At Pioneer, we believe it’s our privilege and responsibility to support the communities we live and work in. We’re dedicated to supporting the community with our time, talent, and treasure and for the past few years, we’ve joined forces with incredible organizations.
In 2024, we partnered with a local non-profit Citizens Against Sex Trafficking (C.A.S.T.).
Founded in 2017, C.A.S.T. is a Twin Cities nonprofit dedicated to ending sexual exploitation before it starts, through education, awareness, and community collaboration. C.A.S.T. focuses on prevention by equipping individuals, including students, educators, and community leaders, with the knowledge and skills needed to keep our kids and our communities safe.
After steady increase over the last 7 years, C.A.S.T. has started to receive significantly more demand from schools than they were able to support. To ensure they did not have to turn anyone down from receiving important education, C.A.S.T. entered 2024 with the goals to double their staff and double their budget, to double their impact.
After hearing the impact C.A.S.T. has had, we knew we wanted to be a part of their journey, to help them navigate the complexities and messiness of a startup to bring structure and optimization to scale towards rapid expansion.
We aim to empower our community and non-profit clients by meeting them where they are at; our approach educates and empowers our partners so that improvements are sustained, even after we roll off. During our work this year, we leveraged an approach that first educates, then focuses on practicing together, with the help of templates and workshops, to drive adoption.
To ensure scalability and consistency, we focused on process documentation and standardization with C.A.S.T..
We jump-started this work by providing an explanation of what process documentation looks like and the value it brings to organizations. For C.A.S.T., process documentation would allow for scalability, team empowerment and delegation, as well as consistency and speed.
After brainstorming a list of processes that could be documented, we completed a prioritization exercise, using a simple impact and effort analysis. We landed on a list of 12 items, a toolkit of templates for C.A.S.T. to use, and a targeted plan of how we were going to practice together.
Our analysis landed on two processes that we would work through together.
The first, grant writing, was created side by side with C.A.S.T. team members who were then trained to answer questions and serve as the internal expert after we roll off.
The full team was then engaged in a process documentation workshop, where we showed the completed grant writing example and walked through a few more examples together, before diving into our second process, volunteer intake.
Following the workshop, we partnered to finalize the volunteer intake process. The team began to utilize their newly documented processes, empowering staff members to own more and the Executive Director to elevate herself.
As we wrap up our engagement, we are excited to see how C.A.S.T. will leverage the tools and strategies we've provided. Our final workshop focused on reflecting on the work completed and discussing how these tools can be used to drive future growth.
2024 has been a significant growth year for C.A.S.T.. In the 2024 spring semester, they gave 22 presentations to students, more than the past 6 years combined! By end of 2024, they completed 67 presentations.
They were able to triple their impact in 2024 and are forecasting an additional tripled increase in 2025.
Seeing the C.A.S.T. team’s excitement and engagement throughout our partnership is a testament to the power of collaboration. We are proud to have been part of C.A.S.T.'s journey and look forward to seeing their continued impact in the community.