Strengthening Organizations That Serve Communities
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| CASE STUDY: Life Skills Workshop, Inc. |
| Since its inception in 1997, Life Skills Workshop, Inc. has empowered women with services they need to transform their lives. This is a tremendous task, since their clients face homelessness, prison, serious addictions and/or abusive relationships. Life Skills helps them build self–esteem and matches them with mentors for on–going support. It even provides women with the professional clothing they need to help them land crucial jobs as they strive for economic independence. With a growing number of women looking to Life Skills Workshop for help – and with VERY limited resources to assist them – the organization itself needed someone to turn to when faced with how to grow effectively and responsively. In 2003, they came to Managance Consulting to help them create their first strategic plan – a document that has become a crucial component of the organization’s day–to–day operations, according to Life Skills Workshop Executive Director Teresa Gardner–Williams. “Managance was always so focused on what really needed to be done,” Teresa said. “They were always on task, and they kept us on task.” Managance developed the strategic plan with the broad involvement and guidance of both Life Skills’ Board of Directors and its Strategic Planning Committee. Using principles from the Drucker Self–Assessment Tool as its guide, Managance implemented a planning method that helped Life Skills Workshop define its mission, its customers, its core operating values, and the results it wants to achieve and its plan for achieving them. The resulting plan now provides Life Skills Workshop with a usable 3–year “road map.” Life Skills Workshops’ staff and volunteers use the plan to help them reach their goals and objectives in a variety of areas. They include fundraising, working with referral agencies, volunteer training, curriculum enhancement, workshop development, planning for staff growth, building operating reserves and ensuring adequate office space. “Thanks to Managance, we now have a strategic plan that guides us and is very workable for us,” Teresa said. “Managance was able to do this on time and under budget. And though the plan was created two years ago, we still use it today.” The plan included the creation of a program evaluation plan and a data collection system. Managance has also helped Life Skills Workshop in this area by designing realistic tracking measures and an Access database. Life Skills Workshop staff uses the database to easily track and report on client outcomes. “We’re a very small organization, and yet Managance has always been very understanding about our budget,” Teresa said. “They never treat us like we’re a small account, because to them, we are not a small account. They bring a great deal of energy to their work, and they are very intense. They have helped us tremendously.” |
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