New Orleans Kids Partnership Backbone Fund Campaign

New Orleans Kids Partnership (NOKP) is a voluntary membership organization that brings together 40+ multi-sector youth service and program providers “to expand access to high quality services for children, youth and families in Greater New Orleans through collaboration and collective impact.”  “Collective Impact” work is an innovative approach that goes beyond scaling up or replicating the work of a single organization or program to commit multi-sector organizations to a holistic agenda for solving New Orleans’ complex problems of social disconnection, poor health, low literacy and poverty. 

The success of Collective Impact requires a central organization, known as a “Backbone Support Organization,” to provide a platform to facilitate dialogue, manage technology and communications, collect and report data, and handle logistical and administrative details. NOKP is the “Backbone Support Organization” that provides the specific skills, resources and infrastructure needed for the partner organizations and community to achieve their common goal – enhanced outcomes for youth. 

When you support NOKP,

1. Your investment is matched by hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff time, cash matches and other resources contributed by the NOKP partners.
2. You support the only comprehensive planning, implementation and evaluation process of its kind for youth and family services in the Greater New Orleans Area.
3. You provide leadership around issues of citywide collaboration, access, quality and system development.
4. Your investment has the long-term effect of ensuring maximum positive impact of existing and future resources on the needs of all children, youth and families in Greater New Orleans.

• $3,000 is half of the printing cost for the Connect 2 Educate Notebook. The Connect 2 Educate Notebook is a comprehensive directory of the organizations in New Orleans that offer direct services to children and families. It includes everything from summer programs, afterschool programs, health and wellness and mentoring and tutoring. Parents and teachers have found this resource to be invaluable and seek out the publication every year. This first ioby campaign will be dedicated to raising funds on behalf of this project, so the funds would be saved until we pay our designer and publisher. The designer/publisher we work with invoices us three times for $2,000 each time:
  • When we put the order in (September 2014)
  • When the order is done being edited and is sent to the printer (End of November-Beginning December)
  • Upon delivery of the order (End of December)
• Planning and editing of the Connect 2 Educate directory is done by volunteer member organization representatives and will be started in June.
• We hope to raise another $3,000 for the directory by selling ad space during the months of June-October
• Planning and editing the directory will be finished by November at the latest
• Document will be sent to the printer in early December

The goal of the Backbone Fund is to develop and diversify our funding streams so we can continue with the work of the organization. Our four Working Groups will continue expanding and implementing current projects and the GRoW network will transition to other neighborhoods, with NOKP as the Backbone organization coordinating their work.