Youth Charity Proves Itself a Promising Prospect for Clark Foundation

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has been finding youth organizations that meet

its requirements: high performance and a commitment to growth.

Through its Youth Development Fund, Clark offers grants that often exceed $1-million per year and free strategic consulting, but in return it expects charities to hit benchmarks for growth and achievement.

To help it find worthy grant recipients, the New York foundation in 2002 asked Public/Private Ventures, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization that works to improve the effectiveness of youth organizations, to identify some of the most promising charities nationwide that are helping teenagers make the transition to jobs or college.

My Turn, a charity in Brockton, Mass., that helps struggling teenagers get back on track, turned up on the list.

My Turn was founded in 1984 by Paul Protentis, a businessman who had discovered that the high-school graduates he was interested in hiring didn’t know how to interview or dress when applying for a job, or grasp the importance of showing up for work on time. My Turn has programs that work with both dropouts and students who are at risk of dropping out, including minority students, students whose parents didn’t attend college, and those who have been involved with the court system. It aids some students in charting a track to college, but its bread-and-butter work is in helping students complete high school and find and keep a decent job.

My Turn does the same basic things that hundreds of other charities do, but with better-than-average results and a remarkably low cost structure.

The charity works with 1,200 youths, mostly in 12 Massachusetts cities. Career specialists in local schools meet with students three times a week to help them assess their strengths, explore careers, develop budgeting and leadership skills, and line up jobs or internships. Case managers work with clients who have dropped out of school, and provide some of the same services, plus act as “air traffic controllers” to help the dropouts navigate the job market and apply for government services.

“We’re sort of the brokering agent for the young person,” says Barbara A. Duffy, My Turn’s executive director, who has led the charity since its founding. “This population has a lack of ability to make those connections themselves.”

Strong Numbers

A 1997 study by Bridgewater State College found that 71 percent of the participants in My Turn’s school-to-work program retained their first job following high school for more than six months, compared with only 32 percent of those in a control group. Before some recent staff additions recommended by a consultant, My Turn was spending less than $1,100 per student per year — one-seventh the amount of comparable providers in Rhode Island — thanks to low overhead and the large number of students it serves.

After seeing the Public/Private Ventures report, Clark sent a “portfolio manager” — its version of a program officer — to see Ms. Duffy speak at a conference. An on-site visit at My Turn’s office followed. Clark then requested what Ms. Duffy calls a “red wagon full of documents” — three years worth of audited financial statements, My Turn’s strategic plan, and outside evaluations of the charity’s work. While reviewing that information, Clark interviewed every member of My Turn’s board, as well as key staff members, and parents, students, and school administrators who were familiar with its programs.

“They wanted to make sure it wasn’t just nice stories,” Ms. Duffy says.

In June 2003 Clark awarded My Turn a $250,000 business-planning grant, along with free consulting from the Bridgespan Group, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that works solely with other charities. A year later, Clark made a $1.8-million grant over three years to help My Turn carry out the plan — the largest gift the charity has ever received from a foundation. The Clark money accounted for more than a quarter of My Turn’s $2.2-million budget in the 2005 fiscal year.

“If My Turn can deliver outcomes with their low-cost model, this investment is a serious winner,” says Nancy Roob, Clark’s president.

My Turn plans to grow regionally in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island through 2011, before embarking on national expansion via franchises. During business planning, the charity decided it should focus only on small urban areas like Brockton, with populations between 50,000 and 250,000. Such areas tend to have few school-to-work charities, while the opposite is true in inner cities, thanks in large part to grant-making practices at foundations, which tend to favor investments in cities.

“I could paper this office with letters I’ve received from funders that say, ‘We only fund in Boston,’” Ms. Duffy says.

New Jobs

The planning process with Bridgespan led to a number of changes at My Turn. The organization added seven new employees to handle two new services, GED instruction and job development (which involves working with employers to secure positions for My Turn’s clients); its first two fund-raising positions — one full time, and the other half time; a second vice president to focus on expansion and program improvement; and an executive assistant for Ms. Duffy. Bridgespan felt the additions were needed even though they will cause the charity’s cost structure to rise to about $1,600 per student per year.

My Turn also has begun to pursue trustees who have more diverse backgrounds and better fund-raising connections than current members of its board.

“There were a lot of ‘aha’ moments, where they tuned us into things that were whizzing by while we were busy running the programs,” says Jill Conlon, a longtime My Turn employee who was promoted to the newly created position of vice president of programs.

The planning process also helped the charity achieve a clear focus on where it can be most successful, something My Turn has lacked in the past. “If someone called tomorrow from Philadelphia, I’d say, ‘I appreciate your interest, but we’re more effective in smaller communities,’” Ms. Duffy says.

Last summer, My Turn expanded to Manchester and Nashua, N.H., where it is working with 120 students at two high schools. Margaret Reynolds, assistant principal at Nashua North High School, says the school brought in My Turn because of its “proven record of success in Massachusetts.”

Previous organizations hired to work with troubled youths have had little success or staying power. “This has been the most sustained, coherent, and well-organized effort that I’ve seen,” says Ms. Reynolds, who has been at the school for 30 years.

My Turn has used $240,000 from the Clark grant to hire researchers at Brandeis University to conduct a multiyear evaluation of how the students who complete My Turn programs fare compared with a control group.

Clark will weigh the results of that study, along with My Turn’s growth accomplishments, and its success at increasing and diversifying its sources of income, in deciding whether to stay with the charity beyond July 2007, when the current grant ends. In the past two months, My Turn has received donations from five other foundations, including a $1-million grant over five years from the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation, in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Financial strength is one thing Clark likes to see before it begins a relationship, and after it ends one. The foundation now requires that many of its grantees, including My Turn, use a portion of each year’s payment to create or add to an operating reserve.

“That’s a really healthy thing for a nonprofit, and it can make all the difference in the world in an organization’s ability to sustain itself,” Ms. Roob says. “It’s also a way of ensuring that we do no harm if we were to decide to exit.”