Board Prospecting
Board Prospecting
Project details
What we need
- Assessment of current donors, volunteers, beneficiaries and other constituents to pinpoint people who are interested in serving your Organization
- Informal staff and board interviews to survey potential connections and/or leads
- A document of up to ten pages that lists potential board members based upon your Organization's data and current audiences
- Note: The Professional will not be communicating with prospective board members.
Additional details
We are 10 years old. First board: friends & contacts of board members. Not all were successful members. We developed recruitment process, ask prospective members be involved w/ us at least 6 months before being considered for board. Works but we haven't had enough prospective members. Two rolling off in Jan. (we were already down). Bd Dev committee not active since previous chair left board. We'd like to recruit mbrs w/ more connections (& not afraid to use them) but we need help getting there
What we have in place
- We currently have mission statement, motivated ED, onboarding process, which should make it easy for you to get started. We also have draft of strategic plan, and the ability to provide any other information you need.
How this will help
This project will save us $5,198 , allowing us to increase the number of teens in foster care & young adults who have aged out of care who have lasting relationships w/caring adults. (Some adults have been w/ their young people for 6 or 7 years now!)
DCFYI helps teens in foster care develop what become lasting and life changing relationships with amazing adult volunteers. We are weathering the pandemic with our finances intact. But we are also only serving some of the area teens who could use this support (now more than ever). We could be more effective and serve more teens if we can find new board members who can help us raise additional funding and achieve our strategic growth goals.
Project plan
Our mission
Family & Youth Initiative creates community and lasting relationships for teens and young adults in foster care.
What we do
Family & Youth Initiative's innovative approach brings adults and teens together to form a community: raising comfort levels, breaking down barriers, and resulting in teens being matched with adult mentors, host parents and adoptive parents. We normalize adoption and increase the number of teens who are adopted. We create opportunity for adult-teen relationships to form naturally and comfortably.
Our programming has the following core elements:
* Events that bring together adults and teens to share a fun activity and build relationships.
* Mentors who spend at least eight hours a month with a teen for at least two years.
* Host parents who welcome a teen into their home for weekend visits and serve as the youth's adoption "advocate," helping him or her meet other adults to expand the circles of people who know the teen and increase opportunities to find an adoptive family.
* Opportunities for prospective adoptive parents to get to know teens waiting for families.
Testimonials
Doing this project with Shauna was both fun and so helpful! Shauna is creative ad insightful. She asked the right questions to get started and had great suggestions for how to structure the work project and product. She quickly laid out a plan with concrete steps and what she needed from me; pivoted easily when our initial exploration took us in a slightly different direction and when one of her suggestions didn't pan out; and gently kept me on track. Not to mention that Shauna is upbeat and fun to talk to and work with. So grateful she volunteered for this project and that we now have a work product we can use and continue to refer back to (and refine as we move forward).
Susan at FYI is an excellent project sponsor. I found her to be a strong and willing thought-partner throughout the project and especially in the early phases. She was open to new ideas and ways of thinking, and weighed in on critical early decisions that helped us produce a blueprint for the engagement. As we advanced the work, she was prompt with thoughtful feedback and suggestions. Last but not least, she was a friendly and supportive collaborator throughout. I would highly recommend Susan as a project sponsor; she is a great leader to work for and to know.