buildOn

buildOn works to transform urban neighborhoods in six regions in the U.S. by providing intensive community-service learning opportunities and leadership training to disadvantaged youth. Then, at the same time in the world’s poorest countries, it builds new schools. In its 28-year history, buildOn has constructed nearly 1,600 schools in seven countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America.

As Carrie Pena, the chief marketing officer at buildOn, explains, raising enough money so that both of its programs prosper is a formidable challenge — one that could only be met with intense collaboration.

You have two program areas to fund. How do you make sure both get the support they need?

Pena: We’ve had challenges based around our dual program track. Our goals of providing service-learning opportunities in the U.S. and building schools globally are certainly connected by our mission. But we’ve found that it can be more difficult raising money for one than the other. We’ve had more success traditionally with donors who have helped us build schools overseas.

What strategies did you look at to get the U.S. program up to speed?

For a comparison point, we looked at a very successful program on the global school-building side called Trek. Donors to that program raise enough to completely fund a school — around $30,000 — plus their in-country travel expense of $900 per person. Then, they travel to work side-by-side with a community to build a school. They raise hammers for the cause as well as funds.

That program has always worked for us. We thought, what if we do something similar with an existing U.S. program, one that links corporations with students at schools in under-resourced communities?

This is the service-learning program?

Yes. The program is designed to empower youth from under-resourced schools to explore the challenges faced by their communities. It gives them the opportunity to address those issues by, say, helping the homeless, or seniors and younger children through service. These students have contributed over 2.6 million hours of service, impacting their communities and learning to lead in even the most difficult circumstances.

What is innovative about it is that it allows corporate employees to learn from our students and serve side-by-side with them. Our students are the types of leaders that companies say they want. They’re the kind of people we’d like to see change the world.

We wondered, as we looked for ways to grow the program, if there was another way we could increase how much money we were taking in for it. We needed to do more.

And what new approach did you come up with?

We decided to develop a service learning immersion, similar to Trek, but in the U.S. where our partners could “walk in the shoes” of buildOn students. Those who take part in the program study the challenges facing neighborhoods, speak with teachers and school administrators about issues facing U.S. public schools, and most importantly, serve alongside buildOn students.

The service-immersion program costs a total of $36,000 for 15. That money goes to directly fund the buildOn program in the community they visit. We piloted this concept in Detroit and from both a programmatic and financial perspective, the new immersion experience became very successful very quickly. We’ve replicated it in five other cities. 

Did you get some help getting the program up and running?

We had an early partner, Rodan + Fields, which partnered with us on the pilot. Amon Rodan, the chairman of R+F, had just joined our board and was interested in experiencing our work. So we created the first pilot in collaboration with his foundation’s team. The Rodan + Fields Prescription for Change Foundation then rolled out the immersion program for their organization across four cities, which has resulted in a $1 million donation each of the last three years.

Besides having the support of a major donor early on, what were the keys to getting the immersion program on the right track?

Pulling off such an immersive experience for a major donor forced the organization to work across departments and to break out of our silos.

We wanted to make sure these experiences didn’t have a negative impact on our program goals or change the nature of the buildOn experience for our students. So, our program, marketing, and development teams had to work together to make sure that things ran seamlessly.

As we grew the program, we created an “immersions team” within the marketing department. Its job is to coordinate all the work across teams to support the immersions, as well as to lead each experience on the ground. But each of our departments has a significant role to play in the success of the immersions and to make sure that the program offers real value for all parties involved, and not just corporations. And now we are working with our data department to use Salesforce technology to measure the impact of the program, and to eventually do all of the on-boarding.

But Salesforce has helped us with more than data management. They spent a lot of volunteer hours advising us on the improvement of this program and have even incorporated it into some of their executive-learning programs.