Services Provided: Financial Management, Accounting Help, Leadership
Our Successes:
- After conducting a needs assessment, CRE helped the After Hours Project obtain software to help the nonprofit with its financial management.
- The software has helped After Hours keep track of its cash intake and expenditures “to the penny.”
- After Hours’ executive director also attended the Leadership Caucus
In the history of the After Hours Project, 2005 will forever mark the organization’s watershed year.
The state granted After Hours its syringe exchange license that year allowing the nonprofit, which is located on the border of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, to apply for and obtain city and state grants it hadn’t previously been eligible for. The budget for the grassroots organization, which also specializes in HIV prevention, harm reduction HIV testing and health care referrals for drug users, sex workers, the homeless and others, suddenly shot up from $26,000 to more than $350,000. Four years later, that budget has now doubled to $700,000.
Soon Fernando Soto, the executive director, who had been largely funding the organization out of his own pocket since he founded After Hours as an all-volunteer nonprofit in 2002, was able to pay 10 full-time employees. Though the organization is still considered small by the city’s nonprofit standards, the growth was substantial enough that Soto needed help managing and especially tracking the growing grassroots group’s finances. Word of mouth and reputation in the sector, Soto says, led him to contact Community Resources Exchange (CRE).
“We really didn’t have a good tracking system for our finances at all,” Soto said. “We had a small operation so it was fine at first but as we started to grow we found it harder and harder to manage our finances.”
After conducting a needs assessment, the CRE consultants were able to provide After Hours with a server and special software called Fund E-Z Nonprofit Software to help them track their cash flow and expenditures. And, Soto said, those items were provided to his organization cost free.
“CRE was great. They bought it for us and made sure we were trained on it, they were really outstanding,” Soto said. “Since then we’ve been able to manage our finances to the penny.”
Soto says that he has also taken advantage of CRE’s Leadership Caucus, a nine-month program in which executive directors from organizations of relative size and budget receive training on the most challenging management and leadership issues of the day.
“That was excellent also,” Soto said of the program. “It was a way for Executive Directors to actually work with other Executive Directors to improve their organizations. It was great because you could bring up problems you’re experiencing and find out how others had dealt with the same kind of problems in the past. I found that to be really helpful.”
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