Investment Categories
To achieve its strategic goals, CTOP invests in nonprofit organizations in Connecticut that serve youth who are severely off-track or disconnected and deliver programs and services that support youth progression toward the long-term education and employment outcomes that are at the heart of CTOP’s mission and which define social value for CTOP’s investment strategy.
CTOP invests in organizations that are at varying levels of development to seed, sustain, and amplify social value accordingly, conceptualizing the process of organizational development as an evolution along the following continuum:
CTOP’s investments, current and planned, fall into three categories:
- Organizations in the incubation, start-up, or early stages of organizational development that specialize in the relentless outreach and other related services such as crisis response required to initially engage severely disconnected youth in transformative relationships;
- Organizations in the build, mature, or expansion stages of organizational development that serve disconnected youth – but perhaps not severely disconnected youth – and have the infrastructure necessary to provide the kinds of programming (e.g., transitional employment and related services) that help a young person to prepare for, become placed in, and subsequently succeed in unsubsidized employment; and
- Organizations that work with disconnected youth only after another organization has engaged them for a period of time to help them to become ready, willing, and able to participate in more traditional programming but that, as their specialized contribution to the pathways that CTOP seeks to create, operate a social enterprise within which young people can gain subsidized work experience that prepares them to succeed in the workforce.
You can download the Opportunity Project's youth development social investment strategy to learn more about its expansion.