End of Year Letter From New Profit Founder Vanessa Kirsch

“ Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.” – Jim Collins
The past year has been a profound learning experience and inflection point for the New Profit community for two reasons. First, the strands of our nearly 20 years of hard work with social entrepreneurs and other partners began to pull together, presenting a clearer vision of what impact we are driving and where we must go in the future. And second, America received a jolting wake-up call from the 2016 Presidential election.
We are still thinking through what all of this means, but the overarching call to action isn’t in doubt: we must remain committed to our founding vision of a entrepreneurial movement driving change in philanthropy, and push harder than ever to advance our mission of breaking down barriers between people and opportunity in America.
Over the next year, leading up to New Profit’s 20th anniversary in 2018, we are going to be sharing New Profit’s evolving impact story with you, our supporters and partners, and the broader social impact sector, in new ways. We begin in this report with the story of the Pathways Fund, which shows how we’ve built upon our core approach of investing in visionary social entrepreneurs to open up new avenues to systemic impact.
The seed of Pathways was planted with the growth capital and capacity building investments we made in three organizations – College Summit, Year Up, and iMentor – starting in 2002. Through these partnerships, we learned that focusing separately on investments in college access, college success, and workforce development for low-income young people was not enough. We had to look at pathways to and through college and into careers as a continuum. In 2010, we partnered with the federal Social Innovation Fund and an extraordinary group of co-funders to powerfully advance this idea by scaling the impact of, and helping foster collaboration between, the organizations above, as well as Single Stop, YouthBuild USA, and College Advising Corps.
After five years of hard work, we can celebrate the impact of Pathways on a number of different levels:
- The six Pathways organizations were able to collectively double the number of young people they reach to more than 400,000 and expand their operations into 35 new communities across America;
- 25+ national collaborations emerged among the Pathways organizations that strengthened their ability to better meet the needs of the individuals and communities; and,
- The initiative also led us to strengthen New Profit’s measurement and evaluation approach and inspired the creation of our Focus Funds.
The story of Pathways doesn’t stop there. J.B. Schramm, the founder of Pathways partner College Summit, joined New Profit in 2014 to launch one of those funds, the Learn To Earn Fund, which advances the Pathways vision through new strategies, including investing in workforce development technology, collaborating more deeply with large employers, and, ultimately, reaching young people for whom college may not be a viable waypoint. With the backing of some of America’s most forward-thinking foundations, the Learn to Earn Fund is working with the XPrize Foundation to design a transformative competition to spark innovation in the field.
That brings us back to the 2016 Presidential election and the critical importance of our work moving forward. Like many across the country and in every sector, we’re taking new measure of suffering and systemic failure, particularly outside the urban areas that have long been the focus our investments. People who voted and people who didn’t – from across ideological, demographic, and geographic boundaries – share an essential frustration about stagnation, lack of opportunity and accountability, and the fact that they aren’t sharing in the spoils of the new economy. They called for disruption in a variety of ways, including some that we find abhorrent and unacceptable.
New Profit was founded in 1998 based on deep concerns about opportunity divides and a conviction that we can do better. From the beginning, we sought to answer those concerns by drawing lessons from the private sector to find and scale the best social innovations. The Pathways story shows our original vision in action. It also shows how we built on that vision as we learned more fully what it takes to unleash innovation and entrepreneurship in the social sector. Today, Pathways organizations are leading the charge on systems change, driving the college-to-career success field forward. And the solutions that are being tested in the Learn to Earn Fund, and in other initiatives that you’ll read about in the pages ahead, have the potential to go beyond demographic and geographic boundaries to change the lives of millions of people.
Our challenge is to stay committed, engaged, and most of all, together. As our Board Chairman, Jeff Walker, has so often said, it takes an ensemble, not a soloist, to solve a complex problem and change a system. The New Profit community is unique in its willingness to take chances on new people and solutions, do the hard capacity building work that is necessary for the social impact sector to flourish, engage in the policy sphere, and collaborate across sectors to advance our mission.
Thank you for your support and partnership.
Vanessa Kirsch, Founder & CEO