First Tee Shenandoah Valley. A four-prong plan to grow access.
Service-learning consulting project for a youth golf nonprofit. A team of four students addressing visibility, transportation, budget, and stigma.
First Tee Shenandoah Valley is a regional chapter of the national First Tee youth-development nonprofit. Our team of four JMU students partnered with the chapter for a semester to identify barriers to participation and recommend a four-prong path forward.
Social media presence
Build a consistent regional content cadence. Kid stories, mentor highlights, event recaps. That gives donors and parents a reason to follow and share.
Transportation
A shuttle bus to and from program sites, budgeted at ~$10K, removing the single biggest logistical barrier for kids without a parent who can drive them mid-week.
Budget
Local fundraising and sponsor partnerships with regional businesses. Moving the chapter off reliance on national grant cycles.
Stigma
Address the perception of golf as exclusive. Through representation in marketing, language access, and after-school programming partnerships with local schools.
I had a hand in all four prongs of the plan rather than owning a single workstream. Partly because the team was four people and partly because the prongs reinforce each other (transportation only works if budget exists; budget grows fastest if the social presence pulls in regional sponsors; stigma drops when the program is visibly serving more kids).
Specific contributions I drove: surfacing local sponsorship pathways (Lakeview Club, Shenvalee Golf Resort, Heritage Oaks Golf Course, plus a JMU-alumni fundraiser angle) as a route off national-grant dependency; the 25-mile shuttle radius covering Staunton, New Market, Bridgewater, Harrisonburg, Elkton, and Fishersville on a roughly $10K used-bus budget; and the bilingual-volunteer recruitment recommendation as the most pragmatic stigma-reducer the chapter could action immediately. Program director Drew Fournier gave us the brief; we returned the four-prong plan plus a marketing schedule and an expected-benefits framing.
Sponsorship strategy is mostly about commercial brands. But a lot of the same thinking applies to nonprofits trying to grow access. This project taught me to start from the user's barrier (cost, transit, stigma) and build outward, not from the brand's brief and work down.
- Nonprofit consulting
- Stakeholder research
- Local sponsorship development
- Cause-marketing strategy
- Community-facing strategy