Dallas Fort Worth Nonprofit Business Journal

Tag: DFW nonprofit news

  • New workforce initiative supports south Dallas women’s entry into high-growth, food system industries.

    United Way’s Southern Dallas Thrives launches a new Women’s Workforce Readiness Initiative in collaboration with PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America, Dallas College, and CitySquare.

    This 3-year initiative will provide up to 550 southern Dallas women with social support, technical-skills training, and soft-skills training needed to secure work in area high-growth food system industries like Advanced Manufacturing & Logistics, Sales & Marketing, Food & Hospitality Management.

  • Dallas County’s food insecurity rate is much higher than the national average

    The Dallas Eater reports the rate of food insecurity in Dallas County is 47 percent higher than the national average.  As large and small nonprofits struggle to fill the need, food insecurity has become a social justice issue. The Dallas Eater has compiled a list of large and small nonprofits providing free food distribution for North Texans in need of food or those looking to volunteer.                     

  • New McKinney social enterprise creates jobs for teens with disabilities.

    WFAA reports that Coffee & Crumbs provides jobs to high school and college aged kids with disabilities.  Dana Leach founded INKorporated Community to help kids with disabilities learn important life skills.

  • Teach for America DFW hires new Chief Operating Officer

    The Dallas Morning News reports that Teach for America DFW has a new COO. David Simpson is the new COO at Teach for America DFW. Simpson grew up in Dallas and reflects on how the community support and encouragement he received fuels his career choice and desire to help young people.

  • FEED Oak Cliff considers Nonprofit Grocery Store

    KERA reports on Dallas community leaders search to bring healthy food to South Dallas.  Feed Oak Cliff has spent four years trying to bring in a corporate grocery store. Feed Oak Cliff’s Founder and Executive Director Anga Sanders looked to Waco’s Jubilee Market for inspiration and experience in nonprofit grocery ventures.

  • Funders: Here’s a Tool to Make your Grantmaking More Equitable

    It is not a secret that I am not a big fan of the way grantmaking has been done in our sector. Often, the foundations who claim to be aligned with equity continue to use truly crappy funding practices that perpetuate inequity. As a reminder, only 7% of philanthropic dollars go to organizations led by and serving Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and POC communities, and 3% go toward serving disabled people, according to this summary by Candid. Trans communities, meanwhile, receive only .015% “or a penny for every $100.”

    If foundations are serious about moving funding to the communities that are most affected by systemic injustice, then their funding philosophies and practices must evolve. My previous organization RVC and I collaborated to develop this Equitable Grantmaking Continuum, based on our experience working with grassroots organizations led by and serving marginalized communities these past several years, and taking a few pointers from efforts such as Trust-Based Philanthropy and Grantadvisor.org. Here’s the full-version, and here’s the one-pager you can print out and hang on your wall. Use this tool to analyze how your foundation is doing and then start taking action. Here are things to keep in mind:

    This tool is a guide and as such it will change: Use this as a way to assess your foundation’s grantmaking practices, think about why you do things a certain way, what impact you may be having, and what things you can do differently. This tool, however, is not set in stone. Communities are not monolithic, and we expect nonprofits may disagree with some of the items in this assessment. That’s good and healthy. We’ll take feedback and change and adapt as we go along.

    As with all tools, thoughtless usage may further inequity: April Nishimura, RVC’s Director of Capacity Building, brings up a good point: “If item 1 (targeting giving to marginalized communities) is not achieved, then a lot of these practices can exacerbate inequities by locking up a lot of foundation’s money into multi-year grants based on an insular grant-making process of who they know and trust (aka white-led orgs).” This is critical to consider. If funders are not intentional, then “improving” grantmaking processes often only end up further helping the organizations that already benefit most from the system.

    Do not spend time in toxic intellectualization: By this we mean funders spending endless hours in meetings debating these points, wasting months or years trying to make sure things are perfect before implementing. It’s important to do research and reflection, but honestly marginalized communities are exhausted waiting on funders to take meaningful action. Stop dilly-dallying in the name of “due diligence” or whatever and get stuff done, even if it’s not perfect.

    Be OK making mistakes and failing: Taking action means on occasion we will make mistakes, and some people might get mad. You need to be OK with that. The alternative is continuing a system where funders are so terrified of liabilities and being called out that they maintain the status quo. Equity work is messy. We will all make mistakes. Set a good example by embracing mistakes and failures, learning from them, and allowing other funders to do the same.  

