Mission, Vision, Brand Story: Focus on Collective Impact & Systems Change (Youth Education/Homelessness)

The Challenge: We are looking for professional assistance to help rethink our mission, vision and how to effectively tell our story on a single website homepage. The foundation for what we do centers around collaboration and collective impact as a means to drive systems change. Yet our program can be seen as a bit eclectic.

My Goal: I have a dyslexic mind that thinks in systems and patterns. A challenge I have is taking what’s in mind and writing it down to tell a compelling concise story about FuseChange. Part of the problem is being so in the weeds that getting our story into a pitch can be a bit difficult.

Tasks: Help us generate a Mission, Vision, Goals/Objectives & Brand Story. Then How do we relate our programs into that mix.

How we tell our story effectively is a critical foundation for what we do and how we generate impact through our programs.

I have had a number of past successes that led us to where we are today, including raising $5M for a social enterprise focused on nonprofit collaboration. This was my first attempt at building technology to support collective impact in the nonprofit sector.

Later, I founded FuseChange as a nonprofit to remove profit driven motives. Over time we won a contract with the New York City Department of Education to work on an open-source technology to support 100,000 homeless youth in the city. This work led to a pivot toward focusing on K–12 homelessness. I talked to districts across the country and realized they are all trying to solve the same problem independently. Rather than doing so independently, why not work collectively and build a solution together with less resources and ownership. The goal is that when we ensure that all children graduate from high school, we can dramatically reduce generational homelessness.

The future objective and why I am doing this work. We need to raise funding to build open-source technologies and tools that enable underfunded school districts to more effectively support homeless youth and families, ensuring they have the resources needed for every child to graduate. Through this process, school districts can not only own their technology but also maintain it. To be honest, it allows the districts to not be at the mercy of proprietary systems, which is a common problem. This includes working across districts to pool funds and build the features and functionality needed to coordinate resources effectively for homeless youth and families. The long-term outcome is the ability to extend these capabilities across the homelessness sector, enabling coordinated resource sharing among nonprofit and government agencies. This will also help us bridge communities inside an open platform to collaborate collectively across geolocations. The concept is that when we collectively try to tackle a really challenging problem, we can be far more effective together.

I am going to be working on this until I not longer can or someone has solved the problem. There is no way I am giving up. I am intensely hyper-focused on making this happen.

As the Founder and President of FuseChange, I have been committed to the social sector for approximately 28 years. I hold a strong belief that collaboration and collective impact are essential to driving greater impact in less time and with fewer resources. I am fully committed to supporting volunteers and implementing changes quickly. I will personally implement these changes and gather any materials needed.

I am determined to see this through and to operate with the highest level of transparency.