City Year Greater Philadephia:
Strategic Plans

Challenge
In 1997, City Year, an urban youth corps that brings together a diverse group of 17- to 24-year-olds for service to children in cities around the United States, added Philadelphia to its expanding roster of local chapters. The program grew quickly in its first two years.  Interested in formulating a strategy to guide and encourage future growth, City Year Greater Philadelphia hired Strategic Communications & Planning to develop a five-year strategic plan.

Approach
To better understand City Year’s competitive environment, SCP began by examining the group’s workplans, budgets, recruitment, and marketing materials, as well as the Web sites of peers and local competitors. Next, SCP conducted a series of key informant interviews with City Year staff, board members, and a variety of key stakeholders in and around the organization and the Greater Philadelphia area.

As a result of this research, SCP collaborated with City Year’s executive leadership to create a five-year plan to help City Year grow so that it reached 10% of Philadelphia’s public school students each year. This would ensure that each entering Kindergarten student would have a meaningful contact with City Year before they graduated high school. SCP developed drafts of the plan with input from board members as well as staff and others, helping to ensure unanimous, energetic support for the plan and its goals.

Following the plan’s approval, SCP continued to work with City Year to provide ongoing communications consultation, helping to hone its messaging and providing advice on its media and public policy outreach.

Results/Impact
By 2005, seven years after its founding, and five years after its initial plan, City Year Greater Philadelphia had recruited and deployed more than 1,000 corps members in service and leadership development. Corps size had grown by more than 200 percent, and the organization was able to serve and influence more than 67,000 children, on track to meet its strategic plan’s goals. Pleased with SCP’s work on their first five-year strategic plan, City Year Greater Philadelphia invited SCP President John Beilenson to join its board. In 2005, Beilenson embarked on a second five-year planning process for City Year, this time pro bono. Again, following a similar iterative and interactive process, this plan set out to grow the corps from 175 to 225 full-time members, expand its part-time corps members signficantly and increase the organization’s budget by 20 percent.