    Take a public stand on equity: Some funders in private say that they are focusing on getting funding to communities that are most affected by systemic injustice, but they refuse to admit this in public. If this is your foundation, get over it. You cannot advance equity without courage. The first and most important item in this tool assesses whether you are “color-blind” in your grantmaking or if you are intentionally moving funding to marginalized communities. If you are serious about advancing equity and planning to focus funding on marginalized communities, be public about it and help normalize this practice.

    This does not substitute for more radical shifts in philanthropy: If you find this tool helpful, that’s great, but understand that many of the items here represent an incremental approach to improving grantmaking. We simultaneously need to work on more radical solutions, such as increasing the minimum payout rate, abandoning grant proposals altogether, and exploring different forms of grantmaking such as participatory grantmaking. Most importantly we need to reform inequitable systems, such as changing the tax codes so that rich people pay their fair share of taxes. 

    Take a look at the tool (again, here’s the full-version and the one-page version). Like any other tool, it won’t solve all the problems, but it can be a good start. Discuss with your board and staff. Go through each item and see where you can move from Level 1 or 2 to Level 3. See where you can improve even beyond that.

    And if you get stuck or overwhelmed, just remember this ancient proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, give Multi-Year General Operating Dollars (MYGOD), invest in BIPOC leaders, and knock it off with all the BS in your grant applications.”

  • Answers on Grant Reports if Nonprofits were Brutally Honest with Funders

    Hi everyone, this Friday is my birthday. If you want to help me celebrate, please donate to Mujer Al Volante, an awesome organization with the mission of helping “immigrant women become independent and empowered through obtaining a driver’s license, financial sustainability, and community support.” Mujer Al Volante does amazing and important work; thanks for supporting it. Don’t worry about me; I got myself some dark chocolate and a 3-pound bucket of Maldon salt, so I’m good until next year.

    Grant reports. We all love to hate them. A reason is that like most things related to grants, we’ve learned to tell funders what we think they want to hear. Imagine if we could be honest, though:

    1. What progress did you make on your proposed outcomes? You and other funders have created an atmosphere of absolute risk-avoidance, so we only proposed outcomes we knew we would likely achieve. So we achieved them. Sometimes we stare wistfully at the distant horizon, imagining a world where we are supported to pursue ambitious, visionary goals, which may include failing spectacularly a few times.
    2. What obstacles did you encounter this grant period? Just the usual stuff: Severe community needs, understaffing, overwhelmed and underpaid staff, lack of funding, micromanaging and/or clueless board members, donors who don’t get it, funders like you who make our lives difficult, a pandemic, systemic racism, white moderates focused more on respectability than equity and justice, pervasive generalized existential anxieties, and a cease-and-desist from MacKenzie Scott.
    3. What are some critical lessons you learned? We learned several important lessons, including that it is crucial to get community input and ownership before launching new programs, cultural dynamics affect everything, and that if you don’t take care of mice problems, it may lead to rattlesnake problems when the office is empty for months at a time. But the main lesson we learned is that we’re all exhausted and this system is untenable and rich people should stop putting money into wealth-hoarding vehicles and just pay their taxes.
    4. What are your program priorities for the next period? Our main priority is to ensure that this program remains running. It’s been touch-and-go. Maria, who has been the instrumental program lead, is seriously considering resigning because we don’t have enough funding to pay her what she’s worth. If she leaves, it will cause a severe chain reaction that may cause the implosion of the program. A lot is riding on this $50 gift certificate for food delivery and a virtual thank-you note signed by the rest of the staff and board.
    5. How did you spend the grant that we provided you? The grant you gave us went into our bank account, which is used to pay for everything. Disaggregating what you paid for versus what others paid for is one of those meaningless time-wasting activities you force on us that harm our work. Here’s a detailed financial report of every expense we made this year. Look through it, and if it makes you feel better to think that you paid for books for low-income children and not staff salaries or whatever, please use your own time to craft that delusion.
    6. Were there significant changes in your budget? Yes. Due to COVID-19, our budget decreased 40%. Unfortunately, we could not get out of our office lease, even though everyone was working from home and the office was empty most of the time except for the rattlesnakes. We had to lay off half the staff and furlough the rest. We’re not the only organization severely affected. Seriously, you should significantly increase your payout rate beyond the legal minimum of 5% (3.5% in Canada) to support the orgs and communities that are suffering.
    7. How much in funding did you gain through leveraging our support with other funders? We do drop your name whenever it made sense to do so when talking to other funders, quietly assessing whether your name would motivate other funders or piss them off. But how much funding resulted from all that, who the hell knows; there are all sorts of confounding variables. Instead of playing these weird funding games, why don’t you just talk to the other funders and collectively fund us so we don’t waste time “leveraging” and can do our work?
    8. Please share a short story that illustrates the impact of this grant on the community you serve: “Eddie,” 13 years old, comes from a low-income household and was three grades behind when he reached our program. After six months, we noticed vast improvements, not just with his grades, but with his general outlook on life. His parents noticed too and came to thank us. We said, “We owe it to the XYZ Foundation; they’ve been supporting the program.” And the parents said, “That’s wonderful! Will the program be around next year?” And we said, “We are not sure; most grants, including from XYZ Foundation, are only for one year.” A shadow fell over their faces, bleak as the winter skies.
    9. How has COVID affected your organization and programs? For the hundredth time: Donations have decreased, everyone is working from home, program hours have been cut, community members are in crisis everywhere, team morale has been down, and we’re not sure if these follow-along-at-home wine and cheese tasting kits we’re sending donors will work. On the other hand, there’s been a surplus in the office snacks budget line item, and the internecine wars over giant pads of sticky paper have ended, so that’s something.
    10. Is there anything else you would like to share with the Foundation? The amount you gave us is not big enough to warrant this unique grant report we just spent several hours writing. We can save ourselves and the Foundation a lot of time if you and other funders just accept the annual report we write, which has a lot of information. If COVID taught us anything, it’s that we don’t have a lot of time to waste with these ridiculous shenanigans cloaked as “best practices.”

