Lions Heart- Teen Volunteers and Leaders
Teen Volunteers and Leaders
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
We continue to hear time and again from parents that they want their teens to develop empathy by having meaningful extracurricular activities that expand their world view. In turn, teens want to have the ability to make a powerful impact on their communities while also achieving their personal goals. In today’s world where the average teen spends about a third of their day connected to a media device, Lion’s Heart strives to banish apathy and connect young people with unique experiences that carry purpose and spark innovation. We’ve created a custom digital platform that allows teens to track their service participation, earn awards/scholarships, and interact with peers and mentors. Furthermore, the Lion’s Heart Teen Leadership Quest will provide teens with enriching extra-curricular experiences that will enhance their studies and personal growth. Many teens have the desire to make a difference but need support in realizing their vision.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Lion's Heart Teen Leadership Quest
The Lion’s Heart Teen Volunteer Leadership Quest is a three-tiered digital curriculum for teens that focuses on building positive personal, group, and societal leadership skills. Funding for this area would support production of the digital courses, printing of supplemental learning materials, course facilitator trainings, and partnerships with educational advisors.
Lion's Heart Teen Volunteers
We are Lion’s Heart: teens dedicated to positive social impact. Our volunteer program connects 6th-12th grade students with local service opportunities that help them build a strong community service portfolio. Through our digital platform, teens can track their service hours, earn leadership awards, and export a copy of their service portfolio to use on scholarship, college, and career applications. We are nearly 10,000 Members strong with new chapters forming every day across the United States! Our teen members are the heart and soul of our organization and the ability for us to connect them with community service opportunities is paramount to our core operation
Where we work
Awards
Affiliations & memberships
Points of Light Foundation, Service Enterprise Initiative 2016
External reviews
Photos
Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Number of volunteers
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Children and youth
Related Program
Lion's Heart Teen Volunteers
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
These numbers represent all of the adult volunteers who help make Lion's Heart possible.
Number of youth who volunteer/participate in community service
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Children and youth
Related Program
Lion's Heart Teen Leadership Quest
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
These are our teen members - the total active member count at the end of each year. This does not count members who have left the program or have graduated high school.
Our Sustainable Development Goals
Learn more about Sustainable Development Goals.
Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
1. Increase the number of teen members who join Lion's Heart by 30% each year. Our goals are to engage as many teens as possible to volunteer in their community to learn leadership skills, to develop empathy and compassion, and to realize volunteering is a life-long endeavor.
2. Maintain the 90% retention rate of current, non-graduating members.
3. Raise the average volunteer hours from 53 to 56 hours per year.
4. Lion's Heart welcomes underserved teens by providing scholarships to give additional support to underprivileged members, bridging the resources they may otherwise lack to engage in service learning.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
1. To engage as many teens as possible to serve the community through Lion's Heart we utilize target marketing resources to inspire students and parent to join us.
2. We maintain and strive to improve a high retention rate among our current members because we provide our members with meaningful, appropriate volunteer opportunities, leadership training and tools, and college scholarship opportunities.
3. To raise the average hours from 53 to 56, we are increasing the number of the volunteer opportunities we provide. We have a part time volunteer who manages in-coming requests from existing non-profits and schools who need help from our teen members, and strive to connect with non-profits and schools in areas where new chapters are created. Our plan is to advance this position to a paid, full-time position so that we can obtain the greatest number of volunteer opportunities for members in all chapters.
4. Lion's Heart is an inclusive organization that supports all teens who aspire to volunteer and lead. We award need-based scholarships to students whose families cannot afford Lion's Heart's enrollment fees. Our outreach efforts have increased our underserved student population from 4% to 10% of our base, year-over-year. Scholarships are just the first step. Members need enhanced services to fully support their communities, and become better prepared for college and employment.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
1. Lion's Heart employs a full time, paid Digital Marketing Manager who uses all social media platforms, but specifically advertises on Facebook and Teen Life. Digital flyers are sent to the middle and high schools, then email marketing campaigns reach out to those who are interested. Lion's Heart also employs a full-time, paid Membership Coordinator who communicates through phone, chat, webinars, and informational meetings.
2. We work with a development team that constantly upgrades our platform so that we may offer benefits to our members. New for 2016 is the sharable volunteer digital portfolio. Later this year, we plan to offer email preferences. Because we count on member referrals and enjoy a high retention rate, we are always thinking of better ways to make volunteering easy and meaningful!
3. We are addressing improvements in our technology to make the job of Volunteer Outreach Chairman more efficient so that specific volunteer opportunities reach the members who want to volunteer in specific sectors (military, homeless, etc.), and avoid sending opportunities they do not want. We are also improving our technology to provide push notifications so that our members know immediately when an opportunity comes to us. Lastly, our long-term goal is to create geofencing so that non-profit organizations and their volunteer opportunities can appear when our teen members are nearby because we know teens and their phones are never far apart.
