Increasing Capacity in Community
Forward Promise’s technical assistance offerings help our grantee organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate just and equitable programs and policies. These offerings are framed to both increase the capacity of our grantee organizations and to offer them the information they need so that their work is both responsive to the cultures of the people they serve, and grounded in disrupting dehumanization.
Organizations led by people of color are typically funded only for the programs they deliver, not the growth they desire. That is why Forward Promise makes technical assistance, particularly related to capacity-building, a priority for our grantees.
Examples of our technical assistance to grantees include:
– Organizational Development
– Business Development
– Communications and Storytelling
– Communications and Storytelling
– Documenting Program Models
Our approach to technical assistance prioritizes the goals that grantee organizations have for themselves and for the service they provide to their communities. Forward Promise grantees are provided individualized technical assistance by TA coaches skilled in leadership development, business development, organizational development, program development, and collaboration with local youth-serving systems. Coaches support grantees via:
– Skills assessments, goal setting, and prioritizing areas of capacity-building
– Providing tools and strategies for problem solving and planning
– Connecting grantees to subject matter experts and other resources in their networks
Forward Promise and The Moriah Group are developing curricula to help organizations that work with youth of color and their communities gain a clear understanding of the relationship between racialized trauma and the health of these communities. These technical assistance offerings center individual and structural solutions to the issues that undermine healing, growing, and thriving for communities of color. Examples of transformed organizational practices include:
– infusing racial equity into the work
– engaging youth of color and their communities in ways that recognize and honor their culture, values, languages, and rituals
– recruiting and retaining staff that reflect the community
– countering dehumanization by engaging in advocacy
– supporting youth-led advocacy to reform harmful systems and institutions
