Teach For America Dallas–Fort Worth
Teach For America: Impact Reports
Four books over four years: three annual yearbooks and the 10th-anniversary edition, A Decade of Impact.
See the work
The challenge
Teach For America Dallas–Fort Worth needed to tell its story of impact in a way that showed every layer of the work: the teachers, the leaders, the community, and the students. The primary audience was donors. Each year began with a theme that shaped the region's work, and the book had to capture it.
What we did
Each year, I worked with the team to choose the theme. Then I gathered data and stories from across the organization, conducted interviews, and orchestrated photo shoots. I wrote and designed everything, and I got approval from leadership.
Every book was a fresh start and also a continuation of the story, showing increasing impact over time. The first, in 2015, was the region's first impact report, covering its first seven years of work. I framed it around each group of people the organization served. The tenth-anniversary book, A Decade of Impact, shows what a city can accomplish when it commits to a cause over a long period of time.
Results
The books were handed out at fundraising events and mailed to donors and partners. The feedback was always extremely positive. Other Teach For America regions often cited the books or even copied them, and the national organization followed suit with similar impact reports.
Figures as printed in the books:
- The 2015 report noted that the 2015–16 school year would reach over 55,000 students, the most in the region's history, with a corps of 360 teachers and over 750 alumni.
- A Decade of Impact reported that what began with 90 corps members in 2009 had grown to more than 1,300 leaders, and that corps members and alumni had reached more than 400,000 students across 3,400 classrooms.