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Growing Up: Organizational Milestones
We accomplished an important objective for any new non-profit when we filed our form 990 with the IRS in late December. This is a detailed annual report that discusses our financial results, governance policies and IRS compliance. As a public charity, this information is available to the general public for review. It can be accessed from our website here.
We are also pleased to add two new board members to our team. Pamela Ryder has been providing valuable insight and assistance to TeenForce since our inception, first as a customer with our LikeList project and later as a marketing advisor with our new standby service. We are pleased that she has joined our board of directors.
Sarah Johnston has also joined the board, bringing our total membership to five. Sarah is a CPA and has been advising us on various financial and organizational matters since our inception. It is due to her good advice and guidance that we were able to efficiently file the form 990 well ahead of the required deadline. You can read more about our entire board on our web site.
As further recognition of the importance of proper structure and oversight, we are also pleased that Sarah McCann has joined our team as Chief Financial Officer. Sarah is a volunteer and plays an important role by adding independence to our monthly financial closing process and general oversight of our accounting practices.
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Moving Ahead: Three Clear Strategies
Our business activities for the year will focus on three specific strategies, all underpinned by youth development and training programs.
- Part-time work opportunites for teens in the local community. The target is to help at least 75 teens with this program in 2011, up from 45 last year.
- Paid summer internship opportunities for older teens (17 - 20). These positions are more robust in terms of the hours and work duties. We would like to establish a minimum of 15 of these opportunities for this coming summer.
- We are partnering with a key employer and two youth-serving organizations to launch a pilot demonstration program to provide work experience for youth in foster care. There will be 10 part-time jobs in this program.
We will use upcoming issues of this newsletter to discuss each area in more detail. See the next section for an exciting step forward on the Summer Internship Program.
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Introducing our Director of Internship Development
We are thrilled to introduce Nancy Westreich, our new Director of Internship Development. Ms. Westreich will focus on developing and managing summer internships for graduating high school seniors, college sophomores and juniors. In addition, she will work with internship candidates to improve their work-ready skills such as resume preparation and interviewing.
Nancy has worked with teens and young adults in a career and counseling capacity for over ten years. For the last five years, she worked for the Marin County Office of Education, School to Career Partnership developing internships and career exploration activities at four high schools. Previous to this, she was the Director of Career and Internship Services at Dominican University of California, counseling students on career options, majors and supervising internships.
Nancy will bring proven experience and focus to the internship programand will be a big part of our success moving forward. If you are 17- 20 and looking for a summer internship or an employer who wants to find out more about our summer program, please contact Nancy Westreich at 408-827-3078 or nancywestreich@teenforce.org.
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-John Hogan
