Leaders of Color Leadership Academy

Rehana Farrell assumed the role of Executive Director of Youth INC in January 2015. Throughout her five-year tenure, Rehana has pushed to diversify Youth INC’s staff and board and made it a fiscally and operationally superlative organization. Prior to Youth INC, she worked at Cain Hoy Enterprises, a private equity firm that she helped form as Chief Operating Officer. It was comprised of investment professionals from Guggenheim Partners where Rehana worked as a Chief Administrative Officer. Before joining Guggenheim, Rehana held a variety of global roles at Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, Booz Allen Hamilton,and Prudential Financial, where she began her career in a management training program.

Rehana holds a BA from Smith College and an MBA from Columbia University, where she was President of Columbia Women in Business. She remains active with her alma maters and also works closely with numerous nonprofit organizations in the Bronx and veteran’s organizations nationwide.

Youth INC is the preeminent accelerator of grassroots nonprofits serving young people in NYC. Our portfolio of 75+ Nonprofit Partners (NPPs) serve over 300,000 young people living at/below the poverty line each year, the majority of whom are young people of color. The impact of COVID-19 on our NPPs has been both devastating and swift. This pandemic has ravaged their communities. Organizations that are serving the populations of young people who most need it at this time are the ones in danger of closing their doors, and those led by leaders of color are struggling more because they have reduced access to funding.  Youth INC will launch a multi-layered approach to combating this problem by teaching them how to break through barriers to funding, find opportunities to build social capital, diversify their boards, and keep their doors open.

New York is a city of endless opportunity, but not all our youth have the resources they need to meet their potential, especially in the epicenter of a global pandemic. Out of 1.8 million youth in NYC, 1 in 3 are living in poverty. Without help, many will be left without the support they need to get them through high school and into a supportive work environment. There are more than 1,500 youth-serving nonprofits in NYC, all trying to make this city a better place. Unfortunately, those organizations led by Leaders of Color (LOC) are at a disadvantage. Research from Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead initiative found that 63% of LOC cite lack of access to individual donors and 51% cite lack of access to foundations as fundraising challenges. It’s been reported that banks gave their white clients enhanced services for pandemic aid. But even for those LOC that were able to get their application successfully submitted (only 23% of black-led organizations) and accepted, it is not a long-term solution to what ails low-income communities of color. There are systemic barriers to sustainable long-term fundraising and operational practices for LOC.

Youth INC’s Leaders of Color Leadership Academy (The Academy) will work with youth-serving Executive Directors & CEO’s, and their management teams, to ensure nonprofit organizations led by leaders of color are financially stable, sustainable, and prepared for the future. It aims to accomplish this by: 

• Providing Leaders of Color with professional development that incorporates their lived experiences; 
• Strengthening the current financial practices (both internal and external factors);
• Providing leaders with an achievable plan and a pathway to strengthen financial growth; and
• Building intentional pipelines for the next generation of Leaders of Colorthat are identified within the organization.

The Academy will also work with Board leadership to shift board culture to embrace a more diverse set of directors and manage fundraising practices and expectations. The programs will be a multi-layered approach to combating the problem of funding access: breaking through barriers to funding, find opportunities to build social capital, and collaborating to develop bespoke strategies for Leaders of Color to access greater levels of funding.

The primary audience for The Academy will be Executive Directors (EDs) and emerging Leaders of Color within the Youth INC Partner Network. The program is being designed by Leaders of Color to meet other leaders where they are. Our network applications and research inform us that our Executive Directors come into their positions with varied educational backgrounds as well as years of experience.  The Academy is being designed to support these Leaders of Color in overcoming the many hurdles they have identified as challenges they are facing in their positions. The Academy will train on areas such as: best practices to building and diversifying effective governing and fundraising boards, developing executive relationships, developing fundraising strategies, building a strong leadership bench, effective financial management and more.

It is important to build the next generation of leaders within their current organizational setting. Allowing the nonprofit sector to retain their existing talent increases the Social-Emotional Learning outcomes within their programs, thus improving the lives of hundreds of thousand young people living at/below the poverty line, the majority of whom are young people of color themselves. 

