Apparo’s partnership with United Way continues to drive strong nonprofit impact
We’ve graduated our third cohort! Our third group of United Way Unite Charlotte and Unite Neighborhoods nonprofits has completed their Technology Foundations work with Apparo. As creating strong, positive nonprofit impact is the goal of this program, we connected with four members of our third cohort to learn about how their participation will improve their ability to fulfill their mission.
Akeliah Stewart, Co-Founder/Board Member, Center 360
Center 360’s career enrichment program for youth encourages personal development, provides life skills training, and promotes career exposure and development. The focus is on the health and wellness of youth, while actively engaging the youth’s family, friends, school, faith places, and all the people and places involved in their lives.
Akeliah shares an overview of nonprofit impact delivered, including increased efficiencies that leave them well positioned to achieve their goal of doubling the number of youth they serve next year:
“I was very interested in working with Apparo because, while we are not in the weeds anymore as an organization, I know we can do a lot better when it comes to technology. When I heard about Apparo and this cohort program, I wanted to jump on it to learn as much as we can to help our programs and organization enhance, especially in the ways that we collect data and do our community outreach through social media, our website and email. We have several goals that require us to increase our fundraising and I know that we could reach more people to support our mission if we improved our use of technology.
“We need easy access to data for applying to grants and so that we can demonstrate the impact of our work to parents of our students, to our funders and to new, potential donors. Before working with Apparo, we were collecting information in many different ways and wasting a lot of time re-entering it into one system. We had to piece together the data we needed for grants, reporting and community updates; it was challenging.
“The program was great overall and Apparo classes were very useful. To me, the most meaningful part was the mentorship because we were able to sit down one-on-one with our mentor (Steve Maykowski, Google) who was able to slowly walk us through technology improvements that we could make.
“We use Google Workspace and our mentor is an expert in it. He showed us tools and tips to save time in our work. Things that were already at our fingertips, but that we had no idea existed. He helped us learn to use them in the best way possible for our organization. Most importantly, he helped us think through a better way to collect data with tools that we already had. We created new forms and now we capture data in one place in real time. Now we can easily and quickly pull data and reports that we need; it’s amazing. We are saving 2-3 hours of work a week. It has been a blessing to our team.
“Now we’re able to apply for more grants and are launching a new individual donor program. These additional funds are critical, as we are on track to meet our goal of doubling the number of youth we serve next year (increase from 30 to 60 students), so that we can meet as many of the needs of the kids in the community.”
Kristi Cruise, President and Co-Founder, Books with Color
Books with Color increases the accessibility of inclusive and bilingual children’s reading materials via strategic partnerships between diversity driven authors and communities who support them.
Kristi shared her experience and the nonprofit impact this program has made on Books with Color, including implementing a cloud-based system and overhauling their email system.
“We came to Apparo as a Unite Charlotte first year beneficiary. They suggested this program because technology is something everyone needs to prioritize. Of course, we rarely ever do because we’re always focused on our programs and donors. It’s a free program and lasted an hour and a half a week for six weeks, so it’s really a great fit for busy people.”
“I found two things most beneficial in the program. First, the social media class was phenomenal. Vanessa Bell’s class was chock-full of information. Social media is so important, and there’s a level of intimidation around it because it’s always changing. At the end of her class, she offered a deeper dive called TACTIX sponsored by the Sequoia Fund. We have since enrolled in it, and it is taking us through all the social media channels in 12 weeks. They offered us a discount and everything. And it was because of Apparo we were able to connect with them.”
“The second most valuable part of the program was the mentor relationship with Kamal Bhargava has been great. He is such a highly skilled person when it comes to technology. He works for Google. He came to Apparo to find someone who he could help and benefit. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, which is helping us to become more proficient in technology. Right now, with his help, I’m moving our email over to a Google server, so we can have emails for everyone who works within our organization. He is walking us through this process. He continues to work with us, even after the program ended, as we continue to tackle tech issue after tech issue. Technology can be really daunting. To have someone like him is invaluable.”
“Overall, I thought the classes were beneficial. They were full of information to help us prioritize our technology.”
Juanita Pipkin, President of Barre Belle
Barre Belle is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization designed to provide universal access to the art of dance through local community centers and schools. Barre Belle is a portable dance studio for elementary students to introduce ballet fundamentals.
