YouthBuild USA

Dorothy Stoneman. Dorothy Stoneman is founder and president of YouthBuild USA, the national support center for 273 YouthBuild programs and a leader in advocating for youth engagement in civil society. She is chairman of the National YouthBuild Coalition, with more than 1,000 member organizations in 45 states, Washington D.C., and the Virgin Islands. After joining the Civil Rights movement in 1964, and… See full bio.

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Story: YouthBuild USA was started informally in 1988 and incorporated in 1990 to guide the process of replicating and scaling up the YouthBuild program with quality in the United States after the program had succeeded in five neighborhoods in New York City. There are now 273 YouthBuild programs in 45 states, Washington, DC, and the Virgin Islands. 92,000 YouthBuild students have built 19,000 units of affordable, increasingly green, housing since 1994. Community- and faith-based nonprofit organizations sponsor most YouthBuild programs, many of which are led by social entrepreneurs who have started YouthBuild in their communities, just like Dorothy Stoneman, recipient of the 2007 Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship, started the first YouthBuild program in East Harlem in 1978.

Evidence of Impact Summary:

Youthbuild USA has had success at increasing postsecondary education and employment success of disconnected youth. They provide leadership development, youth development, and community development with a focus on rehabilitation of low-income housing for at-risk youth.
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Organization Strengths Summary:

According to experts, Youthbuild USA follows one of the few scaled models that has maintained high quality standards and received scale up public funding. They are considered to be very well run with an innovative and effective model for helping at-risk youth.
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Areas for Improvement Summary:

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Dorothy Stoneman is founder and president of YouthBuild USA, the national support center for 273 YouthBuild programs and a leader in advocating for youth engagement in civil society. She is chairman of the National YouthBuild Coalition, with more than 1,000 member organizations in 45 states, Washington D.C., and the Virgin Islands. After joining the Civil Rights movement in 1964, and prior to founding YouthBuild USA in 1990, Stoneman lived and worked for 24 years in Harlem. She was first a teacher and then director of a community-based day care center, elementary school, community development housing corporation, community service program, and a youth employment and leadership development program. She was director for 10 years of the first YouthBuild program, based in East Harlem. She has built grassroots coalitions that have succeeded in obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars of city, state, and federal funds for community-based organizations to implement programs for youth and community development in low-income neighborhoods. Stoneman has a bachelor’s degree in history and science from Harvard University and a master’s degree in early childhood education and a doctorate of humane letters from Bank Street College of Education. She was selected by Non Profit Times as one of the 50 most influential non-profit leaders in 2008, awarded the prestigious international Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2007, the John Gardner Annual Leadership Award from the Independent Sector in 2000, and a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius grant”) in 1996. As a leader committed to building momentum toward the elimination of poverty, Stoneman serves as a trustee of America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth; a member of the steering committees of Voices for National Service, ServiceNation, America Forward, and Campaign for Youth. She served on the Task Force to End Poverty of the Center for American Progress which issued a set of recommendations in 2007 regarding how to cut poverty in half in ten years. She served as a founding board member of Youth Service America, founding co-chair of the Ford Foundation’s Leaders for a Changing World, and founding co-chair of the Campaign for Youth. Stoneman has been a member of the board of directors of Stand for Children, the board of advisors of the Forum for Youth Investment, the Harvard Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement convened by Robert Putnam, the Levitan Youth Policy Network convened at Johns Hopkins University, an international fellow of the Applied Developmental Science Institute at Tufts University, and senior fellow of Ashoka. Stoneman is the author or editor of numerous practical handbooks regarding how to run independent community schools, parent-controlled day care centers, leadership development programs for youth, and YouthBuild programs. She is married to John Bell, vice president of training and leadership development at YouthBuild USA; they live in Massachusetts and have two children and 13 godchildren.

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