  • American Family Insurance to invest $105 million in equity initiative

    Over the next five years, American Family Insurance will invest $105 million in addressing equity gaps nationwide through its Free to Dream Initiative. Funding will focus on economic empowerment, education and health equity, climate resilience, criminal justice reform and workforce diversity, equity and inclusion through the American Family Institute for Corporate and Social Impact and the American Family Insurance Dreams Foundation.

    Read more at the Philanthropy News Digest.

  • Fort Worth Philanthropist Paul E. Andrews, Jr. dies.

    Founder of the Paul E. Andrews Jr. Foundation, Paul E. Andrews, Jr., died this week. He was 78. Through his personal and foundation giving he has funded critical investments in Tarrant County organizations such as ACH Child & Family Services, Lena Pope, Baylor Scott & White and many many more.

    Read more at the Fort Worth Business Press.

  • Leadership ISD earns transformational investment from Rainwater Foundation

    Anti-racism efforts in Texas public education just got a big boost. Leadership ISD (LISD), which has focused its work on the intersection of racial justice and educational excellence in Dallas ISD, Houston ISD and Fort Worth ISD for the last 10 years, announces it has received a $1 million investment from the Rainwater Charitable Foundation to enhance those efforts.

    “Racial equity matters in our schools, and policies that contribute to systemic racism must be reformed if our school systems are to achieve at high levels. LISD has changed how school boards and communities engage with public education in our urban districts and, increasingly, in surrounding districts. It is our hope that LISD will significantly improve opportunities and outcomes for students across the state,” said Jeremy Smith, Rainwater Charitable Foundation President. 

    The Rainwater Charitable Foundation, founded in 1991 by the late Richard E. Rainwater, seeks out educational impact organizations with measurable success, strong leadership and the ability to scale.  Believing LISD was just such an organization, the Rainwater Charitable Foundation recently invested $1 million to deepen LISD’s racial equity impact on public education in Texas. 

    Leadership ISD’s change approach includes:

    • Engagement and Advocacy Programs – Equipping diverse leaders with the access, knowledge and tools to demand and create meaningful change for students of color.
    • RE.A.L. (Racial Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership) Academies – Activating our communities to advance leaders, practices and policies that eliminate achievement and opportunity disparities so black and brown children can thrive.
    • Governance Training – Increasing the efficacy of school boards so that they focus on improving student outcomes and eliminating opportunity gaps through goal setting and policy. 

    To date, LISD has equipped more than 2,000 racially diverse and conscious leaders to create change and trained upwards of 200 school board trustees on equitable governance focused on improving student outcomes and closing opportunity gaps. The organization has also mobilized communities to take thousands of actions to advocate for student-focused and anti-racist policies and practices, locally and statewide.

    “We are honored to add the Rainwater Charitable Foundation to our circle of equity impact investors. This investment will increase the number of system-level policies and practices that improve student experiences and outcomes which will close racial disparities in our current service areas and accelerate our expansion into other districts around the state,” says Patricia Arvanitis, CEO of LISD.