Leaders of Color in the nonprofit sector are chronically under-valued/under-resourced. People of color are more likely to be interested in becoming nonprofit leaders than their white counterparts, yet LOC have key areas where they face challenges: Boards of Directors and recruiters are major barriers to hiring more people of color EDs/CEOs, and those who are recruited into positions face smaller budgets/less access to funding. Youth INC is addressing this problem by becoming a trusted advisor and educator to these social impact leaders as they focus on expanding the depth and reach of their impact within their communities.  

Rehana is purpose-driven and has transformed Youth INC since 2015 and believes to lead is to serve, having expanded our reach from 60,000 youth to over 300,000 annually.As a leader of color, she looks for opportunities to lift up humanity and other Leaders of Color; thus, creating a better community to work, live and thrive in.The Academy has been a concept in the making for years by our Interim Chief Program Officer, Tracie Gilsrap, who over decades in the sector has watched qualified leaders of color continue to struggle to be heard and seen by funders. When COVID-19 devastated NYC and particularly its communities of color, Rehana collaborated with Tracie and her team to transform our existing programs and develop new ones to be of better service to our partners.  

This program is especially critical for our partners with leaders of color as they not only offer best practices in governance and fundraising but also connect our partners with mentors and potential collaborators or supporters.The Academy will help us extend this impact and continue growing the capacity of leaders of color and the organizations they run.We see this as vital to the long-term health of the social impact sector.

As a Leader of Color, Rehana has worked tirelessly to fight for equality for everyone, in her personal and professional life, and having the platform of Youth INC to help support our city’s most vulnerable youth has given her the opportunity to deepen her Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work. Throughout the sector, people of color have cited challenges such as inadequate and/or inequitable salaries, a lack of opportunities for advancement, a lack of role models, a lack of relationships with funding sources, inadequate social capital/networks, being expected to "represent" their community, and being called on to push DEI efforts. In addition, people of color have shared that executive recruiters don't do enough to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates, that organizations often rule out candidates of color based on perceived "fit," and that it is harder for people of color to advance because of their smaller networks. Youth INC can improve the health of our sector in NYC, and potentially beyond, and believe that when organizations make diversity, equity, and inclusion central to their missions and the core of who they are, philanthropy has greater impact. 

For over 25 years, Youth INC has coached our NPPs on exemplary practices in fundraising, governance, leadership and impact evaluation to build strong and resilient organizations, and we have seen significant growth under Rehana’s leadership for the past 5 years. Since our founding, Youth INC has raised over $100M to empower more than 185 youth-serving nonprofits and helped over 1,000,000 young people build the critical skills required to achieve their full potential in life. During Rehana’s tenure, she has built the underlying components required for success for this project, including having: trained over 3,500 corporate professionals on nonprofit board service, established a leadership program to help executive directors with succession planning that has evolved to developing their leadership benches, issued over 60 capacity-building grants totaling over $3M to more than 40 organizations, and built numerous change management programs, from which the learnings and practices can be leveraged as a framework for building DEI training, combined with our deep, trusting relationships, which are invaluable in the uncomfortable and challenging conversations in which we all find ourselves today. Youth INC developed a data driven platform to measure the impact of our nonprofits on the young people they serve.  We now measure the growth in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) of young people each year and coach our nonprofit partners on evidence-based best practices to maximize it.  The Aspen Institute estimates that the return on investing in SEL is 11x, which means we have invested over $1B towards our black and brown communities. 

Many of our NPPs rely on government grants for income, putting a countless in immediate danger of insolvency during this pandemic. The majority have only a few months–or in some cases weeks-of cash reserves.  For those with diversified financial models, they canceled all 2020 in-person events that are the means by which they raise unrestricted revenue. This meant the organizations that are serving the populations of young people who most need support were the ones in danger of closing their doors! In response, Rehana mobilized over 200 corporate partners and their employees to provide resources to analyze the revenue, expenses, and cash position of our NPPs and help them evaluate their options. Volunteers were trained on the nonprofit’s business model and cash-flow tools and paired with coaches from Youth INC to facilitate discussions with NPPs leadership. After initial discovery, Analysts created cashflow tools tailored to each NPPs used to facilitate a discussion with leadership around which revenue lines are at risk, what expense levers can they pull, and where they can access capital (loans, reserves, new donors, etc). To date, 170 volunteers have been mobilized and placed into teams with our NPPs.

