The nonprofit DiscoverE raises awareness about engineering experiences and careers and promotes student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Its signature program, Future City, engages middle and high school students in a project-based STEM competition where they collaborate to design innovative cities of the future.
Expanded access to joyful, hands-on STEM learning opportunities, like ones provided by Future City, is critical to creating more pathways to future engineering careers, a particularly timely goal given the anticipated shortage of qualified workers in the U.S. STEM sector. Research shows that STEM education programs can increase career interest, especially before eighth grade, increasing a student’s likelihood to persist in STEM careers.
An Overdeck Family Foundation grantee since 2021, DiscoverE utilized grant funding to help scale Future City, growing the program’s reach from 67K students in 2024 to 84K in 2025, a 143 percent increase. In addition to general operating support, Overdeck Family Foundation provided a series of targeted capacity-building supports to help DiscoverE advance the scalability, sustainability, and impact of Future City.
“Overdeck Family Foundation’s capacity-building supports have been an invaluable resource for our team as we determine a business model that allows us to scale our programs for greater impact,” said Kathy Renzetti, executive director and CEO.
The first support DiscoverE engaged in was a revenue model workshop series to help its leadership team develop a more diverse and sustainable revenue model. After identifying mission-aligned earned revenue opportunities, the team was able to create a new earned revenue strategy, including launching a registration and finals fee structure for the new high school program and hiring a fundraising lead to support the leadership team in achieving its revenue goals. Once implemented, these key shifts contributed to 12 percent growth in total revenue and 65 percent growth in earned revenue for the organization.
“With the Foundation’s support, we were not only able to focus on identifying earned revenue sources, but also on building the capacity to implement new strategies,” said Thea Sahr, deputy executive director at DiscoverE.
With a strategic revenue model in place, DiscoverE then had support to pursue a deeper understanding of its programmatic cost to uncover cost-effective scale pathways. The team completed a cost analysis exercise with an Overdeck Family Foundation provider to more deeply understand program costs, both for DiscoverE and its implementation partners. Using these insights and revenue goals, DiscoverE identified where programs can earn revenue to cover operational costs and where contributed revenue can ensure continued participation for students and classrooms that needed financial support.
Next, the team received additional support to develop an actionable plan to scale its programs. Utilizing the lean testing methodology, it explored solutions to the key issue of educator retention. As a result, the organization has already seen a three percent increase in educator retention across its programs, in addition to an uptick of regions with greater than 40 percent retention. In its most recent year of operation, DiscoverE grew its reach by 24 percent.
Over the course of DiscoverE’s growth journey, our foundation staff has also played an active role in helping advance the organization’s rigor of evidence to better demonstrate its impact on students to schools and funders. In partnership with WestEd, DiscoverE is working on co-designing a validation study to estimate the causal effects of Future City on students’ STEM interest, engagement, identity, and confidence while gathering exploratory evidence on the impact of the program on educators’ confidence in delivering STEM instructional content. These findings have the potential to help DiscoverE both build a more rigorous evidence base for its programming and support continued scale.
Taken together, complementary capacity-building supports over several years have contributed to DiscoverE developing a strong revenue model with promising signs for scale, while also positioning the organization to pursue more rigorous evidence and ongoing strategic growth in the years ahead.
