Workshops – Thursday 11am

The past few years have been pivotal for philanthropy. In the midst of simultaneous health, economic, and racial justice crises, foundations and philanthropists have shown how flexible they can be to support the immediate needs of communities across the U.S. Despite this, there is still uncertainty about what philanthropy as a sector even is. The sector exists in a narrative vacuum — a space where the lack of clear stories and abundance of ambiguous language allows different groups within and outside philanthropy to fill in the blanks with their own interpretations. As the sector works to respond to legitimate concerns, it — and foundations in particular — must also build its capacity to clearly describe the positive impact of the work, push back against false narratives, and build trust. In this session, we’ll share insights from social, behavioral, and cognitive science about how the philanthropic sector can address this narrative vacuum. We will dive deeper into the harmful narratives that exist around philanthropy and what actions we can take now to not only increase our transparency, but also shift how we view our role in the larger social change community. Lastly, we will describe our research into finding better stories and better language.

Communities Foundation of Texas will describe the regional mobilization that is underway to better coordinate services for Opportunity Youth. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is home to the largest number of young adults who are disconnected from school and work in Texas. The workshop will highlight data assets and innovative new research from Aspen, The Ray Marshall Center, and the Economic Mobility Systems to better target and track re-engagement interventions that put young people at the center.

There is heightened interest in nonprofit demographic data — to gain visibility into equity in the sector, uplift the work of BIPOC-led organizations, and direct resources to the communities they serve. But duplicate and disparate requests for this information have created a significant burden on the same nonprofits we pledged to support. How, then, can we gather crucial demographic data to center equity in our work but avoid placing additional burden on historically marginalized nonprofits to collect and report it? Candid is exploring solutions that also decrease the grantee burden. In this session, we will share new findings from ongoing research to identify and address barriers to nonprofit data sharing, such as privacy concerns, capacity constraints, and other insights from focus groups and direct conversations with nonprofits. We will provide practical guidance on how attendees can incorporate these findings into their data reporting requests and requirements. Participants will share how they are collecting demographic data to assess progress on equity, identify funding gaps, and more intentionally direct funding — while acknowledging concerns raised in our research to avoid cumbersome requests on nonprofits to share their data.

Black, Brown, and low-income neighborhoods have been racially zoned to disproportionately host toxic polluters along floodplains, highways, and switchyards. Downwinders at Risk, a local 30-year-old grassroots clean air and environmental justice nonprofit, is working with neighborhoods to reverse this racist zoning practice in Dallas. This session will provide an overview of the origin of the Neighborhood Self-Defense Project (NSDP) within different Dallas communities. This includes the work in the Floral Farms community from the Shingle Mountain crisis ; the more recent Singleton Corridor plan in West Dallas that led to the formation of Singleton Unidos and the GAFs Gotta Go campaign; and the NSDP’s evolution to support a citywide coalition advocating for major land reform and policy change across Dallas. You’ll come away with a better understanding of how neighborhood-based organizations can leverage local zoning and land-use policies to address the root causes of perpetual environmental racism.  

To advance racial equity in the nonprofit sector, we must shift the power at all levels — including in research and evaluation. Research in nonprofits has historically been grounded in white supremacist mindsets and ideologies that view impoverished neighborhoods and communities of color as passive recipients of services. In an effort to prove “what works,” the evaluation of services too often has involved external researchers coming in and validating or rejecting the work of that community, often leaving programs and communities under excessive scrutiny and unable to shape their own narratives. Recent years, however, have seen the increasing adoption of a different form of program design and evaluation — Participatory Action Research (PAR). In a PAR approach, the people who are closest to the issue being researched design the questions, plans, methods, and analysis, and drive the questions they want to answer, the information they share, the story they tell, and the changes and actions they want to spark. This session will discuss the impact and benefits of PAR, highlighting a recent PAR study led by MENTOR and Community Wealth Partners, to examine how philanthropy can make more impactful and equitable investments in the youth mentoring and social capital space.

Pegasus Park is a 26-acre campus dedicated to innovative companies and organizations across science, technology, health care, and social impact. Pegasus Park offers state-of-the-art facilities and amenities that enable the daily convergence of entrepreneurs, strategic business partners, social impact organizations, and North Texas’ biotech ecosystem. To strengthen North Texas as a globally recognized center for life science innovation, business, and social impact, Pegasus Park’s theory of change is focused on coordinating services and expanding resources across four key themes: physical space and infrastructure, collaborative relationships and human capital, access to financial capital, and opportunities for external/community engagement. Funded by private and philanthropic capital, Pegasus Park’s ability to generate profit, along with a strong sense of purpose for the community, sets the project apart from other mixed-use Dallas developments. 

For nearly a decade, the Sapphire Foundation has been developing an ecosystem of tools, capital, and structures that spark and grow sustainable, scalable impact. Join Chief Impact Officer Salah Boukadoum to find out what’s worked for the foundation and the lessons they’ve learned. If you’re new to impact investing, social entrepreneurship, or sustainable philanthropy, you’ll learn how to start. If you’re experienced, you’ll gain a framework and tools to strengthen your practices and collaborate more effectively with peers. Don’t miss this session if you’re a: funder seeking to achieve more with your resources, nonprofit looking for more sustainability and scale, impact investor looking for better models, or company seeking sustainable impact models.

In recent years, nonprofit policy advocates have put a lot of proverbial points on the board. While incomplete, major victories at the state and federal level have advanced the work of nonprofits nationwide.   How on earth did a universal charitable deduction come into existence for the first time in decades, and why haven’t those same brilliant advocates been successful in restoring it yet? Most importantly, what steps can we take this year and in 2024 to advance policies that help all people thrive?    In addition to getting updates on the latest policy issues affecting nonprofits, we’ll explore the landscape for 2024, consider how elections will influence policymaking, and strategize opportunities to advance effective policies together.