The Center for Responsible Lending reported that the SBA program put in place during the pandemic has failed our communities of color with an estimate of 90% of organizations founded/run by LOCs have been shut out of the Program. Knowing that this support was crucial to meet the immediate needs of our NPPs and to continue to serve our youth, Rehana reached out to all of our partners to offer her personal assistance. She met with numerous financial institutions knowing that banks prioritized larger clients to get into their queue. Due to her leadership, a majority of partners that applied for the 7aPPP loan were accepted and therefore were able to keep their staff through the end of June. One esteemed nonprofit leader shared that Youth INC was “the only grantmaker in NYC that was actually DOING something to tangibly help nonprofits versus calling to ‘check-in’!”   

n/a

Sitting at the nexus of the business community and the social impact sector serving young people, Youth INC is uniquely positioned to advance DEI for our organization and all of our partners. This moment in history testifies to the importance of our work with our nonprofit partners.  This project is innovative because we will seek to leverage our unique position and strengths to drive meaningful and measurable change, including: building a robust pipeline of diverse talent and populating the Boards of our more than 75 youth-serving nonprofits with these business leaders, evolving our already successful nonprofit leadership program to more intentionally advance young leaders of color to assume the leadership of our nonprofit partners, issuing more cash grants to EDs of color (whose access to capital is severely limited compared to their white peers) and improving DEI practices internally at Youth INC as well as for our nonprofit partners, with the assistance of a renowned subject matter expert, like Race Forward or ProInspire. With the proper funding and partnership with MIT Solve, we have the ability to not only create an accelerated platform for our Leaders of Color, but also to create an earned revenue model with our corporate partners that can grow our cash-grants program.

We build strong organizations to build strong people. Organizations – and individuals - need stamina, agility, and adaptability to thrive. Youth INC partners with youth-centered nonprofit organizations to enhance organizational thrivability so that those nonprofits can root down in their communities and out into the city to build thriving future generations

We are a bridge between the corporate, academic and nonprofit sectors. We believe that by harnessing business practice, strategy, and the unrestricted resources corporate partners have to bear our nonprofit partners can build their skills and abilities to manage the constant transition and turbulence that goes hand-in-hand with organizational growth and development.

Our program model is to build knowledge of best business practices along with the leadership skills and behaviors that move organizations forward. To be part of our NPPs Network, there is an organizational assessments - rigorous application and vetting process and Impact Capacity Assessment Tool (iCAT).  Once selected, we work with our nonprofit partners through three main avenues of support:

Coaching - We provide best practices and individualized coaching to help teams implement strong practices in three key elements of organizational thriving:

•Fundraising: Fundraising unrestricted revenue through an event-based approach

•Governance: Board and senior staff build effective oversight and accountability for growth

•Impact Evaluation: Measure the Social & Emotional Learning impact of work and use data to inform program design decisions

Connections

• Advisory: Pro-bono partnerships between corporate and nonprofit partners to leverage business best practices and provide financial, strategic, and organizational improvement

• Service: Corporate volunteer support and volunteer management best practices coaching

• Board Placements: Match-making between corporate partner professionals and nonprofit partners boards

• Partner Network community: Peer exchange opportunities to strengthen best practices through cohort-based program model and Partner Network-wide events

Capital

• Grants: Capital investments for infrastructure needs key to further growth and development

• Capital Introductions: Introductions to funders and individual donors

We dive into the inputs and strategies for improved organizational capacity as well as improved capacity for program delivery to improve short-term and long-term outcomes that then create impact for the youth being served by those organizations.

Youth INC is proud to currently serve over 75 active non-profits within our network and over 300,000 NYC youth. In our pilot year of The Academy, we plan to do a deep dive with 5 nonprofits and their leaders of color, increasing the programmatic output for approximately 25,000 young people. With-in five-years, our goal is to have 40 organizations go through this high-touch program, affecting the lives of over 175,000 young people. There is the opportunity to replicate this program and elevate humanity in additional communities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston and Washington DC.

