LEE
Services: Training & Capacity Building | Convening Design & Facilitation | Network Architecture
DSS helped LEE scale its influx of up to 200,000 college-aged members by building the capacity of the organization to adopt youth-centered practices, designing new youth pilot programs and codifying a strategy for their convenings to support a distinct youth leadership member journey
THE REALITY
LEE is a nonpartisan network that provides 1:1 coaching and skill building to inspire members to pursue roles as elected leaders or community organizers. They build this network by serving program alumni of their partners such as Teach for America.
In 2025, LEE formed partnerships with a pipeline of high schools, an opportunity that would grow their network from 60,000 to 200,000 over the next year. To support these younger members who are earlier in their civic and professional journeys, they came to DSS to help them seize this opportunity.
OUR APPROACH
To support LEE’s transformation, DSS guided over 15 senior team members through a series of capacity-building sessions to assess organizational readiness for engaging its youth members and facilitated cross-functional teams in designing youth-focused pilots projects where they could put these learnings into practice. Alongside this internal alignment, DSS developed a comprehensive Convening Playbook to reimagine how LEE’s local and national summits contributed to onboarding and deepening engagement with members before, during and after convenings. The Playbook introduced scaffolded programming to meet LEE members where they are in their civic journey and introduced templated run-of-show materials to make event planning more efficient and consistent across regions.
THE IMPACT
A comprehensive Convening Playbook that is supporting LEE in convening thousands of youth members annually
Three new pilots developed including a program to support members in pursuing elected positions on campus and a storytelling fellowship that is transforming LEE’s social channels into a megaphone for member leadership journeys
Buy-in and enthusiasm from senior leadership to support ongoing investment in youth-centered practices across the organization
DSS Vice President, Max Steinman facilitating a Public Narrative workshop, a new offering we introduced as part of LEE’s Inspire summits
The DSS team facilitating a capacity building session focused on identifying core LEE offerings to adapt as pilot programs for their youth members
Interested in increasing the capacity of your organization to incorporate youth-centered practices into your programming?