Spotlight

Cloud & Fire Ministries
With technical assistance from the LC, Cloud and Fire Ministries is tracking outcomes and extending its reach.
For special education teacher Melody Rossi, conditions at the middle school where she taught seemed to be going from bad to worse. Located in the North Hills section of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, the school had once been a model junior high, with a stable population base, high-performing students and ample resources.

“This whole part of the Valley used to be thought of as typical suburbia,” Rossi says. “Then it got to be known as ‘the gang corridor.’ Things were getting so bad that our students were testing in the bottom two percent of the nation. With scores like that, how could they ever develop the skills they need for decent jobs and productive lives?”

In 1999, Rossi decided to try making a difference outside the classroom. Together with another teacher, Carole Walker, she began holding after-school club meetings at Centro Cristiano, a nearby church, where neighborhood kids could find safe alternatives to the life on the streets. In addition to tutoring and mentoring sessions, Rossi and Walker organized field trips and classes in spiritual development.

Rossi and Walker’s Cloud and Fire Ministries, named for the Pillar of Cloud and Pillar of Fire that point the way out of the wilderness in the Book of Exodus, remained something of an ad hoc project until 2004, when a neighbor told Rossi about the work of the Latino Coalition and its Department of Labor-funded “Reclamando Nuestro Futuro” grant.

Rossi wrote a proposal to create Project LYDIA (Latino Youth Developing Intelligent Alternatives) and was awarded a $60,000 sub-grant to initiate the program.

Now entering its third year as a sub-grantee, Cloud and Fire has grown into a professionally managed, multi-program 501(c)(3) nonprofit, thanks in large measure to capacity-building assistance provided by the LC and operational improvements prompted by the implementation of Project LYDIA.
“The Latino Coalition took us to a whole new level,” Rossi says. “It was almost like a makeover—like Pygmalion molding us into something better and much more solid.”

The proposal that Rossi wrote to create Project LYDIA was her first attempt at grant-writing, but the step-by-step guidance she received in the course of preparing that proposal has continued to pay dividends for Cloud and Fire.
“The Latino Coalition’s trainers really clarified the relationship between planning the program and writing the proposal,” Rossi says. “By the time we were done, we had a much clearer picture of what we wanted to achieve and how to achieve it.”

 The following year, Rossi applied for a separate grant from the Department of Labor and was awarded $75,000 to develop a “One-Stop Connection” job referral and placement center. Rossi and Cloud and Fire’s administrator, Kelly Gerhart, credit LC consultants R. Paul Morales and Eve Berry with helping them put together the components of that winning proposal.

 “Eve gave us a template to follow, and Paul really walked us through the process,” Rossi says. “They helped us understand the technicalities of what goes into a federal grant application. Before that, we had only worked through intermediaries like the Latino Coalition.  But the technical assistance we got from Paul and Eve convinced us that we could do this on our own. They showed us how to answer specific questions and laid it all out for us precisely and clearly.”
As a result of this kind of expert coaching—along with careful research and targeted cultivation of prospective donors—Cloud and Fire has compiled an impressive record of grant procurement over the last two years.

“So far, every grant we’ve applied for has been approved,” Rossi says. It isn’t just jut proposal-writing savvy that accounts for this success. “What really helped us hasn’t been ‘grantsmanship’ per se, but understanding things like evaluation, outcomes and benchmarks,” Rossi says. “I think that’s what has set us apart from other grassroots groups competing for these grants. It’s another benefit of the training we got and the requirements imposed by the Latino Coalition’s sub-grant.”

As one example, Rossi cites the requirement that her organization’s case management load for Project LYDIA include 60% adjudicated youth.
“That was a challenge for us, since most of the kids we see are not adjudicated,” she says. “To get those numbers, we decided to develop an anger management program and take it into local youth detention camps. That project turned out to be so effective that it’s now our flagship program, and the California Endowment gave us a grant to expand it. Part of their grant was used to hire a professional evaluator—producing even better statistical evidence to back up what we’re doing.”

According to Rossi, another key factor in Cloud and Fire’s success has been the use of ETO (Efforts to Outcomes) software, which the Latino Coalition supplies to all its “Reclamando Nuestro Futuro” sub-grantees.

“ETO truly raised the bar for us,” she says. “It’s very structured, and it pushed us to take a hard look at our programs and the correlating participation. It’s what helps us track the real progress our kids are making, instead of merely guessing or describing it in general terms.”

Now government agencies are coming to Cloud and Fire, directing more referrals to the organization and soliciting its assistance in the delivery of services.
“Our work in the detention camps has led to close relationships with the Los Angeles County Probation Department and the County Office of Education, which is responsible for the education of incarcerated youth,” Rossi says. “In addition, we’ve become an accredited provider for the California Access to Recovery Effort (CARE), working with kids who are struggling to overcome substance abuse.”
Summing up the net effect of these all these changes, Rossi points out that outcome measurement doesn’t just make a favorable impression on grantmakers.  It causes her own staff to feel more positive about the work they’re doing.

“The more accurately we track outcomes, the better able we are to ensure that we’re offering a good product,” she says. “If something isn’t measurable, there’s a good chance we aren’t really meeting the needs of the kids.  And just the process of thinking through how we measure our services has helped us focus on quality control.  Doing all these things has given us more credibility with funders and our partner agencies, but it also makes us feel more confident that the work we’re doing will have a lasting impact.”