I am a co-founder, CEO and President of BroadFutures, a young Washington D.C. based non-profit revolutionizing the way young people with learning disabilities enter the workforce. We utilize an innovative training, mentoring and paid internship program to maximize the inherent potential of the young people we serve. We have been running programs for 4 years, and working with Omnicor for a little over a year. We were first introduced to Omnicor and the Rolefit platform through our wonderful Atlas Corps Fellow, Nyasha Chibanda. Nyasha had worked closely with Omnicor while working at The Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.

BroadFutures has a need for robust tracking of our program participants’ success during our program, their abilities and attitudes towards their futures, as well as feedback on the overall effectiveness of our program from a myriad of stakeholder group. This information is tracked on a weekly basis, pre and post program. We had previously used a fairly crude and archaic method of assessment and tracking, employing a combination of Word documents and a Google Drive platform. Our previous method was exceedingly time consuming, resulting in unacceptable margins of user error, and a poor level of compliance or willingness to participate in the process. As we strategized taking our model to scale, it became apparent that we needed a data platform to allow us to build for our vision. Nyasha helped us research for an acceptable platform here in the United States for that would combine user-friendly data management with customized psychometric tools and exercises. We were not able to find anything here into the States. However at Omnicor and with the Rolefit platform, in collaboration with the wonderful expertise of Hilton Rudnick and Yusuf Moola, we were able to build a perfect system for BroadFutures. The Omncior team was both inspired by our mission and wholly open to customizing their tools and platforms to meet the needs of our small, yet data intensive operation. The system we now have allows us to administer our pre and post program assessments, as well as provide for meaningful ongoing feedback and assessment from our stakeholder groups during our program. The result has been a significant reduction in the amount of staff time on the data collection, more complete and comprehension feedback, and the ability for us to be nimble and responsive to where we are excelling and where we need to focus more efforts. Of course, the most important outcome of our partnership with Omnicor is that it has allowed us to spend less time with the machine and more time with the young people we serve, thereby impacting their chances for successful and promising futures. Thank you Omnicor!! We are still hopeful we can find the funds someday to take our field trip to South Africa to meet all who have helped us in person.

Guest Author: Carolyn Jeppsen

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If you would like to find out more about BroadFutures, please visit us at www.broadfutures.orgwww.facebook.com/broadfutureswww.twitter.com/broadfutures.