By Biff Chaplow | Executive Director
EEqual is at a pivotal point in its growth as an organization. Over the past few years, EEqual’s staff and board have worked tirelessly to develop programs and services that meet the needs of poor young people who want an equal chance at realizing their dreams.
EEqual is focusing on three main goals over the next year. First, we want to grow our chapters program by having 20 chapters established at the end of 2022 and another 10 by the end of 2023. We also want each chapter to be engaged and active by having more than 6 members in each chapter who attend at least 70% of all chapter meetings. More details on specific chapter goals can be seen in our strategic plan attached to this proposal. While these goals can be outlined in quantifiable terms, the vision for Chapters remains the same. We want Chapters to be about building community and connection among youth as they learn to become catalysts for change within their schools, churches, and communities.
Second, we want to deepen the impact we have on our scholars. Our goal is to increase our scholarship award amount to $1,500/year by the end of 2023. We want to make sure we are making a meaningful impact on each scholar’s educational experience, and we know the less that scholars have to search for additional tuition help, the more they can invest in their education and community. We also want to increase the non-tuition supports that we offer scholars. This means bolstering our partnerships and collaborations with businesses that can offer in-kind contributions to empower EEqual scholars to thrive in school. Another goal is to continue our Scholar Flex Fund that we piloted in 2022 (described in previous answers). At this point, 35 - 40 scholars feel like the right amount, so we do not intend to increase the number of scholarships until we have the staff capacity to genuinely serve and support more people.
Finally, we want to focus on building our organizational capacity. Under this goal, we plan to develop and fund three new part-time staff positions. Up until now, we have relied heavily on unpaid volunteers and interns to support our programming. While this approach has served us well, it is ultimately not sustainable or equitable. We want to honor the contributions and hard work of the youth that do work for EEqual. As a young organization, we find that living true to our values can be difficult to balance with a very limited budget. When “living true to your values” means offering fair wages and benefits to staff, things can get rather expensive. Still, we are doing everything we can to invest in our staff knowing that we can and will do better.
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