atlanta venture philanthropy initiatives

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From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced economic shutdown that followed, our early research showed that there were gaps in emergency funding provided to women-led nonprofits, particularly those led by women of color. 

In early 2021, as we saw this resource gap continue to widen, we decided to launch a proof-of-concept initiative to help bridge the gaps.  

We selected Atlanta for our project home base because the city offers both a rich history and a vibrant culture of encouraging social entrepreneurship in Black and Brown communities, albeit not always to new startups. 

Our strong Atlanta professional networks in the social impact ecosystem also helped us get off to a running start when designing and implementing the initiative.  

Based on our own size and expertise, we decided to provide small catalytic seed grants coupled with customized fundraising guidance that would help attract additional investment and build capacity within the nonprofit organizations we selected. 

We enlisted Changing Our World, a philanthropic and fundraising consultancy, to partner with us on the project.  

 Because we knew there would be many organizations and leaders to consider, we wanted to explore innovative ways to identify and vet potential candidates. We knew from our previous work with social entrepreneurs that grantors’ application processes often put a heavy burden on the time and resources of small organizations — time that could usually be better spent in providing direct services.  

Putting the needs of the social entrepreneur first was a core principle we tried to embed in our work. We did not want to add work for under-resourced nonprofit leaders with requests for information that we could collect on our own. This meant that we needed to do our own due diligence process based on gathering research from public sources.  

• We started by doing an analytical scan of registered nonprofits in Georgia to identify small organizations (budget under $1M), led by women (preferably Women of Color), and serving diverse populations. 
• We also used our personal knowledge of — and networks in — the Atlanta social impact ecosystem to identify a strong roster of potential social entrepreneurs for support.  This provided us with an initial list of 80 nonprofits. 
• We collected IRS 990’s, website tear-sheets, Guide Star profiles, and Linked-In resumes from the Internet for each of the 80, used this information to hone the list to 30, and then prepared detailed briefs on each candidate. 
• Based on review, discussion, and scoring by our expanded team, we narrowed our list to 13 women (11 Women of Color) social entrepreneurs we wanted to meet.  
• Only after this process of educating ourselves did we reach out to them.  In our first conversations, we continued to apply our core principle of putting the entrepreneurs’ needs first and only requested information from them that we could not find ourselves and that we thought would be easy for them to provide, like already-prepared grant applications to other funders.  
• We compensated each of the 13 for the time they spent helping us learn more about their organizations and Atlanta’s social impact ecosystem. Though the grants were small ($1,000), we felt it was important to respect and value time spent with us that might take away time from the responsibilities of running their organization.  
• We also decided to provide customized support plans rather than asking the entrepreneurs to fit into pre-defined programs.  
• At the same time, we tried to make it clear — even from these initial conversations — that we would need some dedicated time from them for this to be a beneficial experience. We wanted to set realistic expectations about time requirements from both sides.  We were mindful to select organizations where our skills — in fundraising, marketing, data analytics, and capacity building — would be most helpful. This “fit”, while hard to quantify, was essential for a successful and beneficial relationship.

We selected five women-led nonprofits for hands-on consulting and fundraising support: 

• Robin Chanin, Executive Director, Global Growers Network 

• Rachel Davis, CEO, The Edge Connection — Greater Wealth Works 

• Gigi Pedraza, Executive Director and Founder, Latino Community Fund 

• Amber Scott, Founder and Executive Director, Leap Year 

• Kristina Smith-Newton, Founder and Executive Director, HYPE 

In addition to seed grants for capacity-building, we provided tailored pro bono consulting services to each of the five organizations over a period of several months.  Specific deliverables from our engagements included:  

• Executive coaching and the opportunity to discuss revenue generating and organizational capacity building strategies with a team of professional fundraising and social impact consultants 
• Customized fundraising strategies for new or renewed relationships with funders 
• In-depth funder research for prospects Key marketing messaging for funders, board members, and volunteers Market research 

In 2021 we launched a proof-of-concept initiative to support women-led nonprofits in Atlanta, GA. 

The key take-aways from our initiative are:

• Unsurprisingly, capital is the greatest need for women startup social entrepreneurs and leaders. 

• Social entrepreneurs are also looking for more training, mentorship, and personal and professional development opportunities that lower barriers to entry into fundraising networks where women and people of color may not have been traditionally included. 

• Lack of visibility in traditional fundraising networks is a major challenge for small, startup social enterprises in procuring new funding. 

• More unrestricted funding is needed for small organizations to do their work and add human resources to address the lack of time leaders have available to build their organizations. 

• The importance of networks cannot be overstated. Social entrepreneurs don’t necessarily know all the players in their field and often don’t have the time or resources to find them. 

• Being a startup social entrepreneur can be a lonely role — many entrepreneurs appreciate having a sounding board for decision-making. Even with coaching and support, facilitating connections to new funders is a long-term process. 

• Introductions don’t necessarily lead to securing meetings, meet-and-greets do not preclude having to fit into the grantors’ standard timelines and processes, and funding is often constrained by size and type of organization.   

• Each of the nonprofit leaders we selected is working to preserve the authenticity of her community and culture. 
• We gained a great deal of respect for the resilience, passion, and creativity each woman leader demonstrates daily to make a positive difference in the lives of others.  
• In our program evaluation follow-up conversations, participants indicated that they found their involvement in this initiative helpful. 
• Those with the resources available to reach out to recommended funders with the key messages we developed were able to “hit the ground running” using the deliverables we provided. 
• Social entrepreneurs with small staff found the coaching and opportunity to “bounce off ideas” with our consultants particularly valuable. 
• Many appreciated our team’s active listening approach to consulting. 
• Several expressed the need for additional hands-on help with communication to stakeholders — particularly around social media — to help build awareness about their good work.