For more than 30 years, Juma has helped young people pursue employment, education and financial stability through three areas: earn, learn and connect. Participants ages 16 to 24 gain work experience at major sports and entertainment venue concessions across the west coast, building skills and preparing for future careers and financial independence.
Juma saw an opportunity to strengthen its support for participants after they graduate from the program. Relationships with alumni often depended on individual staff members staying in touch. Without an organization-wide approach, Juma had limited ways to maintain those connections, share resources or understand participants’ longer-term progress.
As Juma developed its Connect pillar, it partnered with FareStart Consulting to turn its ideas into an actionable alumni engagement strategy.
Building a Strategy Around Youth Voices
FareStart and Juma brought together staff, leaders and young people for two days of workshops in Seattle. FareStart’s consultants helped the group examine Juma’s existing alumni work and identify what participants would genuinely value.
Young people from Juma’s Seattle program joined a focus group and identified top reasons to stay connected like job-search mentorship, study
groups, social gatherings, resource navigation and financial workshops.
“With so many proven approaches to alumni engagement, listening directly to young people helped Juma identify and prioritize the strategies most likely to resonate with them and keep them meaningfully engaged,” said Renée Martin, FareStart’s Vice President of Consulting.
FareStart then helped the team prioritize those ideas and define responsibilities, timelines, and next steps.
“Walking away with actual action items and dates was very helpful,” said Claire Wheeler, Juma’s Director of Impact. “It kept everyone accountable for making sure we were doing the things that we needed to do.”
Turning Ideas Into Action
To work within Juma’s current capacity and budget, FareStart recommended a phased approach for building their alumni engagement strategy.
Juma put those recommendations into action by creating a resource page, developing an alumni board with representation from across multiple Juma sites, renewing its LinkedIn engagement and planning alumni events across its markets. The organization also conducted additional focus groups and surveys to guide and evaluate the strategy.
“We accomplished what we had set out to do,” Wheeler said.
Consulting Grounded in Shared Experience
As a social enterprise that also works alongside young people, FareStart understood the realities of combining workforce development, participant support and revenue-generating businesses. That shared experience created space for Juma’s team to speak openly and develop solutions tailored to its goals.
“It felt very safe to talk about all of the things that we were thinking about or the struggles we were going through,” Wheeler said. “They understood the pieces connected to serving young people and operating a social enterprise.”
The engagement helped Juma move from informal alumni relationships toward a practical framework for sustained connection, one shaped by participant voice, organizational knowledge and clear action steps.
Build a Strategy That Works for Your Organization
For more than 20 years, FareStart Consulting has partnered with over 350 nonprofits and social enterprises across the U.S. and Canada to develop practical, people-centered strategies that strengthen job training and expand pathways to economic mobility. Through this partner network, more than 22,000 individuals have connected with jobs.
Learn more about how FareStart Consulting can support your organization.
Read more about the impact of FareStart Consulting at How FareStart Helped Root Strengthen Graduate Success and Nick’s Story: Changing the industry narrative.
