Back-office resources: Helping scale up new organizations

Wildfire relief

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Los Angeles County has a rapidly growing number of mission driven organizations that are starting up to help with wildfire relief efforts and overall youth education around science and sustainability education. While this is wonderful to see, it is an unfortunate reality that most of these organizations are under-resourced and will likely fail from not having operational support. Nonprofit organizations are also businesses like for-profit organizations. In this era, funding partners (e.g. governments, private foundation) more typically require seeing much more organized structure -- especially when it comes to financial, legal, and strategy integration. With the rapid influx of new community organizations, we have already been seeing first-hand these brewing issues. We know this because we are already fiscally sponsoring at least three organizations focusing on wildfire relief and education.

We will reach dozens of organizations through hosting three organizational structure and mentorship training sessions targeted to help community organizations that have emerged to support the wildfire relief efforts and increased educational opportunities for k-12 school programs around climate science education. Through executing programs such as Los Angeles Climate Week, we have already demonstrated our ability to be a successful community organizer and conduct large-scale educational initiatives. However, seminars such as this have not been done before to the best of our knowledge.
At these events, we will be able to bring in experts to talk to many areas of operational and growth challenge that these organizations are facing while serving their respective missions. During these events, we will be able to parse out organizations that need different levels of support. Some will be able to thrive with well aligned volunteers, while other will need much more hands-on support. We aim to directly support 5-10 of these organizations over a 6-month period with proceeds from this budget.

Collidescope Foundation's program success will enable more organizations within LA County to thrive and be able to do more through increased capacity. When you address "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" and allow people to feel more supported, there is no doubt that they can show up and service their mission and their community more effectively. It also allows them to utilize resources more efficiently. This all results in more successful results within LA County with more efficient resources.
We are also confident that through this grant and the ability to execute these programs, we will be able to inspire long term engagement with many of these organizations. The funders behind many of these organizations will be directly exposed to these programs and see the direct and indirect benefits. This will result in them ultimately allocating more funds for capacity building and program execution because they will see more positive results.