Literacy Volunteers of Southwest Minnesota CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

One of the most useful activities actually happened early in the process when representatives from our organization were able to participate in a Bush sponsored event for grant recipients. We found the event to be well-planned, inspiring, and eminently practical. By interacting with peers and hearing from experts in a range of disciplines, this event afforded us a space where we could reflect on our goals and tactics and identify potential pitfalls moving forward. We found the interaction with representatives from other organizations especially valuable for at least two reasons. The first is that it helped us to get a sense of how other small nonprofit organizations the rural Midwest are forming community partnerships to serve the needs of their community. The second is that it allowed us to see how these same organizations have dealt with common challenges related to things like management of finances, board leadership, fund raising, and the recruitment of volunteers. We left this event with a clear sense that the Bush Foundation had the resources and professional expertise to help our organization achieve the goals we had set out in our Community Innovation Grant application.

Community partnerships proved indispensable across the funding cycle. Before applying for the grant, we first met with representatives from the Southwest Minnesota State University Office of Diversity and Inclusion. They provided enthusiastic support from the beginning and helped secure the endorsement of the university provost and president. Once the grant was approved, they supported our efforts in several ways. For two years they donated office space for a grant-funded community outreach specialist. They also cooperated in identifying students in the AOS program (for first generation, low income, and minority students) who could possibly serve as mentors to secondary students from similar backgrounds. They also provided space and expertise to support native language community focus groups where we sought input from immigrants and refugees on educational needs. SMSU also donated space for our adult drop in tutoring program. Other partners included Marshall Public Schools (donated space and staff support for middle school STEAM-ed and ECFE) and Marshall Lyon County library (donated space for meetings and took over two programs we developed: Science Saturday and Tech tutoring).

Community volunteers are the heart of our organization. We are especially grateful to those who have served on our board of directors, served as volunteer mentors, and participated in focus groups and other community events. Over the past two years we have worked to diversify our board membership. As a result, we now have a board that more closely resembles the communities we serve. This is important in that it has allowed us to do a better job of assessing the programs we offer developing new programming to meet the educational needs of families. During this same time period we have benefited from the patient, professional work of several university professors and others who have served as tutors and/or mentors in our STEAM-ed, ECFE, and drop in tutoring programs. Perhaps most important, immigrant and refugee families have participated in focus groups, donated food for grant-related community events, and supported their children’s participation in our educational programs.

Key lessons learned

The single most important thing we learned is that we need to do fewer projects, but with greater depth. During the grant term our organization has sponsored worthy initiatives on multiple fronts, all of them aimed at promoting family literacy. These include: adult drop-in tutoring, one-on-one tutoring, on-sight tutoring at a local factory, tech tutoring, STEAM-ed, ECFE, and family-centered community events. In developing these programs, we embraced the idea that families are the key to literacy. Literate, technologically proficient parents are in a better position to help their children in school. Their children, in turn, are more likely to thrive in our local schools and pursue postsecondary education. In the end, we have re-discovered the importance of organizational partnerships. We are learning how to leverage our efforts by handing off some projects (ECFE, for example) to well-funded partner organizations that share our concerns for family literacy and student achievement. That, in turn, is allowing us to concentrate our efforts on smaller programs (the new high school mentoring program, for instance) that have a high potential for driving positive student outcomes.

We also learned the value of professional expertise in negotiating complex organizational requirements and governmental regulations. There are no shortcuts around professional knowledge and competencies when working with partners to craft educational programming. The most obvious example concerns the mentoring program we are developing in conjunction with SMSU and the local high school. We dedicated considerable time and effort to identifying and recruiting university students and to working with the high school to find appropriate times, locations, etc. These procedures proved more complex and time consuming than we expected, especially when it came to running background checks and training mentors. We had expected to have the mentoring program in place by the start of the second year of the grant cycle. Unfortunately, that did not happen, but we have committed to starting it later this school year. To that end, the SMSU director of diversity and inclusion now sits on our board and is working with us to insure we have the necessary staffing and resources to achieve the goals of a program we could not have developed absent funding from the Bush Foundation.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Several elements of the diagram proved important. For example, we dedicated significant time and resources to increasing our collective understanding of issues and building capacity (e.g., research and fundraising). We also sought ways to maximize our impact by using existing resources in the community (e.g., turning over ECFE classes to the school district). However, we dedicated most of our time to working collaboratively with organizational partners to test and implement solutions. In regard to testing, SMSU donated free office space and professional advice for an employee who worked on developing the high school mentoring program – as well as space and expertise for community focus groups. University students, including the student senate, took an active part in advocating for the high school mentoring program. In regard to implementation, SMSU donated space for drop in tutoring and several faculty served as tutors. For their part, the local school district cooperated on developing the mentoring program and provided space and professional advice for STEAM-ed and ECFE. The local library donated space for board meetings, tech literacy, and STEAM-ed programming.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

We found the diagram to be comprehensive and useful. The only element not included in the diagram that comes to mind for us concerns the identification and development of internal resources for our organization. In that regard, at least three factors were important. Especially in the first year of the grant cycle, we relied heavily on the efforts and professional expertise of our executive director on matters such as program development, curriculum development, and site supervision. Second, we relied on funding from other philanthropic organizations to provide support for certain general operating expenses. Third, we relied on our board to provide leadership, especially in the second year, on matters such as fundraising, staffing issues, and organizational strategy as they related to the goals of the CI grant.

