TPI Fundraising Team Meeting

We are having our first meeting of the Fundraising Team this Tuesday. We will be joined by April Mitchell, Executive Director of Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center, and Nan Little Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, both with some great experience in fundraising.

I’ve gone through our volunteer forms and invited everyone who said they had an interest in gaining experience in fundraising. This meeting isn’t specifically closed, but we want to focus on persons with an interest in being actively involved in this team.

If you haven’t received an email invitation but would like to join us, please call Nell at 214-394-9835 to let her know you would like to attend.

The hope is that we use this meeting to look at some general ideas around approaches to fundraising, determining need, determining the value of our work (April has a good understanding of that), and considerations for fundraising for grassroots empowerment organizations—that is, how does fundraising further community empowerment.

The email included links to some helpful resources for those specifically invited, and we include them here if you are interested as well.

— An article about Incite!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded conference and its impact on non-profit funding (http://www.incite-national.org/sites/default/files/incite_files/resource_docs/6634_lip-npic.pdf).
— Building a Grassroots Fundraising Program, by Dean Spade (http://srlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/GettingItRightFromStart.pdf). This article has some good ideas, not all of which have worked out as well as originally hoped.
— Fundraising Bright Spots (http://www.haasjr.org/resources/fundraising-bright-spots). This is a recent report looking at some success stories in fundraising using creative and non-traditional approaches. It includes information about some orgs doing successful trans justice work.