Atlanta & Denver Launch
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our first two Alliance Partner Cities in 2025— Atlanta and Denver—adding over 30 local nonprofits to our community and ensuring that local organizations have access to this powerful community and programming.
Stronger
Together
Launching this strategy demonstrates deep interest among local organizations to join the community, widespread recognition that our offering is not duplicative of existing efforts in that city, support from other intermediaries to add our Alliance community to the network of providers in that city, and the willingness of local philanthropy to support this work.
With the launch of these two cities, our Alliance community will now include both leading national organizations working in our issue areas and local and more proximate organizations from our partner cities, where we enroll deep concentrations of local organizations.
The Partner City Model
As we continue to grow our Alliance, this hybrid, local-national network is designed to support a more aligned and coordinated nonprofit community, while specifically creating greater connectivity, collaboration, and collective action opportunities for smaller and more proximate youth-supporting organizations within each city. We do this by:
Supporting and facilitating shared learning between local organizations in one geography and peers in other similarly sized cities, as well as the leading national nonprofits.
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Connecting local organizations to field experts to share promising practices and receive greater exposure and opportunity
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Seeding the ground for our Alliance to pursue new multi-organizational collaborations at both the local and national level, focused on the issues that are too large or too complex for any one organization to tackle on their own.
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The Need
Local and more proximate organizations have historically had more limited access than national organizations to the types of supports needed to organize and scale their impact. Leadership development, capacity building, and other supports are expensive for organizations with smaller budgets, and in many cases, those supports are offered exclusively by large national foundations to their grantees.
Our Partner City strategy exists to meet this need, and by advancing the development of local organizations and their leaders we can simultaneously accelerate the development of the field at large.
How It Works
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Each Partner City member organization enrolls their CEO/ED and full leadership team in our community. Leaders from participating Partner City organizations have unlimited access to our program offerings, including:
Each Leader joins a 2-year Alliance Leadership Cohort
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All participating organizations and leaders have access to our knowledge sharing series (20+ offerings per year)
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All participating organizations have access to our capacity building programming (5+ offerings per year)
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All participating organizations can shape our youth-centered research agenda and participate in the analysis and dissemination of our findings
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All participating organizations have the opportunity to join APA’s national collective action initiatives
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All partner city organizations participate in the ideation, design, and launching of new collaborations, specific to the local context and the needs of the young people they serve. In each city, our Executive Directors lead this ideation process and are responsible for funding and launching these initiatives.
