2018 High Impact Giving Guide

Each year The Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP) at The University of Pennsylvania puts together a list of high-impact organizations. The following are the 2018 selections. Give to one of these organizations and be sure that your donation is doing good work. Three of the nonprofits -- Year Up, Nurse-Family Partnership and AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation -- also made the list last year.

Curamericas: Curamericas Global works through its in-country partner, Curamericas Guatemala, to provide health services to a population of 8,700 indigenous people in a remote mountain region of northwest Guatemala.

Fast Facts:
Growth stunting in young children (a sign of chronic malnutrition) dropped from 74% to 39%. $275 covers the cost of a clean, safe delivery in a Casa Materna Rural.

BRAC (Manoshi Project): In Bangladesh, BRAC’s Manoshi Project provides a range of health services for women, children, and adolescents in growing urban slums.

Fast Facts:
From 2008 to 2013, both the maternal and neonatal death rates in areas served by Manoshi dropped by over half. It costs $2 to $5 to provide prenatal and postnatal care per woman, per check-up.

VillageReach: VillageReach works throughout sub-Saharan Africa to increase access to quality healthcare, with an emphasis on strengthening the “last mile” needed to connect rural and hard-to-reach communities to health resources.

Fast Facts:
The percentage of births occurring at a health facility (a factor that research links to better mother and child survival rates) nearly doubled in the community, from 45% in 2012 to 88% in 2014. It costs less than $10 per person to support VillageReach’s Kwitanda efforts to provide clean water, pregnancy-related care, and community health work.

Youth Villages/YVLifeSet: YVLifeSet is an intensive 6- to 12-month intervention program. Participants set their own goals for housing, education, employment, and other aspects of independent life.

Fast Facts:
Compared to a randomly-selected control group, YVLifeSet participants experience measurable positive changes, including a 30% decrease in violent relationships, 22% decline in homelessness, and a 17% increase in earnings from formal work. The cost of moving a young adult through the program is about $12,000—well below the estimated $20,000 to $50,000 communities pay in social welfare costs for a chronically homeless person.

Year Up: Year Up provides low- and moderate-income high school/GED graduates with six months of skills education, followed by six months of hands-on training at a corporate internship.

Fast Facts:
A 2014 study found that over the first three years, the program boosts a young adult’s earnings by an average of 32%, or about $13,000 more than comparison youth who did not participate in Year Up. The cost for a student to successfully transition to postsecondary education or employment is approximately $42,300.

Center for Employment Opportunities: The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) provides short-term paid transitional employment, life skills education, full-time job placement, and post-placement services to formerly incarcerated individuals.

Fast Facts:
A rigorous external study found that CEO reduced the three-year recidivism rate by up to 22% for participants recently released from prison, with particularly strong effects for the most high-risk groups. The program generates between $1.26 and $3.85 in benefits to society per $1.00 of cost.

YouthBuild Philadelphia: YouthBuild offers a second chance to obtain a high school diploma, real-life work opportunities, and support to ensure that small hiccups don’t turn into insurmountable barriers.

Fast Facts:
More than 70% of YouthBuild Philadelphia students graduate the program. Of those who graduate, more than 90% move on to full-time employment or postsecondary education with over 75% retention one year later. The program costs less than $30,000 per student over two years.

Nurse-Family Partnership: Operating in 42 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and six tribal communities, Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) matches a registered nurse with a low-income woman, pregnant with her first child.

Fast Facts:
The yearly cost per family ranges from about $6,000 in South Carolina to $9,600 in New York City. The program returned $6.40 for each dollar invested

City Connects: Based at Boston College, City Connects trains and places a coordinator within each partner school to work with teachers and staff to assess the needs and strengths of students in four domains: academic, social-emotional learning, health, and family.

Fast Facts:
The average City Connects student gains about 12 percentile points in reading and math scores compared to a matched comparison student. The program costs about $4,570 per student for six years, which covers personnel, materials, facilities, and increased community service provider costs.

Citizen Schools: Citizen Schools partners with 20 middle schools to enhance and expand the learning day for about 3,500 middle school students in eight urban districts in California, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina.

Fast Facts:
Some 71% graduate from high school on time, compared to 59% of matched peers. Citizen School’s ‘bang for buck’: a savings of over $12 for every $1 spent on the program.

Jobs for the Future: Jobs for the Future’s (JFF) Early College High School initiative works to integrate rigorous, credit-bearing college courses into high school curricula through partnerships among colleges, districts, and high schools.

Fast Facts:
Early college students were significantly more likely to both enroll in college (81% vs. 72%) and earn a degree (25% vs. 5%) than comparison students within four years of high school graduation. Since earning an AA degree adds an extra $170,000 in income over a lifetime, this represents a return of about $64 for every $1 invested.

New Teacher Center: New Teacher Center (NTC) partners with school districts in 31 states to support and retain some 24,000 new teachers per year.

Fast Facts:
Students of new teachers exposed to NTC gained an additional 2 to 3.5 months of reading and 2.4 to 4.5 months of math over comparison students after the two-year program, or the equivalent of nearly a semester of learning. NTC professional development costs a total of $5,600 to $8,000 per teacher annually, depending on location.

BELL: BELL Summer is a full-day, five- to eight-week summer program serving low-income students in partnership with school districts in 20 states and Washington, D.C. Half of the day is spent in instruction and the other half in enrichment activities.

Fast Facts:
BELL students gain an average of one to two additional months of reading and math skills over the summer. Gains by BELL students over the summer are equivalent to—or better than—gains students make over the school year.

The program costs about half as much as two months of school and keeps kids from losing the skills they’ve gained over the year.

AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation: To close the achievement gap between three- and four-year-old children from low-income households and their more advantaged peers, this Washington, D.C.-based organization has designed a comprehensive instructional model.

Fast Facts:
AppleTree educates approximately 1,200 children at 10 charter preschools in high-need neighborhoods. It has reached an additional 1,000 children through nine partner schools and community-based organizations throughout the District of Columbia, as well as one in New York City.