Chapter 6: What, so What, now What: A Game-Winning Plan for Capacity Building

Capacity building within an organization is key to cultivating rigorous, sustainable youth programs that are data-informed, high-quality, and in tune with stakeholder needs and wants. This chapter provides an overview of how the YMCA, one of the largest youth-serving organizations in the United States, curated capacity across its portfolio of youth programs and systematized youth development leader practices through character development to form a blueprint for a competency-based approach to capacity building. It contains five sections. The first addresses the context in which we decided to focus directly on capacity building as a way to infuse and enhance youth character development. The second section introduces a What? So what? Now what? reflection framework as a means to build capacity for learning and practice improvement. The third sketches a blueprint for building capacity within a youth development organization by focusing on internal partnerships. The fourth section describes how we developed a youth development organizational capacity assessment. The chapter concludes with a brief summary.