Building Capacity in Foundation Grantees

Blue Ridge Foundation New York operates a venture philanthropy fund that provides intensive support to new, innovative organizations that seek to address important social issues. The Capstone team worked exclusively with two of the Foundation’s grantees: iMentor and Legal Outreach. iMentor was founded in 1999 to build relationships between young people and volunteer adult mentors, primarily through e-mail correspondence. The team conducted a literature review and researched corporate-nonprofit partnerships in order to provide recommendations for cultivating relationships that yield corporate volunteers, funding, and programmatic support. Legal Outreach was founded in 1983 to provide urban youth intensive legal and educational programming as a tool for developing skills and facilitating the pursuit of higher education. The team produced a comprehensive marketing packet to appeal to the organization’s various stakeholders, researched recruitment strategies used by other organizations, and designed a promotion and recruitment plan to help increase participation in Legal Outreach’s Summer Law Institute.