Get to Know: Philly BOLT
Real community change and impact doesn’t start with large companies from the outside looking in; it starts with the residents who carry lived experiences and have a full understanding of what specific neighborhoods need to help them flourish. With a mission statement that reads “we cultivate, empower and support grassroots leaders in driving community-led change,” Philly BOLT (Build Our Lives Together) takes pride in creating a platform and support system for these very residents. Read along as we talk to Jude Husein, Philly BOLT’s Deputy Executive Director!
Following our commitment to equity in grant-making and in direct response to input from our community partners, WOMEN’S WAY launched the General Operating Fund in 2022 to provide unrestricted, 2-year grants to organizations primarily serving women, girls, and/or the gender-expansive community. You can learn more about the grant program here.
Can you tell us about the mission and vision of your organization?
Yeah, absolutely. At Philly BOLT, we cultivate, empower, and support grassroots leaders to really drive community led change. We believe in people power cultivating the neighbors that walk these blocks [and] breathe the air. [They] understand what’s happening on their blocks, and our neighbors are really the best suited to solve these neighborhood issues, because they’re the experts and they understand what goes on. We’ve really tried to scale their impact both in our adult cohort and our youth cohort. Hopefully, one day, Philly BOLT will cease to exist, because that means we’ve done our job. That means every neighborhood in Philly is thriving with the people living within those neighborhoods.
How are you working towards achieving this mission?
We have a few different ways to achieve the mission of a future where neighborhoods that face racial and economic injustice are now thriving. One way we do that is through our adult cohort, which is our school for grassroots leaders. Every year, we have a number of grassroots leaders who have a track record of doing the work in their community. We scale their impact in a variety of different ways whether it’s understanding how to pitch, having a grant template, or [figuring out] what are those foundational items that are needed to really scale their impact — [so that] instead of serving 500 individuals, they’re able to serve 1000,1500, 2000. For our adult cohort, it’s an eight-month accelerator program. We think about it as basically a master’s in nonprofit leadership and organization, because they learn everything from traditional organizational mechanisms and communications strategies to program development and theory of change. They go through each of those, and track them in tangible metrics; enabling them to scale and understand the different scopes of work that they have.
Then we have our Youth Fellowship program which we have really scaled into the academic year. We work with young people in the School District of Philadelphia and across the summer to help them navigate the local ecosystem. We pre and post survey them about what they’re super passionate about and support them with being the change that they want to see; creating that pipeline to becoming those leaders that we know they are.
