Problem Statement
Friends of the Children is a nonprofit institution in Portland, Oregon, that identifies and invites teenagers and youths who have unique abilities and dreams and face different challenges. The children are paired with paid professional mentors to support them from their childhood until they graduate from high school. The mentors listen to the children’s dreams and empower them to develop and attain their goals. They also establish meaningful experiences that empower the children to develop life skills and make wise decisions when exploring their different talents and interests. The organization is funded through the generosity of sponsors, government grants, private donors, and fundraising events. The organization has been successful in helping more than 90% of the youths to transition to post-secondary education, assisting more than 80% of youths to earn high school diplomas, and helping more than 96% of the youths to avoid becoming parents in their teen years (Sorensen et al., 2009). The challenges that the organization is facing include the inability to raise the required funds to support the organization’s operations. Since the organization was required to reach more target clients to help them, the company could not fund its award-winning business plan, including hiring more development professionals, starting new chapters, and engaging with more affiliate partners. This means that the organization lacks adequate resources to implement an effective marketing team that can help make the brand known and hence attain more donors. This paper discusses the challenges and dilemmas that the organization stakeholders face and develops realistic and creative solutions to the challenges.
Recommendations
To cut the cost of funding the development plan, the organization may adopt the following recommendations;
- Encourage people to volunteer as mentors to support and empower the youths until they transition from high school.
- Train the youths who have benefitted from the program to become mentors to support other children.
- Do more campaigns indicating the program’s successful outcomes through social media platforms to acquire more donors.
Situation Analysis
The vision of Friends of the Children is to ensure that children develop long-term, consistent connections with mentors who believe in them. The organization’s mission is to build a more caring, loving, and safe world for children. The organization thus targets the highest-risk children living in extreme-risk conditions. The organization’s objective is to intervene at the early age of children before negative behaviors are imprinted in them profoundly and to guide them to successfully transition from high school (Salazar et al., 2019). All mentored children remain in the program for 12 years even when the children change schools or move to another location.
Friends of the Children continues with its mission of impacting generational transformation by empowering youths facing the most significant challenges via connections with expert mentors. The organization plans to expand from 18 locations to 25 locations by 2021. The organization desires to expand and impact more youths by empowering them, their parents, and siblings. Besides, the organization aims to grow its public partnerships to help in systems change by growing its chapter. The organization partners with public schools, children’s welfare agencies, and community institutions to identify children aged four to six years who cannot overcome extreme risk factors without long-term support. Every board member and staff of the organization raises funds to support the model within their community while the National assists in the organization’s expansion plans. The National is acquired from the board of directors, regional, federal, and public partners, revenue-sharing agreements with chapters, national corporations, foundations, private philanthropy, and proceeds from a National endowment.
To expand to 25 locations by 2025 to empower 14,000 youths, the organization must raise $50 million. This will help in offering challenge match grants to develop new Friends of the Children chapter and grow existing chapters, employ significant national employees to offer leadership in the expanded network of chapters, and develop evidence by evaluations on youths and households to inform the field and system leaders (Le Chevalier, 2022). Currently, the organization has a donor retention rate of more than 80%, which involves high-net-worth people, corporations, and foundations. The current funders of the organization include the social innovation fund, the city of Portland, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Michael Jordan, LA County, The Pinkerton Foundation, Cambia Health Foundation, and King Philanthropies, AT&T, Conrad. N Hilton Foundation, the Hearst Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.
The organization has strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats. The strengths of the organization include its ability to retain its funders. The organization currently retain approximately 80% of its funders, giving it the ability to have enough resource to support its operations. Also, the organization has a good reputation hence helping it be reliable and acquire support from different donors. Besides, the organization utilizes an exceptional model of paying professional mentors who support the children. This helps the organization meet its objective hence helping many youths transition and be successful in life. In addition, the organization has good leadership, which ensures the organization’s continuous growth while attaining its objectives. The organization’s opportunities include expanding to new locations since it has many funders, training the youths to mentor others, and acquiring more funders by promoting its brand through different channels. The threats to the organization include a lack of guarantee if the funders will continue funding the organization, which may lead to alteration of its operations due to lack of resources. Besides, the organization competes with other nonprofit organizations supporting children facing challenges. The weaknesses of an organization include failure to engage the community in its activities hence attaining a lower rating making its competitors acquire some of its target clients. Besides, the organization lacks a unique name making many people confuse the organization with other organizations having the same name. This makes people willing to donate fail to donate since they fear donating to the wrong organization.
