Youth Engagement Fund
The Challenge
Create a guide to help foundations address a unique set of challenges faced by youth civic engagement organizations through their philanthropy.
The Impact
A guide that donors used to foster more effective communication with their grantees.
Services
- Program Impact Evaluation
- Branding, Logos, and Web Design
- Print and Digital Report Design
- Presentations
- Data Visualization and Infographics
- Project Management
- Workshops and Trainings
200+
donors briefed on findings
19
key recommendations identified
33
leaders surveyed
Summary
Most nonprofit organizations experience challenges with fundraising, leadership, and governance, regardless of sector. These challenges can be more pronounced among youth-focused nonprofits in the civic engagement field. This is often due to factors like first-time CEOs, election-driven cash flow, young and diverse staff, difficult board dynamics, and lack of institutional knowledge. The Youth Engagement Fund—a donor collaborative dedicated to increasing the civic participation and electoral power of young people—wanted to provide deeper insight into how its membership might lend additional support to the organizations it invested in.
We enumerated the challenges youth-focused civic engagement nonprofits face. We engaged deeply with CEOs, board members, and staff working in the sector through a set of surveys and in-depth interviews, finding that the problems the groups faced were solvable and that leadership was eager for support and feedback. The report we created synthesized the challenges identified through the survey and interview process, and provided a set of concrete recommendations for funders who wanted to better support youth-focused civic engagement organizations.
