Building Organizational Resilience

What does building organizational resilience mean to Jóvenes de Puerto Rico en Riesgo, Inc.? It means building a solid financial base that will support the continuation of our services in the case of a future natural disaster o emergency. After experiencing the terrible organizational devastation due to Hurricane María, we have begun the planning and design phase of our emergency response plan. This plan will allow us to train our employees and volunteers so that we can respond efficiently in the event of an unforeseen disaster. However, the backbone of this plan depends on having the economic resources to maintain the employees who provide the direct services to low-income youth at-risk of dropping out of school and becoming involved in delinquent behavior whom we serve.

One of the most important elements of building our resilience was the recruitment of a dedicated team member who is designing and who will implement a new development plan. We are happy to have welcomed our newest team member Ivelisse Reyes, the Coordinator of Development. Ivelisse has been working non-stop on strategies to diversify and grow our funding resources. This is a great achievement for a small non-for-profit which focuses all resources on direct services to youth.

The support of individuals and private organizations has allowed us to bring this new member who will lead our efforts and activities to access new funding and financial resources. We hope to generate additional contributions to ensure this development plan is implemented. As a result, we will be able to train, develop and maintain the human resources necessary to respond and continue our mission to serve the most vulnerable sector of Puerto Rico’s youth, even in the face of future disasters.