Kids’ Chance of America runs an Accelerator program to strengthen its states.

Kids’ Chance of Tennessee has taken full advantage of this offering, improving their organization in board development, outreach, and fundraising.

“The Accelerator program came to us at the perfect time for Tennessee. Our program was growing very quickly, raising much more money, and becoming increasingly visible in the state worker’s compensation community,” said Misty Williams, immediate past president of KCTN.

“It had become difficult and very time consuming for board members to keep up with our growth. The program assisted us to clearly organize and grow our board, put best practices in place specific to our state, and has allowed us to set clear goals. We are now poised to sustain our organization into the future, we have clearly outlined roles for board members, and are already increasing our yearly donations and awarding more scholars.”

KCTN achieved several benchmarks, including:

• Adopting a new strategic plan
• Putting a solid structure around board development, including creating board and committee descriptions, establishing a robust pipeline to attract and recruit talent, and finalizing a better onboarding process
• Formalizing an active Outreach Committee with a focus on a student and family engagement program. In fact, this committee has already activated a distribution list to share their first KCTN Quarterly Newsletter
• Creating a formal Partner program designed to target larger corporate gifts through partnership levels
• Integrating all members of both the Board and the Advisory Board into active membership on the new standing committees to help spread the work and responsibilities to more volunteers

Hitting these benchmarks has already achieved results. Specifically, the additional income from the partner program allowed KCTN to increase the number of scholarships given this year, helping to exceed their goal of six scholarship to a total of eight scholarship awards.