Since our founding, the Urban League affiliate movement has grown from a single chapter in New York to a network serving two million people in 90 cities across the country. Project Empower University gives them the skills to continue serving their communities and expand the movement’s reach.

Our Approach

Project Empower University is a sequential and systematic approach to moving Urban League affiliates along the pathway to greater capacity and higher performance, with the ultimate outcome of improving financial stability and economic empowerment for their participants. The National Urban League has worked to increase the effectiveness of its national affiliate network’s economic services by helping it to implement workforce development best practices—such as employer engagement, career pathways, and effective data management— and to integrate services more broadly.

Project Empower University is a set of capacity-building initiatives focused on change management, helping affiliates learn how to envision and implement integrated service delivery, as well as narrative change and leadership within their communities. Affiliates are organized into tiers to help affiliates systematically advance through the planning and implementation of service integration and narrative change best practices. Project Empower University’s long-term goal is to advance all 88 affiliates through all four tiers over time.

Accomplishments

Although the Project Empower University initiative is still in progress, it has already helped to increase the capacity of Urban League (UL) affiliate staff members as senior organizational leads redesign operations to achieve improved economic outcomes for clients, helping them to earn more and to keep more of what they earn to build assets and opportunities for the future. It has also brought together affiliate staff at a variety of convenings to help drive narrative change from the bottom up, harnessing the power of the larger Urban League movement to help affiliates lead more effectively both within their given communities and across the nation more broadly.

Fact Sheet