Blue Sky Partners, working with the City of Austin Innovation Office and Homeless Strategy Division, launch community-wide needs assessment and technical support to build capacity for critical organizations. 

Austin –  Blue Sky Partners is launching a multi-tier program to document the current capacity and needs of non-profit organizations supporting the unhoused community within Austin, support the city’s deployment of critical resources, and guide organizations in their journey to grow and scale impactful programs. 

“Blue Sky Partners has been a vital collaborator in our strategy of spurring social innovation through community-focused accelerator programs. They’re the best I’ve worked with in bringing diverse and often overlooked organizations together and elevating them to the next level of performance. Their work has directly created significant advances in homelessness services, displacement prevention, and green jobs access in Austin,” says Interim Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Culotta. 

Blue Sky Partners will launch a needs assessment that will inventory current organizational capacity and what the organizations need to expand their programs or services. Working with the City of Austin, participating organizations will have access to funding to complete the research, and access to experts to provide technical assistance to develop a business model to increase their impact work. 

This program, which kicked off in May 2022 and will run through the end of the year, will assess the current capacity of the organizations providing support and service to the unhoused community in Central Texas; develop a needs assessment to identify ways to expand services and develop new entrants into the space; support organizations in developing a capacity-building plan with associated resource needs; and provide direct technical assistance to organizations. 

“We are honored to be a part of this work,” said Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Matt Glazer. “Having been a non-profit executive director, I have seen firsthand the struggle to do impactful work today while securing the resources needed to ensure and plan for tomorrow. The City of Austin is making it possible for organizations doing critical work for the unhoused community to do just that. Together with the City of Austin, and the non-profit community, we will be able to listen, support, and deploy critical resources to make lasting change.”

Blue Sky Partners is a national consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. The firm’s focus is on helping individuals and organizations set clear goals, develop sustainable systems, and establish healthy expectations. Blue Sky Partners works to help organizations grow and scale so they can do good work for a long time. 

Matt Glazer and Shayna Dunitz will lead this engagement on behalf of Blue Sky Partners. Glazer is a co-founder of the firm and Chief Strategy Officer. He has 7 years of experience as a non-profit executive director and has both directly started or assisted in the formation of 33 companies. He is the former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Trinity University. Dunitz is a former Chief Operations Officer for a fitness company and Director of Operations for 3 Day Startup. She has been actively engaged in the startup and innovation community for nearly a decade.

For more information about Blue Sky Partners, their 2022 Capabilities Deck is available here, and the 2021 Annual Report is available here. For additional questions, please reach out to Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Matt Glazer, at Matt@BlueSkyPartners.co.