Catalyst Fund Grantees

In 2015, ARC, Stockton Arts Centre (ARC) in Northeastern England became the first organization to implement a full season of Pay What You Decide (PWYD) performances, where tickets were not sold for the shows, only free reservations were made. Theatre-goers were given the opportunity to decide after the show what they wanted to pay for the experience. This differs from the popular Pay What You Can model which requires audience members pay as they enter. Initial results have shown an increase in new and returning audiences—something that is particularly difficult for companies focused on performing experimental work. Following in the footsteps of ARC, Azuka Theatre will launch a two-year PWYD pilot beginning with its 2016-2017 season–the first of its kind in the U.S. During the pilot, Azuka will gather data on audiences to see if they are able to maintain box office earnings while encouraging attendance by new audiences who might otherwise avoid new productions due to cost or lack of familiarity with offerings. Lessons learned will be shared with the arts community informing how similar arts organizations might use this model to support their work.

Abington Art Center has served as a traditional community arts center in Montgomery County for over 75 years. Building on its recent designation as a Penn State Invent Center and increasing demand for creative engagement and makerspace-oriented arts programming, they have identified a need for significant adaptation. The Center will rethink, retool and evolve its space and business model to meet the needs of changing audiences by forging creative partnerships and learning from peer urban organizations who are embracing technology, entrepreneurship and imaginative programming. If the Center can successfully make this shift, they can become a richer resource for their community and serve as a model for other suburban arts centers as they consider how evolve in a changing arts and education environment.

The Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia (Law Center) has an illustrious history of ensuring vulnerable populations have access to fundamental resources, particularly special education. Like many legal services agencies, the Law Center possesses deep knowledge in a specialized area of the law that is of interest to varied constituencies (parents, educators, lawyers, social workers, etc.). However, they do not have the resources to create a training delivery model that is self-sustaining. To do so requires understanding marketing, event planning and curriculum development—all areas that are outside the mission of a legal services organization. Further, the training they conduct is not like traditional legal training geared towards attorneys—it is meant to bring the range of constituencies together to build networks and understanding, making it different from other legal education providers. The Law Center proposes creating a separate entity to further their mission of delivering specialized information to the widest audience possible. To do this, the Center hopes to further its mission while creating a stronger business model. As a social enterprise of this type is a new approach for a legal service agency, but one that others could emulate, the research into the viability of this model can serve to inform this sector.

Through “Symphony for a Broken Orchestra,” Temple Contemporary seeks to answer the question “How can we get more music back into the schools?” in a creative, sustainable way. In support of and in partnership with The School District of Philadelphia (District), this project will teach music teachers in the District how to repair some of the District’s 1,500 broken musical instruments, returning them to the classroom and the hands of children. How-to videos will be created and music repair kits will be provided to all District schools with music programs. Opportunities will also be provided for the public to learn more about the District’s music programs and instrument repair. The program has the potential to spark a chain reaction in other cities facing financial challenges in providing music education by creating a low-cost, replicable, school-centered and sustainable model.

Private insurers are increasingly motivated to pay for services that improve health outcomes and ultimately decrease costs. Through an independent evaluation, MANNA has demonstrated that its medically appropriate meals and nutrition counseling create such cost savings. Through partnerships with organizations such as Health Partners Plans, a managed care organization, MANNA will be able to receive reimbursement for the cost of their services. Such partnerships have the potential to transform MANNA’s business model and dramatically increase its impact in the next five years. Funding will allow MANNA to modernize its in-house data collection systems, enabling them to monitor, improve and communicate the quality of their services to private insurers—a new market of institutional customers and an accompanying stream of revenue.

While the number of K-12 schools adopting innovative approaches to education continue to expand, training for teachers in these methodologies has not kept up. In collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Drexel University School of Education, The School District of Philadelphia will design and pilot a program for training pre-service teachers which aligns with the varied modes of learning now being offered in schools. The program will leverage Penn and Drexel’s deep expertise while supporting the District’s development of creative new approaches to education. The project has the potential to inform how other schools of education partner with school districts.

Tiny WPA’s Building Hero Project provides design, leadership and entrepreneurship skills to individuals ages 16 and up who want to be part of a diverse community of civic change agents. The Project harnesses the enthusiasm of those interested in the maker movement by providing deeper learning and connections to a trade. The Project centers on an 8-week training program where participants acquire the design and fabrication skills needed to create products and the know-how to undertake neighborhood revitalization and design-build improvement projects for the community. Using lessons learned from national models, Tiny WPA will build the Project into a sustainable social enterprise that provides fabrication services by Building Heroes to the design and manufacturing sector.

