ENGAGEMENT DESCRIPTION: EMMAUS SOCIAL SERVICES STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT 2001

Contact: Katherine Wertheim, Development Director, Emmaus Social Services for the Elderly, 5 Thomas Circle, NW, Washington, DC 20005: (202) 745-1200, ext. 13:

Introduction

The organization is 21 years old, and annually serves 500 senior citizens with in-home social services, counseling and assistance. Emmaus currently rents a small (1,100 square foot) office at 1615 M Street, NW which houses seven full time staff people. Emmaus’ budget of $373,000 has grown 250% overt the past five years. The 16-member Board of Directors has served for an average of seven years. The Executive Director Reverend Charlie Parker has served in this capacity for four years and the Director of Development, Katherine Wertheim, has raised money for Emmaus for five years.
Emmaus Services leadership and board of directors decided in 1998 to pursue a significant growth strategy. Fueled in large part by a $200,000 gift and an additional $300,000 in contributions, Emmaus purchased a building at 1424-26 9th Street, NW and is in the process of purchasing the adjacent building. This purchase represents a bold yet strategic move, to expand the Emmaus service capability to meet the growing and largely unmet needs for services among the target population in the lower-income sections of Washington, DC that Emmaus serves.

The current state of the organization can be described as solid, yet likely to be severely challenged by the expected growth. Emmaus will be managing real estate, yet does not currently have the organizational capacity to absorb the responsibilities of owning, renovating, leasing and managing significant parcels of real estate in a very low income, transitional neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Emmaus has seven committees on its Board. However, like most non-profit Boards, the dedicated members cannot devote the significant additional time to helping the organization grow as will be called for over the next two years. Emmaus could simply expand its board of directors, but it’s likely that this would not fill the need. Emmaus needs to create one or more Boards of Advisors (which would be a new model for us) and secure additional volunteer resources at the administrative and professional level to expand its services, operate its new office space, maintain quality and become the new social center for seniors that its new office space will enable it to be.

Emmaus now has resources available to it from many volunteer sources, as well as offers from local universities and businesses that it can not pursue due to lack of an organizational plan that would provide for meaningful direction, support and supervision over the efforts of these organizations. Emmaus needs to establish an organizational structure that makes sense for the new Emmaus, helping us offer expanded social services given our new space on-site to carry them out.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

TOPIC AREAS FOR THE MANAGEMENT ASSISTANCE PROGRAM:

1. Identify the skills needed of current professional staff to perform the jobs needed in the expanded Emmaus and secure training for current staff.
2. Identify a new organizational chart and reporting arrangements to allocate duties and responsibilities among key staff to foster accountability and measurement of staff productivity.
3. Identify the job positions that Emmaus will need to fill as it expands.
4. Establish an ongoing strategic planning system.
5. Create a “performance strategy system” to measure the quality and quantity of board members’ performance.
6. Establish a series of metrics for Emmaus’ performance to document the growth in numbers of seniors served and evaluate the satisfaction levels of those we serve.
7. Create and sustain an expanded “volunteer recruitment and training program” that will track the numbers of volunteers, track the number of volunteers who recommend others to volunteer, identify training needs of volunteers and secure pro bono instructors to train our volunteers in needed skills.
8. Improve the fund-raising performance of the organization.
9. Determine the income earning potential of Emmaus and create programs to earn money.
10. Expand the number of strategic alliances.

KEY PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

• Reverend Charles A. Parker oversees operations as the Executive Director. He has been with Emmaus over three years, having served previously as Executive Director at Bread for the City for over six years.
• Mark Andersen is our Outreach Coordinator, helping us find new seniors to serve, having served previously on both the staffs of Emmaus and C. A. R. E. (with whom we merged). Mark has received acclaim in the Washington Post as a co-founder of Positive Force, a group of young people which works to raise money and consciousness on poverty issues.
• Karen Currie is our Advocacy Coordinator. She is joining us after ten years at Iona Senior Services, and is our first staff member with a M. S. W.
• Ilethia Moore has been at Emmaus since 1996 after eight years at Bread for the City. She works as administrative coordinator and directly with seniors, and has extensive knowledge of the neighborhood.
• G. Peggy Parker is our Volunteer Coordinator, having joined us in 1998 after 13 years at Bread for the City. She is our first full-time volunteer coordinator in several years.
• Katherine Wertheim joined us as Development Director last year, after four years as our fund-raising consultant. In that time, she used three years of Meyer Foundation grants given specifically for fund raising to quadruple the number of donors while increasing the revenues from $150,000 to $373,000. As a consultant, her other clients have included Bread for the City, Zacchaeus Free Clinic, HIPS: Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, Paradise Builders and EFFORTS (all funded by the Meyer Foundation).

