New York Cares has been the connective tissue of volunteering in New York City since 1987. The city’s largest volunteer management organization mobilizes more than 71,000 volunteers a year across all five boroughs, working with 360 nonprofits, schools, and government agencies. Coming out of the pandemic, the organization needed to address the sector’s changing landscape in order to rebuild.
“We had a really gnarly strategic question we needed to answer,” Sapreet says. “We needed to understand our competitive environment at a different level. And once we understood it, we needed to have a plan to maximize both our impact and our ability to bring in more partners and more funding.”
Enter Compass Pro Bono.
Over three months in the spring of 2026, a team of six professional volunteers took on a Decision Support project. The brief, in Sapreet’s words, was “to go from beginning to end with us to do a landscape audit, to do a competitive threat analysis, and to then work through recommendations — both an immediate 30-day action plan and a longer-term horizon action plan touching operations as well as positioning in the marketplace.”
The team interviewed across every stakeholder group — staff, board members, corporate partners, and peer volunteer organizations in other cities — and did its own research from publicly available sources. Members also joined a volunteer project themselves to see the experience from a corporate team’s side.
“Because the consulting team was so well balanced in terms of their professional backgrounds, they were able to come at it from so many different angles,” Sapreet says. “Which was really extraordinary.”
They came back with a clear analysis of where New York Cares was strongest, where it was exposed, and what to do about each — sequenced into the first 30 days, the next 90, and the six months after that. The project leader described the deliverable plainly as “a playbook for how they should respond and how they can make sure their organization is resilient.”
The team presented to staff and board on June 17, 2026. Within a week, staff were meeting internally to work out which recommendations to take up first. Within ten days the work had been folded into a board committee’s strategic discussions. “This piece of work that these Compass Pro Bono volunteers did is like the gift that keeps giving,” Sapreet says — pointing not only to the report but to the muscle her team built in executing against it.
Sapreet has continued to encourage other nonprofits to consider Compass for strategic support, and plans to submit another project proposal for New York Cares in the future.
“What we set out to do, they delivered. It’s as simple as that. You hope for that and expect that when you’re paying for services, but to get it in a pro bono capacity is just an even bigger gift. It allowed us to not just get to the place we needed to be to attack this problem, but it also allowed me to use other resources to deliver the mission.”
What Compass Delivered
- $73,216 in pro bono consulting value, delivered by six Compass volunteers over three months
- 20 stakeholder interviews across staff, board, corporate partners, and peer organizations in other markets
- A landscape audit and competitive threat analysis
- Recommendations in four areas, sequenced into a 30/90/180-day action plan
- Internal action within one week of the final presentation; board committee discussion within ten days
