team's creative thinking, and clarify work plans and team practices to continually work smarter, not harder. Noteworthy gains included the formation of "Friends of Ray Advisory Board," comprised of prominent, respected community and business leaders, with good successes in fund development and community development. The Ray of Hope Inter-Generational ensemble was also established, consisting of eleven (11) adults and ten (10) youth. This multi-generational, multi-cultural ensemble provides a platform for artists to use their gifts and skills, helping transform lives by telling important stories based on world history, social and societal issues. The ensemble was conceived as a key part of Ray of Hope's mission, using the arts to make a positive difference in the world. www.rayofhopearts.org/ Red Hook Initiative The Red Hook Initiative works to confront and affect the consequences of intergenerational poverty through an approach that offers support in education, employment, health and community development. Employing some 60 local residents who deliver the organization's services, RHI believes that social change comes from within individuals and that capacity to improve quality of life for Red Hook's residents can best be developed by people living in the community. SEED was sponsored by NYWF in 2010 to offer six-months of executive coaching for RHI. SEED walked alongside RHI's director/founder, Jill Eisenhard, to witness, accompany, guide and support her extraordinary creative capacity. As a result of this focused coaching, Jill adjusted staff structure and profoundly shifted the culture to one that fosters team-building and shared leadership, activating even more latent capacity across the agency. Watch these videos: www.rhicenter.org Socorro Latino Socorro Latino was emerging to promote healthcare awareness and collaboration among agencies providing chronic disease prevention services for Illinois Latino communities. From January through August of 2009, SEED provided program design, strategic guidance, diagnostic, assessment and reporting tools to guide the senior management team in the launch of a sustainable project. SEED also facilitated dialogue to assist formation of a working group focused on breast and cervical cancer prevention. Twelve participating, community-based agencies were guided to develop shared visions, and defined a number of promising collaborative strategies. Unfortunately, this very promising project lost its funding. www.youthnetworkcouncil.org/program-managment.asp Summer Search Summer Search is a national leadership development program that operates out of seven cities, providing long-term counseling, mentoring, and outdoor summer education experiences to low income high school students. Starting sophomore year, more than 700 students annually take part in weekly mentoring and personal growth opportunities aimed at preparing for college and becoming responsible and altruistic leaders. In 2008, with support of the Starfish Group, 20 national senior management and executive staff engaged in a year of capacity-building with SEED to "think nationally, act locally" and improve outcome reporting. www.summersearch.org Trinity Boston Foundation Trinity Boston Foundation is a subsidiary of Trinity Church and home for two programs that began working with SEED in 2007: Trinity Boston Counseling Center (TBCC) offers mental health services for caregivers and clergy, as well as community members without health insurance. Trinity Excellence for Education Program (TEEP) is a model youth leadership program, serving middle school students through an intensive summer school/day camp and after-school programs. TEEP provides high school students with year-round leadership development, preparing them, in turn, to lead middle school programs. Both projects have used the Six-Month Stretch and Journey Mapping to sharpen their focus and capture outcomes, contributing hope, healing and community to Boston. In 2008, SEED also guided TBF to establish new evaluation protocols for capturing and reporting transformative outcomes. www.trinityinspires.org Sustainable Tucson Sustainable Tucson is a citizen-driven initiative committed to building regional resilience and sustainability. A core team of veteran and newer members first used "Seeding the Vision" to share views and reach common ground around expectations. Next they found the SEED Diagnostic especially helpful to clarify priorities and launch action plans. Something had been needed to focus the energies and big visions of this sprawling informal network. SEED provided that catalyst. www.sustainabletucson.org Women's Center for Education & Career Advancement The Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement is committed to the goal of economic self-sufficiency for all women, especially women of color, in New York City. At the start of its 40th year, with support from NYWF in 2010, the leadership team found the SEED Diagnostic valuable to assess their impacts on individuals, organizations, and systems, and to identify 1-2 strategic priorities for focus. The objectivity gained through the exercise was useful at this time when the organization was reinventing itself for a sustainable, impactful future. Watch these videos: Learn more from the Executive Director. www.wceca.org Women for Afghan Women WAW is a grassroots civil society organization dedicated to securing and protecting the rights of disenfranchised Afghan women and girls, particularly their rights to develop their individual potential, to self-determination, and to be represented in all areas of life: political, social, cultural and economic. Working in Afghanistan and Queens New York, WAW challenges the norms that underpin gender-based violence wherever opportunities arise to influence attitudes and bring about change. In 2010, SEED was sponsored by NYWF to offer coaching and training in effective communications for the NY-based team, as they developed a local advisory board and expanded a stronger leadership team serving the local community. www.womenforafghanwomen.org |
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