Challenging Narratives of Poverty
Often, nonprofit organizations can make a mistake of assuming that the people touched by its programs and services are monolithic, with uniform needs and prefereces. There is a long standing narrative that assumes the poor are the poor, with little recognition of the differences between individuals.
We were hired by Capital Partners for Education (CPE) to conduct a limited, four-week long research initiative designed to "test" these assumptions.
CPE is the only youth organization in the Washington Metropolitan area that provides students with a combination of private high school scholarships, adult mentors, and academic support and enrichment opportunities. The organization's reputation is built on the success of its placement services and placing students in high schools where they are likely to fail could have a devastating effect on the organization's reputation and the viability of its programs. Assuming all poor kids are alike is a decision that fails our children.
Our research initiative was designed to provide CPE with an outside look at some of the trends and facts associated with its student-mentoring program. We developed a customized data worksheet to tease out some of the data we believed would be important in our effort to identify trends and facts associated with CPE’s students and families. We asked CPE to provide us with data on a number of variables: student achievement, student’s code, annual household income, type of caregiver in the home, number of adults in the home, parent or guardian’s level of involvement with CPE, and parent or guardian’s level of involvement in the student’s school.
In addition to the data on the students and their families, we also designed a customized online survey for all 110 CPE mentors. We asked mentors a number of questions, including: why they chose to become a mentor, whether they have ever been a mentor before, and what kinds of support services they would like to see from CPE. We also devised an innovative way to test the relative “attractiveness” of roughly 10 different mentor enrichment activities designed specifically by CPE’s staff for the survey. We tested the attractiveness of things such as monthly outings with other mentor-mentee pairs, tips on how to help mentees resolve conflicts, and strategies on how to deal with an unresponsive mentee.
The results of our research helped CPE better understand the needs and preferences of its students and mentors. More importantly, we helped the leadership devise cost-effective ways to improve student-mentor pairing, as well as to enhance its support services for mentors.