Juanita discusses the value of the connections made through the cohort program, including expanding Barre Belle’s reach, and engaging with the community in ways that will support their mission and help double their fundraising goal:
“People don’t always see the mind body connection between yoga and dance and how kids are learning to bring awareness to their bodies to manage things like their stress and anxiety, especially after COVID-19 which brought much more of these mental health issues to our youth. COVID also prevented us from many in-person fundraising opportunities, but this year we are hopeful to double our fundraising goal from last year.”
“Our program teaches so many things. The children are learning discipline, gaining confidence, and stress-management. Dance develops more than artistic expression, it develops visual- spatial and thinking skills. It nurtures interpersonal skills through group participation in creating movements that communicate stories that become a dance. It can be difficult to translate that in a way people can understand because when you talk about gaining skills around teamwork and strength in basketball, it makes sense, but not everyone is as easily able to make the connection between things like self-managing stress and dance or yoga. Sometimes kids can dance out their anger as a positive outlet to express emotions. Students learn mindfulness through yoga. We teach them how they can go into meditation to relieve feelings of anger and frustration that can help avoid conflict later. It’s so critically important for everyone, especially young people, to have these avenues to address their issues. Sometimes these connections are more difficult to translate than basketball, but this work really helped us figure out how to better make that translation and form connections with our community.”
“One of the things that really made this project was working with our mentor, Desiree Rogers. She was truly amazing. Desiree helped us become more efficient in the way we handle things like social media. It was so incredibly helpful how well she clicked with our organization and how much she really cared about our mission. She was fully prepared to take on our technology challenges. Communicating with her couldn’t have been easier. Helping us integrate Give Lively on our webpage will benefit us in so many ways. She even created some templates that have been great for our social media and website. Desiree worked with us create a plan for posting more frequently on social media and showed us how to set things up to be efficient about when and what we post. She showed us how to track metrics, which will be able to start doing soon. I don’t know how Apparo matched us so well, but her skillset was a perfect fit for our organization’s needs.”
“We wanted to take advantage of everything that came with being selected to be a part of the United Way Cohort and we didn’t hesitate to get involved with Apparo. The workshops have been so helpful to our organization and we’re looking forward to participating in more.”
“Sometimes you don’t really know what you could improve until you’re in the workshops and seeing all the possibilities. Learning new skills has helped us make connections to inform the community more efficiently about what we do. We’re incorporating this broadened reach and accessibility throughout the organization so that everyone who wants to engage with us can do so easily, whether it’s someone sending a check via snail mail or someone interacting with us on our website.”
Winston Earle, Vice President of Operations and Programming, Men of Destiny
Men of Destiny is striving to develop vocational and professional skills for youth in Charlotte. The nonprofit focuses on making an impact on youth while helping them to reach their full potential. Men of Destiny is a safe space for young men and women to cultivate their future while building effective connections.
Winston shared his experience of the impact delivered, including educating them on ways to expand the use of technology in their nonprofit.
“I first heard of Apparo through Unite Charlotte. Originally, Gary Crump the Executive Director and Founder of Men of Destiny, was involved in the cohort program. Part of our training was to take classes at Apparo, and we began the 6-week program to learn more about technology.”
“My experience in terms of computers and internet is very limited. I thought in terms of broadening my perspective of the use of those tools, the Apparo classes were extremely helpful and educational.”
“Our mentor, Colin Lafever, was also amazing, and would answer any questions we had. He shared the differences between the Google and Microsoft platforms and showed us how we could more efficiently use them both within the scope of our nonprofit. For our participants, we can push a lot of information to them through Google, including the use of Google forms. Internally, we feel it is better to use the Microsoft platform for grants and communications. There are also added security features there. Our mentor helped us think through these processes and best use cases.”
“Using his recommendations, we will absolutely save time. We are still structuring how we are doing things, especially in our year-round cohorts. For the summer program that we’ve done for the past six years, we will continue to use Microsoft. But for the year-round program we will be focusing on incorporating the Google program. Once we have these in place, we will have a better idea of how much time will be saved.”
“Of the classes, I found the social media class enlightening. We have Facebook and Instagram right now. What’s ideal for a social media presence is posting daily, and we are currently posting weekly or less. We try to highlight our events and put them on social media. We understand, as we grow, we need to increase this to 3+ times a week – it’s just having the staff to be able to do that or finding a volunteer who would be willing to do it for us. Once the summer program ends, we are going back into building our social media and IT plan to incorporate what we have learned through the Tech Foundations program.”
“For me, personally, I wish the program had been a little bit longer. I felt like it was a lot of information in a short amount of time, and there is so much good information that we can build upon. The classes were informative and broadened our knowledge overall.”
