Baltimore’s Thread program surrounds struggling inner-city students with a circle of devoted volunteers, overseen by well-trained staff. It’s labor-intensive and costly to expand — and it works. Here are two other programs that are seeing success by putting lots of muscle and money into tackling intractable problems.
One Million Degrees
Program: Tutoring, professional development, and other support tailored to individual students at 11 Chicago-area community colleges
Success data: 65 percent graduation rate
In Chicago, a decade-old nonprofit that also leans on intensive, wrap-around services is looking to grow its own big idea. The biggest hurdle to scaling up the One Million Degrees model is its expense. As the group’s leader, Paige Ponder, quips, “Everybody would love for life-changing things to cost no money.”
One Million Degrees, begun by a trio of social entrepreneurs as a scholarship program, offers supportive services to low-income community-college students. Four years ago, when Ms. Ponder took over, the organization was serving 125 students in Chicago. Today, it serves about 700, with ambitions to grow further.
The group gets results: 65 percent of One Million Degrees participants have graduated from community college, and 75 percent of the program’s alumni have transferred to four-year colleges.
The group combines stipends with tutoring, professional development (such as sending students to industry conferences), and personal help like lining up child care for students with kids. The scholars also have volunteer coaches working in the fields they aspire to join, like nursing.
The cost of all this, Ms. Ponder says, is about $5,000 per student per year, when overhead expenses are figured in. “It’s not a cheap model,” she acknowledges. But she says the group’s myriad services, while making it harder to bring the program to scale, are necessary.
“If any one of these things could get us the results that we want, then that would be lovely,” she says. “But our position is, you have to have all these things together to form a system that’s going to work.”
One Million Degrees recently won two grants totaling $500,000 from the ECMC Foundation to help it better prepare students to make the leap from college to good jobs and to explore the notion of expanding nationally. In April, it announced a partnership with Aon, a global company that offers risk-management, insurance, and other business services, to provide apprenticeships for One Million Degrees students in a variety of fields.
First Place for Youth
Program: Helps young people aging out of foster care in five California counties settle into independent lives.
Success data: 96 percent of clients are in school or have earned their high-school diploma or GED; 81% are employed
The Oakland, Calif., nonprofit, founded in 1998, helps with the big things — finding an apartment, preparing for college or the work force — as well as basic life skills like grocery shopping and doing laundry.
First Place’s tailored, one-on-one approach is crucial for the young people it serves, says Liz Bender, the organization’s chief finance and growth officer. “The one-size-fits-all will definitely not work” with young people leaving foster care, she says.
The nonprofit’s solution, Ms. Bender says, is cheaper for society in the long run than letting former foster kids struggle on their own. With about 75 percent of First Place’s funding coming from government, it’s benefited from a favorable political climate in its home state of California. Other parts of the country can’t necessarily offer the same.
The group’s leader for the past dozen years, Sam Cobbs, has prioritized data collection to help First Place fine-tune its work, and the results are impressive. During the 2016 fiscal year, 81 percent of First Place participants who had left foster care within the previous two years had jobs, compared with about 29 percent overall for former foster kids in the state.
In 2015, as part of a plan to expand services in California and start operations in a couple of other states, First Place for Youth launched a $10 million capital campaign; about $8.2 million has been raised so far, with the drive slated to run till 2020.
But challenges remain if First Place’s model is to spread around the country. The program benefits from federal funds California has secured to extend care to people leaving foster care up to age 21. Yet some states have not applied for the federal grants, or have pursued post-foster-care programs far less ambitious than California’s, Ms. Bender says.
She finds the unwillingness of other states to address the challenges faced by young adults leaving foster care puzzling, because on a national scale “this is not a huge population. We’re talking about 25,000 to 30,000 kids a year who age out.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said that the program One Million Degrees provided child care. We added the fact that it does offer professional development.