The initial goals of the program are to build the framework to ensure that the proper practices, tools and resources are in place to move the needle and to change systems that uphold systemic racial injustices within the nonprofit community and for Leaders of Color. With the support of MIT Solve, over the next 5 years we will:

• Provide corporate mentors to each our LOC that will help them build capital connections;
• Double amount of LOC’s within our network and support the creation of a bench of middle and senior management that is reflective of the communities in which we serve;
• Execute 25 “Get On Board” corporate employee trainings to educate and recruit a diverse pool of board members;
• Increase Board Diversity from 10% to 25%;Increased revenue of our NPPs that go through our program by 160%;Increasing the programmatic output for approximately 175,000 young people
• Increase the gains of Social and Emotional Learning of those 175,000 youth by 85%;
• Execute a feasibility study to expand this program into other markets as an earned-revenue licensing model. 

Youth INC is working to create systemic change and that requires putting practices and policies in place that causes organizations to evaluate their own policies and practices, which is going to take additional financial resources. 

The barrier lays within the capital needed to bring on the staff to build, manage and facilitate this program, consulting resources and technology needed to execute The Academy, both virtually and in-person when it becomes safe again. After two years of executing this program, the earned revenue component should drive the funds needed for it to no longer require institutional funding support.

Due to COVID-19 and the ability to scale the program outside of our existing service area of NYC, Youth INC will need to invest in an E-Learning Platform that will not only support our LOC’s, but can also be utilized to train their existing board members as well as a tool to recruit and train new, diverse, board members. We also need to invest in reimagining our SEL measurements on self-management, contribution, social skills, positive identity, social capital and self-efficacy to show that this program can execute on our desired outcomes.

We need to realign our existing staff (and provide additional training to enhance existing skill-sets and to develop new ones) and replace their current roles, or bring on new staff to execute this program as well consult with additional subject matter experts to design the framework and build out the 12-month curriculum for each of our cohorts to engage in. After the initial year, we will look at the programs outcomes and the feedback from our LOC and make the necessary adjustments to pivot from the pilot stage to the full execution stage.

Youth INC will be implementing aspects of our DEI work with the following organizations that are in our Nonprofit Partner Network, serving all five-boroughs of NYC:  

826NYC
A Fair Shake for Youth
Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York
America On Tech
America SCORES New York
Artists Striving to End Poverty (ASTEP)
Beam Center
Beat the Streets
Behind the Book
Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
Change for Kids
Chess in the Schools
City Growers
Community-Word Project
Concrete Safaris
Cornelia Connelly Center
Council For Unity
Dancewave
Drama Club
Extreme Kids & Crew
FAN4Kids
Fiver Children's Foundation
Fresh Youth Initiatives
Friends of the Children NY
Futures And Options
GallopNYC
Girl Be Heard
Girls Write Now
Global Kids
Hands In 4 Youth
Hour Children
Hudson River Community Sailing
I Challenge Myself
Imani House
INCLUDEnyc
Kids Creative
Kings County Tennis League
LEAP
Literacy INC (LINC)
Minds Matter NYC
NYC FIRST
Only Make Believe
Opening Act
ParentChild+
Play Rugby USA
PowerPlay NYC
Project Morry
Read Ahead
Roads to Success
Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability & Equity (RISE)
Rocking the Boat
Saint Barnabas High School
Serious Fun After School Inc
South Bronx United
St. Ignatius School
STEM From Dance
Steve's Camp at Horizon Farms
Story Pirates
StreetSquash
TADA! Youth Theater
Tech Kids Unlimited
The Eagle Academy Foundation
The New York Center for Children
The Reading Team
Trail Blazers
viBe Theater Experience
Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls
Writopia Lab
You Gotta Believe
Youth Action
Youth Build East Harlem
Youth Represent. 

Youth INC canvasses and surveys nearly 100 youth-serving nonprofits every year, out of 1,500 in NYC, for potential partnership. With our extended network of philanthropists and nonprofit professionals, we’re creating a nonprofit network that can meet New York’s needs without competing for elbow room.

We seek to increase their impact on our nonprofit partners in the following ways: youth served, revenue, and board engagement.

Youth INC currently has 75 Nonprofit Partners in our network. Once in our network, our nonprofits participate in one or more of our key programs, led by staff experts and community experts, to learn the skills needed to grow quickly and sustainably.

