Capital One Pro Bono Program Helps Citizen Schools Achieve Sustainable Goals
Citizen Schools and Capital One have held a meaningful relationship for the past 10 years. From financial support, to running apprenticeships for students in our Expanded Learning Time program, Capital One has been a consistent partner, supporting impact in a number of ways. That relationship continued to grow as Citizen Schools was awarded the opportunity to participate in not one but THREE projects as part of the Capital One Pro Bono Program.
Through Pro Bono, Capital One partners with nonprofits, startups, small businesses and CDFIs to build capacity and drive social change in our communities. Pro Bono is a foundational component of Capital One’s Impact Initiative, an initial $200 million commitment to support growth in underserved communities and advance socioeconomic mobility by closing gaps in equity and opportunity. The Impact Initiative builds upon Capital One’s mission and supports racial equity, affordable housing, small business support, workforce development and financial well-being.
“Capital One is committed to leveraging our scale and resources, and the ingenuity and empathy of our associates, to help foster a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to prosper, said Ashley Trick, Pro Bono Program Manager, Community Impact and Investment, Capital One. “Pro Bono will allow us to build on our longstanding partnership with Citizen Schools in an even more meaningful capacity.”
Citizen Schools qualified for pro bono support in the following areas, gaining access to high-quality professional support to bolster our team’s efforts:
Accessibility: Video Captioning
Define the process and best practices for captioning our videos. With over 200 videos on the Citizen Schools YouTube channel, providing closed captions is an ongoing process, but Capital One was instrumental in showing our team how to tackle this project with their extensive knowledge.
Find and acquire the tools for our specific video captioning needs and learn how to make better use of tools we already have at our disposal.
Help us better align Citizen Schools’ content to our diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) values by making that content accessible to all, regardless of ability.
Finance: Refining our financial modeling tool
Review our approach to forecast modeling and recommend that we revisit some fundamental questions about our approach. They highlighted opportunities to align internally on usage of a modeling tool, its inputs, outputs, and assumptions that would in turn, create a more inclusive and transparent process that extends beyond the finance and executive leadership.
Reground us in some key process tools for making decisions and managing projects in order to do the hard work of alignment before getting tactical with a financial modeling tool.
Provide us a set of questions to unpack as a team on both the methodology and content, including: What is the level of detail, how frequent is our reporting, how often do we update the inputs, who manages the data, who is the model accessible to, how do we use market data, what is our growth in program staffing, and what is the demand for volunteer capacity?
Contribute best practices that align with values of integrity, transparency, leadership and Inclusive communication.
“As a Finance team, we know this work will take time,” said Citizen Schools Executive Vice President, Elisha Muskat. “We also feel committed to going through these steps with our Board and staff to collectively build the impact we aim to achieve, and to develop some solid assumptions to model this future.”
Brand: Strategizing how to utilize influencer marketing on social media
For the brand team, Capital One is helping us analyze the current ways we are using our social media channels to increase awareness and engagement and develop a more concrete strategy moving forward.
At Citizen Schools, we truly value the relationships we’ve built with all of our corporate partners, and having Capital One help not only externally, but internally, shows the value of teamwork, one of our core values.
Thank you to the entire Capital One Pro Bono team for their time, sound advice and commitment to helping us develop new techniques and models that will impact much of the work we do as an organization and in the communities we serve.