African American Community Service Agency (AACSA) Funding and Engagement Plan

• Course: PH 102: Health Team Building
• Community partner: African American Community Service Agency (AACSA), Santa Clara County, serving the community since 1978
• Artifacts: Presentation with the problem analysis and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
• Presentation

Summary

For this project, our group acted as a consulting team for AACSA, a Santa Clara County nonprofit that works to preserve the dignity and culture of the African American community. AACSA promotes the community’s full participation through economic justice, education, and access to services. Each member took a role on the team, and I served as the Community Health Educator.

We identified two major problems. First, the agency has funding gaps: as AACSA grows, its revenue and organizational expenses are declining in budgeting. Second, the agency faces high interest rates on loans. Our brainstorming process moved from problem identification and background research to a collaborative method, then used elimination criteria to narrow our ideas to the best options. Our three potential solutions were securing more grants, outreach initiatives, and donation-based funding.

We grounded our recommendations in research on nonprofit funding, including work on revenue diversification, racial disparities in nonprofit funding, and access to financial capital for African American organizations. From this we proposed two growth opportunities: a structured grant and partnership strategy for long-term, multi-year funding, and growth through fundraising campaigns, corporate partnerships, and community engagement.

We turned our final solutions into three measurable objectives with key results, shown below. Together they aim to stabilize funding, launch a homeless support program, and strengthen the agency’s community ties.