Featuring Outdoor Outreach
“I don’t think we’d be where we are today. The facilitation value SVP provided us helped to cut our learning curve in half,” shared Outdoor Outreach CEO Ben McCue.
SVP’s Investee engagement with the organization spanned pandemic lockdown restrictions and reopening’s at a time when youth needed the transformative power of the outdoors more than ever before. A team of SVP Partners led by Andy Kaiser, including Liz Baun, Ned DeWitt, Veronica Ford, Philip Lurie, Joyce Ross, Dana Torykian, Tom Watlington, and Renee Zau, employed an adaptive approach in collaborating with Outdoor Outreach’s leadership team throughout the two-year partnership.
A fruitful strategic planning session set the tone for the engagement and yielded several useful strategy tools that the nonprofit was able to implement right away such as their strategy screen, used across all levels of the organization, and a theory of change that provided the foundation for messaging and outreach. Also key to the engagement was a board governance project. Board engagement among members deepened to tackle exciting new endeavors with revived energy. Outdoor Outreach brought on four new members, diversifying skills sets and perspectives around the table.
It's clear that Outdoor Outreach’s success lies in its readiness for change and enthusiasm for implementation.
“The biggest thing that points to the success of our partnership is that we are now using these tools we’ve developed to move forward. This translates to our ability to increase our impact specifically with the youth we serve,” said McCue.
SVP couldn’t be happier to see the tools it developed with the organization alive and well; bringing more youth to the trails, the ocean, and out under the stars to discover their own power and resilience. SVP takes many organizations like Outdoor Outreach from an inflection point to sustainable growth and increased community impact.
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