Dallas Fort Worth Nonprofit Business Journal

Category: Features

  • Fort Worth welcomes a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization

    News outlining the decline of local journalism in this country has been prolific in the last five years (ironic, right?). The traditional for-profit business model for many local news organizations was no longer profitable. Thousands of news organizations went out of business and many Americans now lived in “news deserts.”

    Despite its size, Fort Worth wasn’t immune to this national trend and several years ago a group of local civic and business leaders began discussing the need and looking at other models. This group commissioned audience research and focus groups that ultimately validated the need and desire for more substantial local coverage of government, arts, education, business and health.

    In order to sustain such coverage, a nonprofit news model was launched with seed funding from The Burnett Foundation. The Fort Worth Report is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that relies on a broad base of charitable support from individuals, foundations, and businesses to deliver more substantive local news coverage.

    “By supporting our nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization, donors can help us tell local stories that would otherwise go untold. These are stories that hold government officials accountable, fairly report the facts about issues that affect us all, and connect our splintered communities. Strong local journalism gives our community members the facts they need to become more informed, engaged and empowered, making Tarrant County a better place for all of us, ” says The Fort Worth Report Publisher and CEO, Chris Cobbler.

    The Fort Worth Report’s board of directors includes several local business and civic leaders, including co-chair Wes Turner, former publisher of the Star-Telegram; co-chair Bill Meadows, a longtime civic and business leader; John Lumpkin, former director of the TCU journalism school; entrepreneur Jonathan Morris of Hotel Dryce; and Rachel Navejar Phillips, a marketing executive.

    The Fort Worth Report has a three-year plan to expand their newsroom to 22 staff, including 18 reporters and editors by 2022. To achieve this, the organization will need to raise approximately $2 million each year after its first year of operation.

    Having launched just a few months ago, The Fort Worth Report now joins the philanthropic funding game with all of us.

    Disclosure: Barbara Clark-Galupi is a member of the volunteer Community Advisory Council for the Fort Worth Report.

  • Children at Risk issues preliminary summary on legislative achievements and lost opportunities for Texas children

    Children at Risk issues preliminary summary on legislative achievements and lost opportunities for Texas children

    Children at Risk recently released a child-focused 87th Legislative Session recap outlining missed opportunities and legislative wins. During the recent session, Children at Risk registered support for bills 93 times, provided impactful written testimony 21 times, and provided oral testimony 20 times.

    Early childhood education, human trafficking and child exploitation, children’s health and nutrition and family well-being all saw legislative wins. According to the recap, public education and childhood racial disparities saw minimal, if any gains.

    Children at Risk is expected to release a full legislative report in the coming weeks.

  • 286 teams, some local, receive share of $2.7 billion donation for “empowering voices the world needs to hear”

    Mackenzie Scott announced another significant round of donations today in a blog post on Medium. Congrats to local organizations like Big Thought for receiving this recognition of your work. But, equally – or arguable more – exciting as the donations is what she had to say about philanthropy’s norm of centering wealth and donors.

    “People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating. This is equally — perhaps especially — true when their work is funded by wealth. Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them. And despite those obstacles, they are providing solutions that benefit us all.

    Putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role. Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisors — we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others. Though we still have a lot to learn about how to act on these beliefs without contradicting and subverting them, we can begin by acknowledging that people working to build power from within communities are the agents of change. Their service supports and empowers people who go on to support and empower others,” wrote Mackenzie.

    Beyond the list of organizations receiving these donations, her announcement is well-worth the time to read and share, and share, and share, and share.

  • ACH Child & Family Services and employees named in lawsuit amid statewide foster care turmoil

    The family of a North Texas toddler Amari Boone who died on April 12, 2020 while in kinship care with the Texas foster care system has filed suit against ACH Child & Family Services and its employees involved in Amari’s care while in the custody of State. According to ACH Child & Family Services, this is first lawsuit it has experienced since becoming the first Single Source Continuum Contractor (SSCC) for foster care redesign in the state in 2014.

    Community-based Care is the State’s approach to overhauling the traditional foster care system that has been riddled with tragedies, inefficiencies and legal woes for decades. Community-based Care is designed to decentralize foster care services and allow smaller, regional providers the ability to use local knowledge, resources and strengths to improve outcomes for children in foster care. ACH is the regional provider for seven counties surrounding and including Tarrant.