FUNDRAISING: Each year, we teach up to nonprofit organizations how to fundraise effectively by pairing their executives with Youth INC advisors. Youth INC’s annual gala, “A Celebration to Benefit New York Kids," has raised more than $25 million by over 100 nonprofits since 1995.

ENGAGEMENT: This 15-month program employs custom assessments and mentorship from board development professionals to enhance board engagement. We place corporate professionals on the well-positioned board of our nonprofits.

METRICS: Our 12 months of workshops, technical assistance, and peer mentorship gives our partners access to critical program data. Using cutting-edge social-emotional learning (SEL) research to underpin evaluation tools, partners learn how to weave these concepts into program design.

GRANTS: We provide capacity building grants. We deliver grants to grassroots, youth-focused organizations within our network and use a metrics-based selection process that ensures maximum return on investment.

Each donor who supports Youth INC’s work reaffirms our vital purpose: to put all New York City young people on a path to long-term success. There are numerous components of The Academy which requires Youth INC to seek funding from various sources.

New and sustained donors, along with longstanding corporate partners, have provided the critical funding for cash grants needed to assist our NPPs during the COVID-19 response and recovery period, aimed at ensuring organizations lead by Leaders Of Color have the ability to continue programming during the pandemic. Corporate partners are crucial to Youth INC’s success and we will be offering a variety of engagement opportunities for companies big and small, established and emerging, that could provide an earned revenue component that will be reinvested into cash-grants for our participating organizations. Foundations and institutional funders are being solicited to help build and maintain the infrastructure of the program.  

As shared above, there are numerous components of The Academy which requires Youth INC to seek funding for. The component that we have already received funds for is our COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund in this fiscal year

$50,000-Goldman Sachs-July

$125,000-Nuveen-March

$20,000-Apollo Global Management – June

$125,000-Blackstone Charitable Foundation -March

$50,000-Eurazeo-May

$50,000-PJT Partners-May

$3,000-Nasdaq-May

$6,000-Scotia Bank-April

$5,000-William Blair Company-April

$2,5400-GCM Grosvenor Private Markets-April

$10,000-Capital Group-June

$88,250-Individual cash donations-April through July

For the infrastructure component of The Academy, in addition to applying for the Elevate Prize, we are in the process of submitting a $50,000 grant application.   

Youth INC is currently seeking $550,000 to execute the Leaders of Color Leadership Academy, for the design and framework in 2020, pilot in 2021 and full execution in 2022. By 2023, our earned-revenue model is expected to generate the capital needed to continue the program without seeking additional funding

Youth INC is currently seeking $550,000 to execute the Leaders of Color Leadership Academy, for the design and framework in 2020, pilot in 2021 and full execution in 2022. 

• 2020 expenses are estimated at $100,000;
• 2021 expenses are estimated at $200,000;
• 2022 (and beyond) expenses are estimated at $250,000 annually.

Youth INC has a demonstrated history of catalyzing positive impact. Being awarded the Elevate Prize will not only bring the National/Global recognition of our work and our innovative program but will encourage other communities around the globe to elevate humanity and the next generation of nonprofit leaders of color to ensure the sector can continue to grow and drive social change. Being aligned with Mr. Deitch and the Elevate Prize will give us not only the capital support we need to launch this program but will also provide us with the capacity building tools we need to be successful.

During this global pandemic when corporate funding has decreased and private funds have been diverted to front-line support, organizations like Youth INC and the 75 youth serving organization in our Nonprofit Partner Network need to be able to build strong partnerships that will help us achieve the social change needed in our world.

While Youth INC could greatly benefit from Elevate’s support in mentorship & Coaching, Marketing & Media Exposure, Board Leadership as well as Funding, these are areas that our NPPs that are led by people of color could benefit from as well and would welcome an opportunity to explore the potential of replicating the partnerships benefits.

Youth INC would consult with organizations such as Race Forward and ProInspire to help develop our curriculum.

Race Forward catalyzes movement building for racial justice. In partnership with communities, organizations, and sectors, they help build strategies to advance racial justice in our policies, institutions, and culture.

ProInspire designs and delivers programs and resources to help social sector leaders build the competencies, confidence, and connections to accelerate equity and leadership.