What It Actually Takes to Build a Program That Sticks
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Leesa Carter-Jones
President & CEO, Captain Planet Foundation
Every nonprofit leader I know is asked to answer the same question: “What’s your impact?” The question is fair. The problem is that too many programs answer it with the wrong data.
I’ve spent more than 25 years working in sustainability, environmental education, and nonprofit leadership. When I became President & CEO of Captain Planet Foundation, I inherited a legacy organization with a powerful brand and a genuine mandate to serve young people. What I wanted to build, specifically through our Green Heart STEM Challenge, was a program that didn’t just look good on a grant report, but actually changed what students believed was possible for themselves and their communities.
Here is what we’ve learned that actually requires.
Measure Completion, Not Just Participation
The most common mistake in program design is confusing enrollment with impact. We know how many students signed up. We know how many showed up. But did anything actually get done?
When we launched the Green Heart STEM Challenge, we designed it so that winning teams didn’t just receive applause, they received funding to do their project. We had great submissions. Students were pumped to win. But in that first year, only one out of nine teams actually implemented their winning project. That number was painful, but it was honest, and it told us exactly where the program was breaking down.
We fixed the gaps. The following year, we asked our funder, Accenture, to provide project-specific mentorship for the winning teams. Our completion rate rose to 50 percent. The year after that, we added mid-cycle reporting and check-ins from the CPF team. Completion rose to 70 percent. That is what meaningful measurement looks like: it has to be honest enough to sting when the number is low - and cause refinement.
Success Has to Bridge Ideas to Action
Most STEM challenges stop at ideation. Students generate brilliant ideas, winners are chosen, pictures are taken, and that’s it. We made a deliberate decision from the start that the Green Heart STEM Challenge would not follow that pattern.
Our structure has three non-negotiable elements. First, the idea itself has to be community-rooted. When students in Atlanta identify groundwater issues along Chattahoochee River tributaries and students in Houston identify unsafe drinking water in school fountains, they are not responding to abstract problems, they are solving issues they witness everyday. That specificity drives commitment.
Secondly, students need professional mentorship that treats their ideas as worthy of real investment and genuine collaboration. We pair finalist teams with corporate mentors who operate as project managers - working through budgets, timelines, and implementation plans with the same rigor they’d bring to any consulting engagement.
Third, accountability must be built into the structure from day one. Our student grant recipients submit interim and final reports, just like any other funded project. A 17-year-old DeKalb County student, named Maximo Luciani, used his Green Heart STEM Challenge project as the foundation for a Bloomberg Youth Climate Award, ultimately planting more than 1,000 live stakes along eroding creek banks in Atlanta. That outcome happened because the program structure gave him a framework for thinking bigger, and because adults treated his work as meaningful.
What Actually Limits Program Success
In my experience, the biggest limiter is not funding, though funding matters. It is the gap between what a program promises and what its infrastructure can actually deliver. Programs scale before they’ve solved the implementation problem. They recruit more participants before they’ve understood why previous participants didn’t finish.
The second major limiter is underestimating educators.
Teachers are not delivery mechanisms for curriculum that someone else designed, they are the program. In our model, educators do the first round of judging. They guide early ideation. They know which students are struggling and which ones are about to surprise everyone in the room. A program that doesn’t invest in teacher experience will always plateau.
The third limiter is underestimating young people. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not waiting to be told what the problems are — they already know. What they need is more organizations to take their ideas seriously and give them the support to act on them.
Nearly 5,000 students are currently working through the 2026 Green Heart STEM Challenge across 71 schools and 11 states. Some of their ideas will change things in ways we won’t fully understand for years. But their programs will get implemented. That is what impact looks like when it’s designed to last.
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