Product details

By the spring of 2003, less than two years after its founding, the Philadelphia non-profit program known as Amachi had already arranged for more than 500 volunteer mentors drawn from the city''s inner city African- American churches to counsel children of incarcerated parents. The importance of the program, however, transcended its accomplishments. Not only did it hope to expand across the US to reach 100,000 children of prisoners within five years but Amachi - headed by former Philadelphia Mayor W Wilson Goode, Sr - was among the first of a new type of social service initiative, and one of special interest to the administration of President George W Bush. In contrast to a previous generation of programs which relied on public funding and government agencies, Amachi set out to address a social problem by combining faith-based voluntarism with the experience and capacity of established non-profit organizations (such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America) and limited government funding. This case details the operational decisions, complications, and setbacks of the first two years of Amachi (a West African word meaning ''who knows what this child has brought''). It focuses on nuts-and-bolts issues such as volunteer recruitment, relationships with parents of children being assisted, and record keeping of meetings between mentors and ''mentees''. It is meant as a vehicle for discussion as to the practicality of taking a volunteer-based social program ''to scale'' by examining the operations challenges of a start-up enterprise.