EXPECTED PROJECT IMPACT

Increased organizational capacity through new job descriptions, new training and identifying in advance the key roles that will need to be mastered as Emmaus expands.

Improved recruiting and retention of employees through better advance planning, higher job satisfaction levels and clearer scope of responsibility for each employee and manager.

Improvement in customer satisfaction through incorporating this key element in the new, enhanced strategic planning process.

Increased economic stability through increasing the sources of revenue, undertaking entrepreneurial activities to generate revenue, improved cash flow.

LEARNING AND EVALUATION

Each employee will be asked to write weekly or monthly “best practices” or “lessons learned” from this management assistance project. These reports will be circulated to each employee and maintained electronically and in paper form. These documents will be available to each new hire and volunteers and will form part of the increased training and human capital enhancement process that will occur through this project.

Evaluation-A person will be designated as the Chief Evaluation Officer who will monitor the process and report to the Executive Director of the beneficial and not successful aspects of the project. The Chief Evaluation Officer will write a monthly report that will be circulated to the Board.

The Chief Evaluation Officer will also be responsible for making sure that after the consultant is finished with the project that Emmaus can continue the aspects of the plan that are working and that Emmaus staff are trained to keep the strategic planning and organizational development improvements moving forward. There is a start date and end date to the process. The Chief Evaluation Officer will document the history of the project as described in Breakthrough, Inc. – High Growth Strategies for Entrepreneurial Organizations which will serve as a key reference guide to this management assistance project.

CONSULTANT SELECTION PROCESS

Emmaus has access to a large pool of potential consultants. Emmaus has held a series of discussions with Herbert Rubenstein, Founder and CEO of Growth Strategies, Inc. over the past ten months. Mr. Rubenstein was recommended to the Executive Director by a member of our Board of Directors.
Herb Rubenstein Consulting is a consulting firm with offices in Washington, D.C. and Austin, Texas. It has worked with numerous non-profits and its founder is the co-author of Breakthrough, Inc. -High Growth Strategies for Entrepreneurial Organizations (Prentice Hall/Financial Times Management, 1999) and former board member of numerous successful non-profits.

Mr. Rubenstein was referred to us by one of our board members. We approached Mr. Rubenstein and his consulting firm and requested that they consider assisting Emmaus on a reduced fee basis. The company agreed and was selected for this project due to its expertise, its understanding and support of our mission, its experience in developing and monitoring numerical performance objectives and outcomes and its strong focus on employee training, development and involvement in the strategic planning process.

CONSULTANT’S EXPERIENCE AND WORK PLAN

Attached is a document, Partnership for Growth in a New Era, that provides information about the company. Additional materials are available upon request as are references. Mr. Rubenstein is the former Chairman of the Board of the Jeleff Boys and Girls Clubs, has served on numerous other non-profit boards, is a lawyer licensed to practice in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, is listed in Who’s Who Among Outstanding Americans and served in the following employment positions:

1976-National Academy of Sciences-Research Associate

1977-1980-American Institutes for Research-Senior Research Associate

1980-1983-U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services-Senior Policy Analyst, Welfare Reform

1983-1997-Lawyer in Private Practice

1997-1999-CEO, Herb Rubenstein Consulting.

Mr. Rubenstein is a Phi Beta Kappa Graduate of Washington and Lee University, a recipient of the Rotary Foundation Scholarship for Graduate Study Abroad where he received a Diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Bristol, earned a Masters in Public Affairs degree from the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin and received his law degree from Georgetown University.

The work plan calls for the consultant to prepare specific documents and to explain all key strategies to the staff and the Board and to facilitate the
organizational learning on how to accomplish each of these activities in the future on their own. The consultant will hold weekly meetings with the staff and will facilitate a full day Board retreat during the last quarter of the project. Board members will be invited to attend the staff/consultant meetings and consultants will discuss progress on the project on a regular basis with the chairman of the board and his designate. Emmaus staff and Board will have access to the writings of the Company on such issues as Board Selection, Change Management, Personal Coaching, Book Reviews prepared by Herb Rubenstein Consulting staff and other documents. Herb Rubenstein Consulting will make an electronic copy of each document available to Emmaus. The book, Breakthrough, Inc. is available starting October 1, 1999 from all bookstores.

back