Panhandling is an age-old and complex challenge faced by cities worldwide, but the founders of StreetChange believe that technology could provide new solutions that benefit everyone. In partnership with the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania (MHASP), StreetChange will use mobile technology, e-commerce and Bluetooth technology to incentivize Philadelphians who are both homeless and panhandling to visit or return to social services. StreetChange will also provide pedestrians with a modern and simple way to make donations and ensure that their generosity has a positive impact. By facilitating beneficial transactions between homeless individuals and the pedestrians and social services organizations wishing to assist them, this solution has the potential to positively impact the way cities address panhandling nationwide.

Update: Led by its Founder Andrew Siegel and Managing Partner Dan Treglia, StreetChange has taken major strides since it received its first funding, from Barra, in December 2015. In addition to completing the app’s development and launching their website, StreetChange has conducted a beta test with support from Mental Health Association of Southeastern PA, which informed improvements to the app and helped them strengthen proposals to funders, investors and partners. They have engaged critical stakeholders including the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services and Center City District and have begun meetings with other homeless services providers to understand how the platform could provide greater value to this group. They have also received strong media coverage, including several local publications and a video produced by Verizon and Upworthy that has been viewed more than 3.5 million times. StreetChange is in the process of developing a business plan, including formalizing partnerships with providers. StreetChange is seeking funders and investors so that it can build its team and launch the app in summer of 2017.

Healthy Rowhouse Project, a collaborative hosted by the Center for Architecture, aims to tackle the barriers preventing Philadelphia from repairing rowhouses at scale in order to improve the health of residents and preserve critical affordable housing. They aim to improve 5,000 houses per year—thousands more homes than any other U.S. city has been able to repair—at an average cost of $10,000 per home. Building from their preliminary research and with the support of their multi-disciplinary coalition, in the next two years Healthy Rowhouse Project will develop a new home repair infrastructure, including an organized network of service delivery partners, new program designs and creative financing for property owners and investors. This grant was originally made to the Center for Architecture, the initial fiscal sponsor of Healthy Rowhouse Project, but was transferred to Clarifi, Inc. when the project relocated.

Cultural organizations regularly collect data around their work, however, due to an ongoing capacity gap in terms of knowledge, skills and resources, they often do not effectively use this information to tell their story and analyze their work. DataArts will integrate an online, on-demand educational curriculum designed to build arts professionals’ data fluency into its well-established and widely-used data gathering platform. By providing this information and training across the cultural sector, the curriculum has the potential to significantly influence and improve how arts professionals do their work.

Northeast Philadelphia is a rapidly changing community and its neighborhood high school, Northeast High School (NEHS), is a unique microcosm of the growing diversity. NEHS is the largest public school in Philadelphia and one of the most diverse high schools in the nation, serving over 3,000 students, with 56 languages spoken and 750 English as a second language students. Currently, there are few opportunities for channeling this level of diversity in positive ways. Al-Bustan will engage NEHS students, parents, faculty and staff in a multi-faceted arts program that will use deep exploration of cultural identity and connectedness to further important conversations about diversity at NEHS and in other schools and neighborhoods. This work has the potential to promote understanding of and have a deep impact on communities that are often overlooked and, therefore, misunderstood.

Based on evidence that demonstrates teacher effectiveness is the most important factor in student success, Jounce Partners seeks to improve student learning through a new model of professional skills development for educators that provides targeted support and an easy to follow structure. Jounce Partners will further develop its unique school leader and teacher coaching model that employs extremely high-frequency feedback, high-repetition practice of key teaching skills, and very specific criteria for execution of those skills.

Inglis has designed a new service delivery model called LIFE that will enable their clients with significant disabilities to live more independently in a community setting, rather than in an institutional environment. The LIFE center will be in the new complex and will offer enhanced medical services, adapted computing, education and other opportunities for community engagement. To implement the LIFE program and support the transition of residents from Inglis and other nursing homes into a newly constructed community facility, Inglis plans to employ Pay for Success (PFS) financing, an emerging social finance tool. The grant will support Inglis’ efforts to hire experienced consultants to oversee the PFS initiative’s implementation, including deal structuring and evaluation.

