Building a new nonprofit leader’s confidence in delivering impactful programming
Client: We Are Beautiful
Type: 1 year old 501(c)3
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
How we feel about ourselves directly impacts our ability to achieve goals and connect with the world around us.
Our beliefs affect how we respond to stress, build relationships, and make decisions. When a girl believes she is not worthy, she risks missing healthy connections with peers, pursuing opportunities to build her dreams, and fails to see the impact her life has on the world.
We Are Beautiful provides participants the skills and strategies to recognize the value they each have, practice establishing positive connections with others, and nurture a growing sense of purpose.
“I felt overwhelmed when we started, and didn’t know how I could fill out all the parts of the curriculum. Thank you for walking me through it step-by-step. You made it easy for me to describe things and respond to questions. It made me realize how much I know about the girls, the topic, and running the program.
Now I feel more confident delivering the program, presenting it to new clients, and asking for money to pay for it.”
— Starshemah Duncan, Founder of We Are Beautiful
ABOUT WE ARE BEAUTIFUL
We Are Beautiful was founded by Starshemah Duncan in response to a growing need for mental health and mentorship for young girls and women. The organization is dedicated to building self-esteem and cultivating the beauty within each girl and young woman through programming designed to assist them with building life skills, developing self-confidence, and forming mentoring relationships.
I have an idea. Now what?
Starshemah Duncan has more than 15 years experience as a mental health provider and therapist. She has witnessed firsthand the impact that positive role models and self-perception can have in a young girl or woman’s life.
Longing for more impact, Starshemah was driven to develop a group program—and ultimately start a nonprofit—because of her own personal struggles as a dark-skinned girl. Those struggles had followed her into adulthood, resulting in a lack of self-esteem and an inability to live up to her full value and purpose in life.
She envisioned creating a safe space for girls and young women to learn about and increase their self-esteem, building positive community along the way.
But establishing a nonprofit, developing a curriculum, and engaging potential sponsors was a whole new world. Although deeply experienced in providing mental health care, Starshemah needed a partner to guide her through the unfamiliar process of creating curriculum out of her expertise.
Starshemah and Precious, her first employee, enrolled in a nonprofit accelerator program, where they met Kimberly Zahler. They immediately connected over a shared love of self-care and mental health.
Creating a plan.
To complement their accelerator work to better define organizational goals, financial sustainability, and storytelling, Star and Kimberly carved out time to review and shape the curriculum for the flagship program: We Are Beautiful Self-Esteem Group.
Learner Profiles & Systems of Influence
Following human-centered principles, we crafted learner profiles based on Starshemah’s years of working with her therapy clients. We then mapped the people and relationships that have the most influence on the girls, identifying new audiences to engage in creating a network of support.
Course Curriculum
Working with the end in mind, we turned Star’s vision into clearly defined objectives, themes, topics, and then activities. The agenda came together naturally after specifying the purpose and outcomes for each session.
Messaging and Value Proposition
We used a technique called a “course promise” to provide prompts for creating a succinct and engaging description of the program and the value it will deliver to participants and program sponsors. Star now has a set of starting points she can mix and match or adapt to the audience she’s speaking with.
Going back to our systems mapping, we flagged the individuals surrounding participants to identify who needed to know what information and when. This is the base for a new program communication suite Star is developing.
Impact Measures
Documenting the expected outcomes, key insights and behaviors methodically made identifying early impact measures a painless exercise. Since she is starting out, Star will collect evidence anecdotally and from her own observation until she is ready to progress into more elaborate and/or technical data collection methods.
What comes next.
Starshemah has already contracted with two local schools to deliver the program to 24+ girls, and intends to run the program again shortly after to private participants from her business location. By developing a suite of communication tools and refining her proposals, she has embraced the value of what she is offering … and her own personal value and impact.
She is better positioned to pursue grant funding and address school administrator and parent questions about what to expect from the program. She is already garnering support from parents and educational staff and collecting more and more evidence of the impact her program has on young lives and the communities they live in.
Starshemah Duncan, Founder of We Are Beautiful
“Working with Kim gave me a greater sense of stability and confidence that I can repeat the sessions with another group.
I also feel more comfortable talking about my program, particularly the expected outcomes and impact of it. I’d never thought about the different types and timings of communication to build a suite of tools to connect with them all.”
Photo credits: Monstera Production and Brett Sayles on Pexels.com