Key Issues
Most of the intended scale of the organization requires an increase in their employees and other expenses, changing the organization’s operating structure, and establishing new funding sources. The organization uses a unique model of paying wages to mentors who empower and support the youths, whereby the compensation also involves health benefits. This model is more expensive than models utilized by different organizations supporting the youths (Walsh, 2021). This means that approximately 87% of the expenses go to the employee, with the remaining operating costs for the organization, such as technology.
Besides, the organization chose to fill the gap left by other youth development organizations by offering long-term commitment, which involves the youths remaining under the program for 12 years. This shows that the organization requires more resources to fund the model. Therefore, the organization failed to conduct deep research on ways of attracting more funders to support their expensive model (Greene et al., 2016). In addition, they did not conduct profound research on the effectiveness of their long-term commitment approach. This has, therefore, made the organization encounter a financial crisis due to a lack of enough funds to support its expensive model and hence been forced to close down some of its branches.
In addition, the organization was able to acquire more of its target clients due to its unique model of long-term commitment. However, the organization failed to involve the community by hiring local champions who are leaders in the community. This, therefore, made the organization lack local support since it was not addressing the issues that are unique to every community. The failure to assess if they have local support has contributed to the organization’s challenges as the members of the community feel left out in the organization’s program. As a result, the community members remain reluctant to support the organization through donations.
Strategy
To overcome the challenges, the organization should diversify its funding streams by pursuing a diverse mic of donors and funders to avoid risk if one or more funding streams are cut off. The organization should work hard to ensure diverse sources fund its chapters since a chapter’s budget cannot come from a single funding source. This is because dependence on a single source of funding may lead to the closure of a nonprofit organization (Sorensen, 2019). Besides, the organization should ensure proper oversight of financial personnel and leadership operations since it can help avoid possible red flags and be guaranteed success. This is because proper oversight is essential in ensuring scaling success. Proper oversight ensures that financial risks related to establishing new chapters are managed. In addition, the organization may consider innovating its model to maximize the impact of the model through identifying new approaches and opportunities.
Implementation
The organization should consider diversifying its funding sources before developing any scaling plan to be assured of the success of the plan. This is because the organization will be assured of enough resources to fund the developed plan. This can be done through conducting prospect research to find potential new significant funders, considering donor-advised funds, exploring corporate giving opportunities, and developing intentional relationships with donors. Besides, to ensure effective oversight of the financial and leadership operations, the organization needs to have creative financial offers and understand the model of the organization well. The financial controllers should not only have expertise in finances narrowly. However, they should be able to use the financial data to challenge the organization and contribute to operational decision-making besides linking strategic objectives with the organization’s financial goals. This will prevent the organization from falling into a financial crisis when developing its scaling plans.
Conclusion
Friends of the Children in Portland was developed to help children at the highest risk by connecting them with mentors who empower them once they finish high school. The organization has adopted a model of paying the mentors to ensure an effective program in transitioning the children. The program has been successful in helping more than 95% of the youths from becoming parents in their teenage age. The organization has faced a lack of finances in its scaling plans. The organization’s strengths include a unique and unique model and a long-term commitment plan. However, the organization has been facing financial issues since it did not research the consequences of adopting the long-term commitment expensive approach and failing to involve the communities to obtain more donations from the community. For the organization to be successful in its scaling plans, it should consider adopting diverse funding sources by involving the communities in their localities and researching prospective donors. Besides, the organization should consider overseeing its financial operations by hiring highly professional financial officers who are creative and understand the organization’s model. This will help the organizations make operational decisions when developing any scaling plan.
References
Greene, J., Lee, N. Y., & Nelsen, E. (2016). Friends of the Children: Strategies for Scaling Impact.
Le Chevallier, A. (2022). Friends of the Children Expands National Reach by Establishing a 25th…. Friends of the Children. https://friendsofthechildren.org/news/25th-site-announcement
Salazar, A. M., Haggerty, K. P., Walsh, S., Noell, B., & Kelley‐Siel, E. (2019). Adapting the Friends of the Children program for child welfare system‐involved families. Child & Family Social Work, 24(4), 430–440. https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12622
Sorensen, T., Furrer, C. J., & Kissick, K. (2009). Friends of the Children–Portland Annual Evaluation.
Sorensen, T. (2019). How a Portland-based Nonprofit Scaled From 5 to 20 Locations in 7 Years (SSIR). Ssir.org. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_a_portland_based_nonprofit_scaled_from_5_to_20_locations_in_7_years#
Walsh, S. (2021). CEBC» Program › Friends Of The Children. Www.cebc4cw.org. https://www.cebc4cw.org/program/friends-of-the-children/
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