Futures and Options, Inc.

In FY 2022, Futures and Options will serve more than 1,500 youth through our programming. Our goals include:
1. Provide work-readiness training and career exploration workshops to 280 New York City youth through Career Essentials.
2. Supervise 300 students in internships hosted by employer partners across New York City.
3. Increase the number of employer partners who hire interns to 110 and engage 40 businesses to host career exploration field trips at their work spaces.
4. Collaborate with employer partners to engage 180 students in The Externship Experience, providing customized externships with skills training, mentoring opportunities, and project-based learning.
5. Serve 500 youth by providing “On The Road" workshops to schools and other organizations with youth programs.
6. Provide 10 college guidance workshops and individual counseling to students to assist them in applying to college, serving a total of 100 young people.
7. Track student participants to document short-term outcomes of our programs, including: character and confidence; interpersonal skills; professional work-readiness skills; exposure to and understanding of academic and professional opportunities; ability to build a network.
8. Continue to build a robust alumni network with events and career development activities, serving over 200 alumni.

Futures and Options is motivated to reach significantly more youth, delivering services that make a lasting change for our young people. To this end, we will invest in areas that will increase our impact with each student we serve, and we will develop stronger tools and systems to measure outcomes in the short and long term. We will continue to grow such that more young people can access our programs, and we will invest in administrative areas that will generate capacity for ongoing and then faster growth.

Strategies for increasing our impact include:

1) Improve program quality and effectiveness - Program effectiveness is responsible for our impact with each student we serve. Increasing our impact with each student to ensure a sustained change is an important end in and of itself, but it is also a strategy to enhance our reputation, tell a strong story, and improve our relationships with our partners, which should all ultimately contribute to program growth via an increase in revenue and internship placements.

2) Increase the number of opportunities for students - It is imperative that we offer more students access to our programs, through activities that efficiently and sustainably grow our revenue and internship placements. This includes growing our technical assistance work, so that more students have access to our valuable programs and more professionals are trained to provide career development programs for youth.

3) Improve alumni engagement - Maintaining relationships with former program participants allows us to track our long-term impact with youth while creating a pool of potential donors, volunteers, and new business partners.

4) Improve marketing and build brand awareness - Brand awareness and professional marketing materials support Futures and Options growth in all areas. These are necessary investments to generate new funds and partnerships.

5) Improve fundraising and revenue generation - Our sustainability most fundamentally hinges on our financial health. Diverse and predictable unrestricted and restricted program revenue are necessary to achieve all other goals.

6) Improve core infrastructure - Our people are our strongest resource, and the right staff and volunteers make Futures and Options successful. We need to recruit and retain the staff and volunteers needed to execute our work in all areas, and provide them with the right tools, training, and systems to accomplish their goals, ensure success of our strategic plan, and prepare for what’s to come.