Learn by doing

Building a nonprofit often feels like two steps forward, one step back. That's not failure, that's program design.

When Bold Idea joined the Social Innovation Accelerator at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, we were convinced we had a smart idea: bring our Coding Clubs to Dallas recreation centers. Built-in facilities, existing registration systems, established staff. On paper, it was an easy path to scale.

A year of piloting told a different story.

Working alongside the City of Dallas introduced bottlenecks we hadn't anticipated. Transportation was a barrier. Cost was a barrier. The friction we thought we'd eliminated turned out to be baked into the model itself. At the end of 2018, we regrouped, and we scrapped it.

What we did have was one site that was quietly working really well: an after-school Coding Club at an elementary school in Oak Cliff.

So we leaned in. We expanded to more schools. And almost immediately, we saw why it worked:

🏫 Schools brought students directly to the program with no transportation required
💸 Participation was free, removing financial barriers entirely
👩‍🏫 Teachers served as built-in liaisons and community trust
📋 Dallas ISD streamlined the volunteer onboarding process
💲 Corporate partners wanted to fund the weekly Coding Clubs

The rec center model wasn't a waste. It was a variable we had to test to find the one that worked.

Here's what I'd love to see more of in our sector: funders investing in the cost of learning, giving nonprofits the time, resources, and permission to pilot, fail, and refine. Because the organizations doing the most thoughtful program design aren't the ones who got it right the first time. They're the ones who treated every iteration as data.