PASA’s social impact recognized by index

IN THE ZONE: Employees from AfterZone program provider DownCity Design demonstrate hands-on engineering at the Providence Career and Technical Academy on June 5. / COURTESY CHERYL ADAMS-JOHNSON PHOTOGRAPHY
IN THE ZONE: Employees from AfterZone program provider DownCity Design demonstrate hands-on engineering at the Providence Career and Technical Academy on June 5. / COURTESY CHERYL ADAMS-JOHNSON PHOTOGRAPHY

The Providence After School Alliance is the only homegrown, Rhode Island nonprofit on the S&I 100 Index compiled by the Social Impact Exchange in an effort to attract funders by offering “proof of results.”
Social impact, or how an organization affects its community, is a challenge to measure, but the Growth Philanthropy Network in New York City, itself a nonprofit founded in 2005, established the Social Impact Exchange in 2009 in order to do just that, said Monica Ward, the network’s senior manager of nonprofit initiatives.
PASA has been part of the index since it was launched in November 2012. There are now 114 nonprofits or national organizations with state affiliates on the list, Ward said.
It’s meant to include high-impact nonprofits that are trying to scale their work beyond their immediate environment. The original intent, Ward added, was to target an audience of high-net-worth individuals as donors who could feel comfortable knowing their money would have a demonstrable effect on the causes they cared about.
Invited to apply to the index, PASA is a public/private partnership and nonprofit 501(c)(3) whose Hub and AfterZone programs for helping educate and engage high school and middle school youth, respectively, have been attracting requests from cities across the country to help replicate the models.
Hillary Salmons, PASA’s executive director, said the application process required supplying materials “three telephone books high” regarding finance, budgets, business and strategic plans, logic models, operations manuals and evaluations.
“We have all that material because we’ve been training other cities to replicate us,” Salmons said. “[Longtime funders] have high expectations about ‘replicability,’ so quite frankly, I’m always shooting for the gold standard.” Still, Salmons believes new funders could be attracted to PASA based on its inclusion in the S&I 100, so going through the vetting process made sense.
Jill Simonson, regional leader of community affairs and grassroots for Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, said that Southwest is a new funder to PASA who for the first time in 2013 provided $10,000 in round-trip vouchers for the national work PASA is doing training other nonprofits in other cities.
Bank of America has donated $500,000 in the last six years to PASA, according to William F. Hatfield, the bank’s Rhode Island president.
PASA’s impact on youth is evident in after-school programming for middle school students that keep those students engaged from middle to high school, Hatfield said. He was impressed to learn that 97 percent of students who participated for 50 days or more of AfterZone programming graduated high school, while 99 percent graduated if they had attended more than 90 days of programming, he said.
“We’re seeing very impressive graduation rates from youth in high school … who participated in the AfterZone program,” he said. “That’s powerful. [There are] 2,000 students a year participating. You multiply that out over a decade and you’re creating real scale.”
Since 2012, the Rhode Island Foundation has awarded nearly $80,000 in funding to PASA, said Chris Barnett, senior public affairs officer.
While such regular funders may not need the index to see PASA’s worth, Salmons said she is glad PASA has been included because it “reaffirms we’re worth investing in.
“It’s a credential,” she said. “And when you’re talking to a potential investor it’s good to be able to say, ‘We’re in the same league as Teach for America, and a lot of national organizations.’ ” •

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