4. Helping students build an affinity for, and connection with, causes in their community is a cornerstone of Lion's Heart's mission. We have 12 years of data demonstrating that when students are given opportunities to volunteer, they can select causes that are important to them, volunteer alongside peers, and maintain an 85% - 90% retention rate in the program. Members remain in Lion's Heart for 4.7 years, on average. While Lion's Heart requires 25 hours/year of service for a member to stay active in the program, the average is 53 hours/year. Our data shows underserved members are not as engaged as our general population based on volunteer time, retention, and eligible awards. Teen Members need adults (typically parents) to help coordinate and transport them to Lion's Heart provided volunteer opportunities. We're building the program to supplement the adult support available in underserved households.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
1. We have continued to build on our strong organic referral network. We have not found an alternative channel independent of our referral network to scale the organization beyond our 30% trailing growth rate.
2. The most common reasons members leave our organization are unfilled required hours and missed meetings. We are already addressing the need for more volunteer opportunities, but now are looking at ways to have our members attend some meetings virtually or online.
3. Currently our members average 26 more hours than the required 25 hours - which is already impressive. What we haven't accomplished, but part of our strategic plan, includes an investment in technology, specifically notifications to mobile devices.
4. We are initiating more outreach in underserved areas, and anticipate that requests will increase as we expand and diversify. In addition to scholarships, we've allowed for flexible meeting times, easily accessible meeting locations, and group composition. These efforts are a good start but not enough for underprivileged members to be successful in Lion's Heart. We've observed that these students lack the logistical support to volunteer on a regular basis. Scholarship students are also less likely to remain in the programs, or qualify for national awards or scholarships. We are dedicating our internal resources, partner collaborations, and Script Flip to designing the program so that underprivileged students will have the same opportunities to volunteer, earn awards and recognition, qualify for scholarships, and become college and career ready.
How we listen
Seeking feedback from people served makes programs more responsive and effective. Here’s how this organization is listening.
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How is your organization using feedback from the people you serve?
To identify and remedy poor client service experiences, To identify bright spots and enhance positive service experiences, To make fundamental changes to our programs and/or operations, To inform the development of new programs/projects, To identify where we are less inclusive or equitable across demographic groups, To strengthen relationships with the people we serve, To understand people's needs and how we can help them achieve their goals
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Which of the following feedback practices does your organization routinely carry out?
We collect feedback from the people we serve at least annually, We take steps to get feedback from marginalized or under-represented people, We aim to collect feedback from as many people we serve as possible, We take steps to ensure people feel comfortable being honest with us, We look for patterns in feedback based on demographics (e.g., race, age, gender, etc.), We look for patterns in feedback based on people’s interactions with us (e.g., site, frequency of service, etc.), We engage the people who provide feedback in looking for ways we can improve in response, We act on the feedback we receive, We share the feedback we received with the people we serve, We tell the people who gave us feedback how we acted on their feedback, We ask the people who gave us feedback how well they think we responded
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What challenges does the organization face when collecting feedback?
Staff find it hard to prioritize feedback collection and review due to lack of time, It is difficult to get honest feedback from the people we serve, It is difficult to identify actionable feedback
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
Lions Heart- Teen Volunteers and Leaders
Board of directorsas of 09/19/2023
Jim Bastian
Shulman, Bastian, Friedman & Bui LLP
Term: 2018 -
Jim Bastian
Shulman, Bastian, Friedman & Bui
Clay Corwin
Stonecreek Company
Terry Corwin
Community Volunteer
Glenn Llopis
Glenn Llopis Group
Neeraj Sharma
James Kieckhafer
Veronica Carpenter
Cal Optima
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? No -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Yes
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Candid partnered with CHANGE Philanthropy on this demographic section.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
Gender identity
Transgender Identity
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data
Equity strategies
Last updated: 08/18/2020GuideStar partnered with Equity in the Center - an organization that works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems to increase racial equity - to create this section. Learn more
- We review compensation data across the organization (and by staff levels) to identify disparities by race.
- We ask team members to identify racial disparities in their programs and / or portfolios.
- We analyze disaggregated data and root causes of race disparities that impact the organization's programs, portfolios, and the populations served.
- We disaggregate data to adjust programming goals to keep pace with changing needs of the communities we support.
- We employ non-traditional ways of gathering feedback on programs and trainings, which may include interviews, roundtables, and external reviews with/by community stakeholders.
- We disaggregate data by demographics, including race, in every policy and program measured.
- We have long-term strategic plans and measurable goals for creating a culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.
- We use a vetting process to identify vendors and partners that share our commitment to race equity.
- We have a promotion process that anticipates and mitigates implicit and explicit biases about people of color serving in leadership positions.
- We seek individuals from various race backgrounds for board and executive director/CEO positions within our organization.
- We have community representation at the board level, either on the board itself or through a community advisory board.
- We help senior leadership understand how to be inclusive leaders with learning approaches that emphasize reflection, iteration, and adaptability.
- We measure and then disaggregate job satisfaction and retention data by race, function, level, and/or team.
- We engage everyone, from the board to staff levels of the organization, in race equity work and ensure that individuals understand their roles in creating culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.