    Amari’s death occurred during the initial weeks of the State’s transfer of case management, kinship, and reunification responsibilities to ACH. According to the State, “the SSCC will start by taking responsibility for new cases, while DFPS gradually transitions children with cases that are in progress to the SSCC.”

    While ACH utilizes insurance to mitigate its risk in operating and managing child welfare services for the State, it is unclear if that tool also covers the employees named in the suit.

    This suit comes at a time some are calling the most challenging year ever for the State’s foster care system. Earlier this year, reports of children sleeping in state offices for multiple nights began popping up all over the state. This was an early symptom to an almost 1,000 bed shortage.

    The bed shortage is the result of many factors, not least of which was the global pandemic. Recruitment of new foster homes during the Covid-19 pandemic ground nearly to a halt and because of the timeline involved in recruiting and licensing foster homes, the impact will still be felt for months to come. In addition, some foster care providers have pointed to an exodus of licensed foster homes to higher paying government services, like care for unaccompanied minors from the border.

    But the pandemic can’t be blamed for all of the current foster care system woes. The State continues to deal with the impact of a class action lawsuit that resulted in a legal mandate for improvement that the State has yet to reach nor the legislature willing to fully fund.

    This confluence of events and circumstances has led to increased scrutiny and unfunded mandates adding further pressures and risk to the nonprofit organizations operating in the system. The Children’s Shelter in San Antonio, recently canceled its own SSCC contract with the State and other providers have just closed citing among other things, liability risks.

    Additional Information:

    Dallas Morning News

    KSAT

    KXAN

    Texas Dept of Family and Protective Services

  • Animal rescue nonprofits get a big win in legislation

    Aprrrrroved without opposition, Texas Senate Bill 197, exempts the prices and fees for adopting pets from nonprofit animal shelters and similar organizations from any sales tax. The bill currently awaits Governor Abbott’s signature.

    Source: Caller Times reports

  • North Texas Pan Asian nonprofit releases white paper debunking “model minority” myths

    North Texas nonprofit, Ascend Leadership Foundation, announced the release of its latest white paper titled Model Minority Myth & The Double-Edged Sword. The paper addresses the popular American narrative of Asian Americans being perceived as the “model minority” and how this stereotype masks the bias that Asian Americans face in the workplace, in schools and in the communities in which they reside.

    The Ascend Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit Pan-Asian organization primarily engaged in research with a mission to advocate, enable and assist Pan-Asians in North America to become the leaders of today and tomorrow.

  • Rebrand for Goodwill Industries of Fort Worth

    The 71-year old Goodwill Industries of Fort Worth, Inc. that provides jobs and job training to individuals with disabilities and other barriers to employment, recently announced a rebrand to Goodwill North Central Texas.

    Goodwill North Central Texas has grown from its modest roots at 665 South Main with four employees serving only physically or mentally disabled residents of Fort Worth, to employing over 800 individuals and serving more than 10,000 people with disabilities and other barriers to employment in an 18 county service region.

    “Today, we serve communities far beyond the boundaries of Fort Worth…” said David Cox, President & CEO of Goodwill North Central Texas. “We are excited to make this change to a name that is truly representative of the diverse and unique communities across the 18 counties we serve in North Central Texas.”

    Along with the name change, Goodwill’s volunteer Board of Directors adopted a new mission and vision statement. The new mission of Goodwill North Central Texas is to CREATE Lives of Independence and BUILD a Stronger Local Community. The nonprofit’s vision is a North Central Texas where every person has the opportunity for maximum independence and abundant living.

    The organization will begin rolling out the new branding on their website, signage and other collaterals over the coming months.

  • $125 million dedicated to Asian American and Pacific Islander anti-hate initiatives

    Sonal Shah and actor Daniel Dae Kim discuss on CBS this morning the $125 million in funding available through The Asian American Foundation to combat alarming increases in Asian American and Pacific Islander hate crimes.

  • Fort Worth Foundations highlight funding priorities for 2021

  • Two Years of Strong Fundraising Returns Projected, plus Five Other Giving Predictions

    Chronicle of Philanthropy reports: A recent report from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy suggests a period of “broad philanthropic growth” is on the horizon for nonprofits over the next two years as the economy rebounds after the Covid pandemic.