November 2024 Update
On November 9th, USIT hosted its annual Texas Charity Pitch event. Teams comprised of PIT analysts placed first and second in the competition.
Thanks, as always, for your contributions to the USIT community. Happy Thanksgiving!
We were previously sending out these newsletters through MailChimp, but after multiple folks mentioned not receiving the emails or having them automatically route to spam, we are switching to this format for the time being. We are also beginning to publish our monthly newsletters on our website, usitfoundation.org.
Giving Update
This year, the USIT Foundation is hitting our five-year mark. Since starting our efforts, we have donated $380,000, the bulk of which has been to environmental and recidivism prevention charities. During the last giving cycle, half of our donations were provided to repeat organizations.
Our priorities this upcoming year are as follows:
Portfolio Monitoring. Develop a more sophisticated monitoring approach toward actual performance vs. originally underwritten expectations, particularly for charities with which we have engaged for multiple years.
External Engagement. Our organization has been internally focused for the last four years. While it was necessary to build the team and infrastructure as a foundation of knowledge and process, it was to our detriment that we did not better engage external stakeholders, including our broader donor base. This year, we are committed to a more frequent cadence of communication and knowledge-sharing, including externally publishing our findings on the USIT Foundation website.
Status on the 2024-2025 Giving Cycle
PIT accepted 7 new Junior Analysts this year, and the team now has a total of 26 members.
Our student team, co-led by LJ Feinstein and Dinesh Elanchezhian, has reviewed 70+ unique charities thus far this year and is currently working on deeper diligence for six organizations at the mid-level stage. Analysts have focused on charities within the economic mobility (36% of charities reviewed), climate change (34%), and recidivism (29%) verticals.
Within each of these verticals, we are working on specific research projects to standardize our understanding of metrics throughout the funnel. This includes:
Recidivism Benchmarking: Creating a database of (i) 1-year and 3-year recidivism rates and (ii) the annual cost of incarceration by state and demographic (e.g., age is highly correlated with various criminogenic factors, so we should expect that charities serving younger populations should experience higher recidivism rates). These inputs are huge determining factors of the value we attribute to our donations within the recidivism vertical, and while we have historically used guidelines from reputable sources as inputs in our math, we plan to create more rigor in these comparative figures.
Homelessness White Paper: Standardize our understanding of the housing options and resources for transitionally unhoused individuals in key metropolitan hubs, where most of our research is focused. Develop a view regarding the capital efficiency of charities that own their own housing assets.
Lastly, our mentorship program has kicked off with 14 alumni mentors in a new rotational coffee chat format. If you would like to be a mentor and sounding board to our analysts, please send us a note at alumni@usitfoundation.org to indicate your interest in participating.
Our Giving Committee for the 2024-2025 cycle consists of Nilay Gandhi, Eddie Wu, Harvey Powers, Benedikt Kroll, Sunny Pamidimukkala, and Angela Yang (you can see our smiling faces here). As always, feel free to reach out to any of us with suggestions or questions.
Best,
Angela Yang | Chairperson of the 2024-2025 Giving Committee