Twin Engines for Propelling Social Impact

The business world’s “Engine 1/Engine 2” concept can help ambitious nonprofits balance today’s needs with tomorrow’s potential.

In the 12 years since its founding, OneGoal had grown to engage almost 12,500 high school students a year in six metropolitan areas and had become widely recognized for its success in helping lower-income students—mainly young people of color—enroll and persist in postsecondary education. Yet OneGoal was hitting the limits of its relatively costly model, which required large and continuing streams of philanthropic funding. It was growing one school at a time, adding hundreds of students each year—but the need was many, many times that. “If we continued to grow at the current rate,” says OneGoal CEO Melissa Connelly, “we would never come anywhere close to reaching the 1.4 million 11th graders nationwide who could benefit.”

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