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THRIVE Participant Perspective: The Osiris Foundation
Our Fourth Cohort of THRIVE: An Accelerator for Social Good, facilitated with our partners at The Spark Mill, began in early September. Each week, we'll bring you the perspective of a participating nonprofit and share a little about their organization.
About The Osiris Foundation:
The Osiris Foundation was created to empower youth to live full and rich lives by providing resources and tools that promote overall well-being and offer solutions to current issues in order to reduce the number of young lives lost. The organization began as a tribute to Kimani Osiris, a young man who was loved by family and cherished by friends. His life journey was cut short, but not forgotten. Kimani's presence is deeply missed, but his energy and spirit is the impetus for the creation of the Osiris Foundation.
FB/IG @theosirisfoundation
What are you hoping to get out of this program?
As a newly established nonprofit, THRIVE supports our pursuit for progress by leading us through specialized programming centered on nonprofit success. We hope to use our time in THRIVE to work together as a team to crystalize our goals and develop a roadmap for achieving them.
What did you learn or feel spoke to you about today?
This week in THRIVE we learned about the components needed to create a flywheel, discussed leverage points, and identified our key metrics. As part of the session, we brainstormed successes and challenges faced by our organization in the last two years.
Some of these successes were interpersonal and qualitative in nature (trust built between the organization and families), while others were tangible, and measurable (multiple grant awards). The challenges identified were linked to our pursuit of growth (need for more funding and staff). From these identified strengths and challenges, we created two flywheels comprised of leverage points from our brainstorm. The first reflected our mission driven ambition for organizational growth, and the second reflected our prioritization for trust between our organization and kids, families and schools. We identified a key metric for each of these flywheels that will guide us as we head into our 3rd year working with youth in the community.
Chris was a great support in this process, pushing us to think deeply about our leverage points and specific metrics for success as we move forward as a youth-centric organization.
Tell us about your experience in the program.
The THRIVE program has provided our team with dedicated time to discuss the processes for further establishing our organization to extend our reach in the community. Through THRIVE we’ve further defined our mission and reflected on our successes, challenges, areas of opportunities, and the importance of our mission of reducing rates of community violence in the city of Richmond through youth-centered programming.
How do you see this applying to your organization?
We plan to apply our learnings to expand the reach of our organization, increase our capacity to serve and ensure the youth we serve have an opportunity to THRIVE.
Are you interested in applying for THRIVE Cohort 5? Complete our interest form today!
The THRIVE accelerator program provides an opportunity for nonprofits to look beyond current challenges and obstacles and plan out a direct and streamlined path forward. Organizations will tackle a specific hurdle they want to clear to get to the next level of impact with the community and will spend concentrated time with staff and board planning and executing real-time solutions with guided facilitation. We will utilize accelerator techniques to build a cohort-responsive program.
THRIVE was created through collaboration between The Collaboratory of Virginia and The Spark Mill.