Walk With Sally - Bringing the cancer community together to heal the next generation

Adults getting sufficient social & emotional support

Rates of volunteerism

Total number of local social media friends and connections Angelenos have

Trainings and/or in-person engagements

Connect Angelenos with impactful volunteer opportunities

Increase donations to organizations and causes

Walk With Sally is LA’s premier voice on connecting volunteers to the most impactful opportunities as well as to each other.

We propose three pillars of engagement and asks for your help to see them grow across the city!

Engaging Young Professionals

Creating Young Leaders Who Give Back

Recruitment & Engagement Management

We have long been the hub for young professionals to find a place to give back while connecting to a network of like-minded individuals. With the new FTK Social Club or our For The Kids Young and Young at heart professionals group that was recently formalized, we have created a community service platform in which these young volunteers can give of themselves and become a resource for other young professionals as well as the organization as a whole. Membership in FTK requires a minimum of 15 hours of volunteer service to WWS within the year and in exchange they receive networking events and speaker series aimed at the issues they care most about. They have their own governing board and create their own content and events! It is a unique formula that crosses all ages and creates a regular stream of volunteers for the organization. With this working model, we aim to replicate FTK in another part of the city.

With so many youth that we are investing in long term, many of them find are looking for something that can help guide them into secondary education and civic engagement. WWS heard the call and created our Junior Mentors Program, Mentees ages 14 — 17 that are ready to begin their path towards volunteerism and leadership. This group also agrees to a certain amount of minimum volunteer hours at WWS’s Friendship Activities or Fundraisers and in return they receive curated content from Advisory Board, FTK and other resources as well as special opportunities and a chance at not only WWS’s Fred’ Future Young Leaders Scholarship but also other community scholarships within our Hub of resources.

For the first time since our inception, Walk With Sally has hired a Volunteer Recruitment and Manager to specifically create the pathways to engagement for prospective volunteers through Walk With Sally. While the pathway to find our beneficiaries is predominantly and clearly 85% through our schools, the one to find the many mentors we need to fulfill the need in the city is not. Therefore, this person’s responsibilities include searching for opportunities to find and recruit not only WWS mentors but also WWS Ambassadors that can help WWS leverage growth much faster than we can relying solely on our own internal resources by attending Outreach events when a staff person cannot, or volunteering for one of our special events committees, or Friendship Activities where they are able to interact directly with our Mentees.

And lastly, we will hire a 5th Program Coordinator to work remotely and along side our current Program Dept. in order to expand these as well as our mentoring program throughout DTLA, East LA, The Valley, Pasadena and beyond

Within the FTK Social Club, WWS intends to engage young professionals within a multifaceted array of other networking events. WWS will use the same bylaws and board structure to create the FTK Social Club North Branch. This will engage adults 25 - 40 to think about civic engagement and what it can look like. We will thereby connect hundreds of like minded young citizens throughout the city.

Through our Junior Mentor program we will be engaging youth between the ages of 14-17 impacted by a parent, guardian or sibling's cancer not only through their own one on one mentoring but also through a series of volunteer activities. In addition, we will be exposing them to opportunities, bonding them closer to each other, and training them to be leaders within our city.

And finally through new recruitment avenues and a healthy engagement system we will be connecting volunteers of all ages and paths of life with each other and with the children who need them, in every corner of LA!

We will define success through the following:

1. Recruitment of 50 FTK North Branch members and 4 consecutive FTK events

2. Matching 100 new Friendships, a match of one child between the ages of 7 -17 and one adult who has experienced the trauma of cancer within the areas outlined.

3. Recruitment and Maintenance of 100 new WWS Ambassadors within our database for all outreach and fundraising events.