A nonprofit whose mission is showing low-income high school students a path to economic self-sufficiency looks to be nearly self-funded in its third year.
Genesys Works is a St. Paul program that offers students in an intensive eight-week IT and professional skills training course before placing them in one-year paid internships.
"We are truly a social enterprise. We operate very much like a for-profit IT staffing company, that just also happens to have a nonprofit mission of helping low-income students of color," says Jeff Tollefson, Genesys Works' director in the Twin Cities.
The organization was founded by a former Compaq executive in Houston. It started a Twin Cities branch in 2008 and launched a Chicago program this year.
Tollefson says about 90 percent of the program's budget this year should be covered by fees collected from its corporate partners, mostly large employers that pay to have students placed at their organizations, much as they would working with an IT staffing agency.
Genesys Works partners with Minneapolis, St. Paul, Richfield, and Robbinsdale school districts to recruit students, who apply for the program in the spring. An eight-week training course begins in June, and the top students are then placed at employers, where they work as IT technicians throughout their senior year of high school.
The program hopes to have a summer class of 150 students next year. It's also going to pilot a finance and accounting program in 2011 with about 30 students.
Tollefson says the response from employers suggests the program is working. Not only is it adding partners, but existing ones are increasing their commitment. Medtronic, the largest employer of Genesys Works students, went from 5 to 11 students this year.
Genesys Works will be recognized with the
Innovation Collaboration of the Year Award at the Minnesota High Tech Association's Tekne Awards on Nov. 3.
Source: Jeff Tollefson, Genesys Works
Writer:
Dan Haugen