Progress toward an innovation

With this grant we aimed “to engage with families to access educational opportunities and build inclusive communities in Southwest Minnesota.” We have made progress toward achieving an innovation several fronts. First, we have laid the ground work for a mentoring program pairing at risk high school students with high achieving university students from similar backgrounds. Second, we have begun to sponsor meal-sharing events in which immigrants and refugee families can learn about school expectations and requirements while interacting with local residents and learning about local culture. Third, we are continuing to offer existing programming, in particular adult drop-in tutoring and middle school STEAM-ed. Taken together, we believe these programs can help to build a more inclusive community in Southwest Minnesota while at the same time affording families access to high quality educational programming. This would constitute an innovation because it fills gaps others are not currently filling in our community, because it is sustainable (due to organizational partnerships), and because it is tailored to the complex educational needs of families in our increasingly diverse community.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

To achieve an innovation of the sort described in the grant materials, we will need to do at least four things. First, we need to implement the high school mentoring program this coming school year. To accomplish that, we will need to work with the ODI at SMSU to identify more student volunteers, conduct background checks, and hire a graduate assistant to supervise the process (already underway). We will also need to continue conversations with the high school about identifying students and agreeing on curriculum and assessment protocols. Second, we must expand the community meal sharing events by offering them at least twice a year and working with the schools on a list of topics and speakers. Third, we need to recruit and hire a nonprofit professional to oversee administration of educational and community programming. Fourth, we need to secure ongoing funding for general operating support, especially in regard to hiring professional staff. To that end, the board has been working actively with organizational partners to secure stable sources of funding thereby insuring the programming we have worked on during this funding cycle will expand and flourish.

What’s next?

In addition to the steps we outlined above, we plan to do at least five more things related to the goals outlined in our CI grant application. First, we plan to continue the adult drop in tutoring program. We have currently suspended this and other programing (pending grant funding from other philanthropic organizations). As a result, we will probably need to recruit new professional staff to work on a part time basis to do testing, curriculum, and some tutoring. Second, we plan to continue our middle school STEAM-ed program, which will entail working with the school district to arrange after school transportation for participating students. Third, we need to work with the local school district to evaluate their need for volunteers to work with ECFE classes that include children from immigrant and refugee families. Fourth, we need to recruit and train more volunteers to staff these programs. And fifth, we need to set up an annual regimen of conducting native language focus groups aimed at identifying the educational needs of immigrant and refugee families.

If you could do it all over again…

The one piece of advice we would give ourselves would be: offer less programming. Looking back to the start of the grant period, it is clear we allowed ourselves to be spread too thin. Family literacy is a complex set of phenomena, and we attempted to address it on a number of fronts. In retrospective, we should have worked relied more on our community partners. The most obvious example is ECFE, which proved labor intensive, time consuming, and therefore costly. It is now clear we could have limited our efforts to providing volunteers for classes with immigrant and refugee families. That, in turn, would have freed up time and resources for the high school mentoring program and the family meal events. To be clear, we did hand off our Science Saturday family events and tech tutoring in the second year, but this proved “too little too late.” When our executive director (who often worked extra hours unpaid) had an emergency and resigned, she proved difficult to replace. No one else could be expected to work effectively on that many projects. Had we offered less programming, we would have been more financially resilient and the programs we offer would be more sustainable.

One last thought

Our organization experienced a major disruption when our founder and executive director experienced a family emergency and was forced to resign. It is now clear that our board should have been more involved with day to day operations of programs. When she stepped away, the board struggled to make sense of finances, and in particular the relationship of grant funding to program expenses. We responded by consulting with our accounting firm. They were able to explain how accounts had been coded. After reviewing the language of the grant agreement, they agreed with us that we would be justified in recoding certain expenses to the CI grant. They subsequently worked with us to recode these expenses dating back to the start of the grant period. To be clear, none of this should be taken to mean our former executive director did anything wrong. To the contrary, she held herself to high professional standards. The board simply concluded her stance on what should be coded to the CI grant was too conservative. We appreciate that staff from the Bush Foundation were willing to consult with us as we worked through the process of reviewing the grant agreement and recoding expenses.