LIFT Annual Report 2013: Building Strong Foundations | Page 5

Welcome
Each year we grow more optimistic that the day will come
when the conversation no longer has to be about the haves
and have-nots. But we can’t get there without you.

Dear LIFTer,
We are building strong foundations.
At LIFT, we help families build the strong personal, social, and financial foundations they need to get ahead. Yet in order to help more families
build these foundations, we must also build a strong foundation for LIFT, one that will enable us to achieve our audacious goal of helping all
families move out of poverty for good. With this in mind, we present to you LIFT’s 2013 Impact Report, Building Strong Foundations.
2013 was the first year of our five year plan – the foundational year of our next chapter – towards achieving deeper impact for our families
and broader influence on the field. We set in motion activities against four priority areas: evolving our model, demonstrating our impact,
leveraging our results and stories, and strengthening and growing our organization. Across all, we focused on making the critical investments
to ensure that we had the highest caliber talent and resources ready to execute against Year Two of our strategic plan.
Looking back on 2013, we have much to celebrate. Most notably, we delivered high-quality, transformational impact for more than 12,000
families – a 14% increase on 2012. Contributing to this growth, our new Los Angeles site – LIFT’s first West Coast office – opened in January of
2013 and to date has served more than 600 families. On the East Coast, we hired our first LIFT-New York Executive Director, Cindy Menz-Erb,
who will lead our efforts to build our presence in New York City. With these investments in place, all regions are now well-positioned to lead
significant program model evolution in Year Two of our plan.
Building on our capacity to serve more clients, we also invested in our ability to better measure our impact. LIFT believes that the voices of
the people we serve – our Members – must be at the heart of how we innovate and at the center of how we evaluate; thus, we partnered
with Keystone Accountability, a leading innovator in this field, to help us pilot a “constituent voice” measurement system in Philadelphia and
Chicago, which after further testing, we will roll out to all sites by the end of 2014.
Finally, to support these investments, we hired 16 new team members, grew our fundraising by 50 percent, executed inspiring and recordbreaking events across our regions, and honed our message about the work we do helping families navigate their paths out of poverty. We
also secured additional commitments toward our Growth Capital campaign, taking us to a total of $8.2M raised toward our $10M goal. We
hope to close out the campaign soon.
As we hope is evident, we made great strides this past year towards building a resilient foundation upon which we can grow in 2014. Yet
without you and your continued support, none of this would have been possible. While we are ever more optimistic about the possibility of
a different future for our families, we cannot and will not grasp these dreams without you. As we embark on Year Two of our plan – a year to
launch from our new foundation – we urge you to reconnect, re-engage, and reignite that spark that first inspired your engagement with LIFT.
You are a necessary part of this people-powered movement and we look forward to working together with you to lift people out of poverty for
good.
Keep LIFTing,

Kirsten E. Lodal
CEO, Co-Founder

Michael F. Gilligan
Chairman, National Board of Directors

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