The Ripple Effect: Redefining volunteerism by connecting those passionate about sustainability with Non-Profits who need help tacking their biggest problems

LA based non-profits are underfunded and often lack the expertise they need to tackle their most pressing issues. While they make due with what they have, they are unable to optimize their organization to expand their service capacity and maximize their impact with the donations that they receive. Consulting organizations that traditionally would provide the expertise and guidance to overcome these hurdles are extremely expensive, and paying for these services is outside the budgets of local non-profit organizations. Unable to pay for such expertise, these issues and inefficiencies go unresolved and our local non-profit organizations are held back from achieving their full potential and making their biggest impact in the Los Angeles area. Seed Consulting Group strives to bridge the gap of these issues through providing a team of pro-bono consultants that recommend sustainable solutions to each organization's most pressing issues.

Seed Consulting Group fills the professional services gap for Los Angeles Non-Profits by reimagining what it means to volunteer. By creating unique, high-impact volunteer opportunities, we engage portions of the population that previously may not have considered volunteering, including the unemployed or underemployed, graduate students, and individuals working in demanding professions, increasing civic engagement and long term social impact. We engage these segments by creating project teams that provide free consulting work to help solve LA county non-profit organizations's biggest problems, allowing these non-profits to amplify their impact with their existing resources. Our Pro-Bono Consulting Cycle is a 10-week program that connects volunteer consultants with non-profits. We provide professional development for our volunteers by training them with consulting basics, enable them to use their individual strengths and expertise as part of a project team. In the process, they learn valuable STEM skills, gain relevant work experience, and provide networking opportunities which increases their potential for social mobility. While upskilling members of our community, they build long-term relationships with local non-profits. We perform meaningful work for our community's non-profits, amplifying their existing impact in a variety of ways, such as increasing effectiveness of their programs, increasing their revenue streams, increasing community awareness of their work.

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

Prior success from our Pro-Bono Consulting Program is two-pronged: we help create a Los Angeles where non-profits are able to do more and positively impact a wide variety of members in the community, while increasing the social-mobility of minority groups through valuable job experience and hands-on training. Our Pro-Bono Consulting Program results in a more efficient non-profit community. This leads to increased awareness around existing non-profit programs, more people benefiting from those programs, and a greater impact on global climate change. Seed also promotes a more civically engaged community by creating bonding experiences between professionals and the broader field of social and sustainable impact. Program success creates a Los Angeles where more people are actively volunteering, unemployed and underemployed people learn skills to help them reenter the workforce, and under-represented communities increase social mobility through our professional development services.

As the benefits of our program are two-fold, we measure our impact in two ways: 1. Non-Profit Impact: We currently have regular client satisfaction surveys where our clients indicate the impact that our work has had on the operations of their organizations, and actively track the number of clients, projects, and volunteer hours provided by our organization. These include: - 99 nonprofit clients served (30% of clients are repeating client) - 141 completed projects - 46,000+ volunteer hours donated 2. Volunteer Up-skilling & Professional Development Impact: Using onboarding and offboarding surveys, we are able to determine the positive impact our program has on core STEM skills by comparing the volunteer skills assessment before and after our program. These include: - 95% of volunteers report an increase in their technical and professional abilities