Helping LGBTQ+ Youth Find a Home

At New York City's Ali Forney Center (AFC), supporting unhoused LGBTQ+ youth is a matter of life and death. Named after the late Ali Forney, a gender non-conforming teen who tragically died on the streets after being rejected by their family, the center strives to provide a safe space and comprehensive support for marginalized youth.

The center offers a broad range of services, from emergency and transitional housing to job readiness training and counseling—all of which are designed to help the young people it serves to cope with the trauma and isolation of no longer having a home. It also works to provide access to medical care, including HIV prevention and treatment.

"A lot of times when these youth are rejected, they have no place to go,” says Sayeed Naghavi, AFC's Controller and Director of Contract Financial Management. "We provide a one-stop shop for people who need a shower, mental health counseling, medical services, or a meal. We have served 2,200 vulnerable youth and our demands are growing.”

But helping at-risk youth is only half the battle. The center also faces major administrative hurdles as it strives to meet the growing needs of its community.

Navigating an Administrative Maze

Like many nonprofits, the Ali Forney Center has limited resources at its disposal, and the more time and money it spends on administrative work, the less it has available to address its community work. In the past, figuring out the most efficient accounting and financial management platforms—a task that could greatly improve its efficiency—has taken a back seat. Because of the complexity of AFC's work, Naghavi's team uses multiple platforms, each of which addresses different business objectives, including accounting, corporate credit card transactions, grants management, invoicing, and accounts payable.

Unfortunately, the lack of a centralized platform causes confusion and requires Naghavi’s team to spend hours manually pulling and inputting data. Moreover, this piecemeal process means that the center has no way to analyze its finances as a whole, limiting its ability to make informed financial decisions and plan for the future.

"We wanted to research a solution that would address all of these issues and bring all the data set together in one seamless integration,” Naghavi says. However, the center had neither the time nor the resources to weigh the merits of all the available platforms, choose the best one, and integrate it into their existing system.

A Partnership for a Solution

Luckily, there was a solution on the horizon: JPMorganChase's Force for Good (FFG) program. An initiative under the Tech for Social Good umbrella, FFG connects skilled employees to nonprofits in need of technical assistance and strategic guidance. In the case of the Ali Forney Center, eight FFG volunteers, pulled from JPMorganChase's technology, finance, and management teams, joined to sort through the nonprofit's accounting requirements and choose the best platform to address its changing needs.

The main goal was to find a tool that could integrate the organization's various accounting platforms, and help the center make informed decisions about its finances to continue to invest in the programs that help support LGBTQ+ at-risk youth.

"Working with AFC was eye-opening," shares Renu Khot, one of the FFG volunteers at JPMorganChase. "We aimed to find a reporting process so that their time spent could be better invested in expanding their reach and supporting their youth."

Charting a Path Forward

The Force for Good team worked with AFC to identify, research, and evaluate the available financial management systems and determine the best one for the center's needs.

"The team established clear roles to gather findings, present the comparisons of each, and set up live demos,” Naghavi says. “I love the way they handled the entire process. Doing the research would take a lot of time and effort for our nonprofit. It was a lot of work, and having a team of people to work on it made it very efficient."

From the array of available platforms, the Force for Good team identified two potential systems that that have the capacity and features that the center needs to streamline its administrative functions and optimize its financial management.

The Force for Good team's work may have impacts far beyond the Ali Forney Center: AFC hopes to help other organizations with similar goals—and similar accounting challenges. "We are trying to replicate the same model that we have at AFC to help smaller nonprofits,” Naghavi notes. “We share goals to help at-risk LGBTQ+ youth, but they are in earlier stages of building their platform and we want to help.”   

For the Force for Good team, the process was also an education. "It’s enlightening to work with nonprofits,” Khot recalls, reflecting on the lessons she gleaned from the eight-month process. “They're making real changes in the community, and we wanted to support that."