Elevate To Even Plus Incorporated

Eleven+ seeks to disrupt systemic inequality by providing underserved students with access to transformative, paid internship experiences that get them to even and beyond.

We will scale our impact by identifying new talent pools of qualifying smart, motivated students to participate in our internship program. We will expand our portfolio of partnering organizations to host internships. We will increase our funding through an expanded donor reach, increased grant awards, corporate sponsorship, and new, revenue-creating programming.

Goal: Place 75 students into meaningful, paid summer internships in 2023
Goal: Scale our programs in NJ, CT, OH, and CA, with an emphasis on increasing our presence in CA, our smallest program location in 2022
Goal: Raise funds and generate income to support funding requirement, growing the percentage of support from grants to 50% of total income.

Additionally, we will expand our enrichment programming to include: a training module on workplace communication, facilitated expectation setting sessions for interns and host mentors at the onset of the summer jobs, provide best practice guidance to mentors, expand our role model speaker series for interns to hear from accomplished people from similar backgrounds (3 in '22, a goal of 5 in '23), further expand our networking sessions and professional headshot programs., and implement an end of summer training module on transferring acquired skills to ones resume and LinkedIn profile.

Eleven+ programing prepared underserved students for greater post-graduation success by providing access to experiences that build skills, relationships, and self-belief. It is reasonable to expect that program alumni will land jobs fast and at higher rates of pay than their immediate peer groups.

Eleven+ programming creates capacity for the partnering organizations that employ Eleven+ interns. This helps them advance important initiatives and projects with resources to which they wouldn't otherwise have access. In turn, this helps them increase the impact they're making to the communities where the operate.

By focusing on low-income students of color, we're leveling the playing field and providing access to opportunities that create economic and social equality. This also helps to pull the participating students out of poverty while helping them access decent work and economic growth, in turn supporting economic growth of the communities where they live.

Our greatest asset is the partnership network we have established to match students with opportunities.

As we capture the evidence of program success, we're better positioned to attract donors and grant money.

Additionally, our secondary model of providing access to diverse talent for corporations, which in turn will provide Eleven+ with administration fees, gives us additional income that can be redirected back into our programming, helping us to become more scalable and more sustainable.

Finally, our program director brings years of experience managing internship programs for university career development departments, helping us to operate effectively as we grow.

As a young organization with outsized ambition, we are proud of our growth and accomplishments. In 2022, we increased our intern population by over 300% and expanded from one market to four.

Although we had identified over 85 opportunities for students, we filled only half of these. In 2023, we are focussing on filling more positions by employing a variety of different strategies: improving our position descriptions to emphasize the skills each job can develop, start the recruiting process earlier, and increase our hourly wage from $15/hour to $17.50/hour. With these changes, we have set a goal to fill 75 internships in 2023 across each of our existing markets.