Philadelphia has a rich cultural sector that provides informal educational opportunities for youth. These are often disconnected from the needs of the city’s schools. The Greater Philadelphia STEAM Initiative will explore how to bring together the cultural and education sectors to facilitate a more robust and academically purposeful relationship between the two sectors to create an integrated STEAM curriculum. A planning process that engages key stakeholders from each sector will aim to determine how to leverage the valuable programs of the cultural community to better support schools. If planning efforts are successful, subsequent phases of the Initiative will include creating a full curriculum and piloting it in three high schools.

Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, led by two Echoing Green fellows, will achieve shorter and fairer sentences for youth facing adult criminal charges through their innovative sentencing advocacy intervention. Their long-term goal is to use their experience and evidence to inform efforts to change how the city and state’s adult criminal justice systems treat children, by humanizing the sentencing process for youth.

Through HandCrafted, The Clay Studio will use collaborative, low-commitment, social experiences to acquaint new audiences with their work and highlight how ceramic art is part of day-to-day life. This creative approach to audience engagement provides an accessible entry point for new visitors to learn more about a typically niche art form and is a gateway to expanded opportunities like workshops and collecting. HandCrafted will be replicable by organizations looking to creatively link art and experiences.

Open Source, a project of Mural Arts Advocates, will consider Philadelphia’s diverse urban identity through the works of 14 artists from around the world. These artists will work within the community to broaden the conversation around topics including mass incarceration, education, youth development and economic challenges. The project will culminate in a series of talks, tours, visual documentation and direct engagement with the artists in October 2015. These forums will provide an opportunity for Open Source to spur dialogue and catalyze social change.

Philadelphia Young Playwrights will undertake the 1219 Vine Project to activate new levels of partnership with the Asian Arts Initiative and Mural Arts Program to create a model for deep and lasting collaborative work. The project harnesses the momentum of transformation in the Chinatown North neighborhood and will culminate in one or more community-centered events and/or artistic works. By integrating their resources and skills for the purposes of the project, a model for collaborative practice may be established that can be adopted and adapted by other organizations nationwide and inspire innovative thinking around other creative placemaking efforts.

There is currently no system in place to help staff of charitable organizations provide furniture to homeless clients who are moving into new homes. Searching for and delivering low-cost or free furniture creates a bottleneck in housing placements and prolongs the time that people live in an emergency shelter or temporary housing. For hundreds of nonprofit organizations, this approach costs precious staff time and scarce resources. To solve this problem, Pathways to Housing PA and its partners will launch a large-scale, tech-savvy system to redistribute cast-off furnishings at no cost to families and individuals in need: Philadelphia Furniture Bank.

Habitat for Humanity ReStore sells new and gently used donated building supplies and home goods to the public. 850 ReStores across the U.S. generated $89 million in net profits in 2013, covering the costs of 898 Habitat homes. Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia’s ReStore offers a unique and significant opportunity for the organization to increase revenue and, in turn, build and repair more homes for Philadelphians living in poverty. Despite a strong business model and success in other cities, the local ReStore has struggled financially.  Determined to diagnose the problem and turn the fledging business around, Habitat enlisted professional counsel on retail management and real estate and determined that the store’s location was dramatically hindering its potential. The Barra grant will allow Habitat to relocate their enterprise to a competitive new location, deliver improved marketing, and secure the financial strategy services of Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Bethesda Project is developing a new model of care for chronically homeless individuals, Bethesda Beacon. Their goal is to make available within one building a seamless process for people to transition from living on the streets, to engaging in social services, to receiving and recovering from medical care, to living in permanent housing. The “step-up” model includes a welcoming café, medical respite care for 30 people and 50 units of permanent housing—all under one roof. The Barra grant will support Bethesda Project’s first phase of planning, which includes examination of the design’s feasibility and financial sustainability.

PhillyGoes2College, a project of The Mayor’s Office of Education, launched Connect2College (C2C), an initiative featuring a web-based app and text messaging tool that provide users with college access information. The online and mobile tools supplement and enhance C2C’s work with community-based organizations to provide on-site college planning information. This new approach utilizes scarce resources more efficiently to provide citywide access to information and to foster a college-going culture.

Update: Through C2C, The Mayor’s Office of Education has strengthened 24 organization’s capacity to offer college access resources and services. Awareness of C2C has grown and more residents are accessing C2C through the website, the texting platform, at partner sites and through one-on-one appointments with C2C staff. From the launch in January 2015 through October 2015, the website had 6,962 users, the texting platform had 428 subscribers, the Facebook page had 1982 likes and there were 242 new Twitter followers demonstrating the reach of C2C’s message.