Summary: Did you know that almost two-thirds of reporting public charities in the U.S. have an annual budget that is less than $500,000? (We learned that from Social Startup Success.) There are a lot of small organizations out there and it's tough to do evaluation when you're a one or two (wo)man show. In this episode, we chat with Justin Rivers, founder of The Character Connection Initiative (TCCI), a character education program serving the NYC region. Justin is a former middle school teacher and spent time as the lead educator for a character education nonprofit before starting his own organization. We chat about that transition in this episode, as well as how his experiences using and teaching character education in the classroom helped him see its value. We also chat with Justin about TCCI's approach to program evaluation, and the challenges he's faced along the way. Justin was an absolute pleasure to talk to. We would be remiss if we didn't also mention that he's kind of a Renaissance Man. In addition to being an entrepreneur and educator, he's also a playwright, tour guide, and graphic novelist. (What have you done today?) You can check out some of his cool side gigs here, here, and here. In the intro, we offer two quick footnotes for this episode. First, since we recorded the episode, TCCI hired an executive director. Her name is Sarah Beth Lardie. You’ll hear us talk about how Justin is both the founder and interim E.D. That's no longer the case, which is a big milestone for TCCI! The second footnote is that this conversation with Justin was actually the first podcast episode we’d ever recorded! So if the recording sounds cruddy and we sound awkward, that is why. It may not be the high quality production you've come to expect out of the Glass Frog Podcast ;) This is our penultimate episode for season 1. We'll be back next month with our final episode when we pepper Sheila Robinson with all of our questions about survey design. We hope you'll tune in. If you have a minute, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, Google Podcasts, or TuneIn. If you need to find us in any of the directories, you can search for "Glass Frog" (two words). Until next time!
