20 Years, A Season of Celebration
This year marks Mission Capital’s 20th Anniversary. For over two decades, our nonprofit has been equipping and connecting mission-driven leaders, organizations and networks as we seek to advance equity and opportunity in Central Texas.
Mission Capital’s History in Central Texas
We were founded in 2001 as the Austin Nonprofit Resource Network which soon became, Greenlights for Nonprofit Success. Our origin story was made possible through the collaborative and cross-sector efforts of community and business leaders, nonprofit executives, board members, and philanthropists who believed that nonprofits were an essential part of our community infrastructure and social safety net. We exist because of the visionary community volunteers, funders, philanthropists and hundreds of nonprofit partners that have trusted Mission Capital for the past two decades, as a “guide on the side”.
For those of us who can remember, in 2001 our Central Texas region was undergoing rapid growth on the heels of the technology boom. In 2001, I graduated with a master's degree from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin and had just begun a new job with Accenture’s Public Sector Consulting practice in Austin. The future seemed bright and our Central Texas region full of possibilities... until the tech bubble burst, and we began seeing the consequences of rapid growth, gentrification, opportunity gaps and the growing socioeconomic divide, particularly for communities of color.
In 2001, Steve Murdock became the first official State Demographer of Texas, circuit-riding throughout the state with data charts forecasting population and demographic change and how we needed to prepare ourselves and invest in the rapidly growing diversity of Texas. Twenty years ago, Murdock was quoted saying, “The Texas of today, is the U.S. of Tomorrow”.
Over the last 20 years, Mission Capital has functioned as a place-based nonprofit capacity builder, strategic planning consultant, leadership development resource and membership hub for our Central Texas nonprofit region. We’ve also strengthened our organizational muscles to backbone collective impact work in the area of child welfare and philanthropy, data/evaluation and learning. And our organization has lived experience as well as consulting experience on nonprofit mergers and acquisitions.
As deep learners ourselves, we have grown and learned alongside our community partners through the milestones of our 20-year history.
2001
Our organizational journey began with Greenlights for Nonprofit Success led by Founding Executive Director, Deborah Edward, serving Travis, Williamson, Hayes, Bastrop and Caldwell counties. In our early years, Greenlights offered an array of services including: consulting, education, networking, and information services. By 2004, we’d launched the Greenlights Back Office program, offering in-house financial management/human resource services to nonprofits.
2005
As Greenlights began to grow as an organization, so did our programming, which included a nonprofit membership program of 350+ nonprofits coming together as peer nonprofit leaders to learn and strategize. We also began offering leadership and training opportunities for volunteer board members serving nonprofits and launched our first Crossroads Conference for nonprofit partners to share ideas and best practices. In 2006, our founding ED, Deborah Edward transitioned and passed the torch of leadership to Matt Kouri, who joined as CEO in 2007.
2010
Almost a decade into our work, Greenlights continued to scale our programmatic offerings in consulting and training, including nonprofit ED gatherings, and our annual Board Summit. We also provided support to OneStar Foundation and Texas partners organizing the Texas Nonprofit Summit. During this time (post 2009 recession), we were also supporting nonprofits through strategy and sustainability offerings and published a seminal research report, On the Verge: Value & Vulnerability of Austin’s Nonprofit Sector. During 2013-2014, we also began serving as a collaborative backbone for the emerging collaboration of the Travis County Collaborative for Children (TCCC) focused on reducing childhood trauma within the child welfare system, while achieving dramatic healing that nurtures families and permanency.
2015
From 2014-2015, Greenlights for Nonprofits formalized a merger with Innovation Plus, a local philanthropic group of skills-based volunteers connected to Social Venture Partners – a global network of engaged philanthropists. This merger of two organizations (Greenlights for Nonprofits and Innovation Plus) resulted in a post-merger rebrand to Mission Capital. This combined work included innovative programming and partnerships with Social Venture Partners, supporting nonprofits with earned revenue modeling, scaling for impact and social enterprise expertise. In 2015, Mission Capital also began to backbone a collective of funders dedicated to supporting data, evaluation and learning for social impact (for funders and nonprofits alike). Known as Good Measure, this collective group co-created signature program offerings such as: Data Leaders Academy, Measuring What Matters, and the biannual Data Institute.
2020
In 2017, CEO Matt Kouri concluded a decade of service with Mission Capital, as he passed the baton of leadership to Madge Vásquez as CEO in 2018. The Mission Capital board and staff signaled their commitment to adopt an explicit racial equity commitment, and thus an era of deep internal capacity building, learning and unlearning began. In 2019, Mission Capital adopted a strategic plan to center racial equity, with 3 goals: 1) Close the racial leadership gap in Central Texas, 2) Increase organizational resilience and sustainability, and 3) Expand collaborative networks – all with the bold vision of advancing equity and opportunity in Central Texas.
Mission Capital’s Work Now and Into the Future
In the midst of this, during the Spring of 2020, our world was halted by the global pandemic of COVID-19. Over the last 18+ months, Mission Capital has sought to deepen relationships and rapidly respond to the needs of our community partners, funders and neighbors Our team has expanded collaborative efforts with partners (i.e. the COVID-19 Pulse Surveys, Mental Health, and Digital Equity & Inclusion convenings) as we all continue to navigate the triple pandemic of COVID-19, national racial reckoning and economic instability.
Moreover, we seized this moment of disruption to intentionally revamp external program offerings, while still engaging in our personal learning and transformation work as a staff and board. This included the creation of new offerings such as: Race to Lead, Central Texas Brief, Implicit Bias Learning Circles, Austin’s Compounding Institutionalized Racism, WeThrive BIPOC CEO/ED Coaching Circles and Nonprofit Mentorship programs. It also included the collaborative spin-off of SVP Austin, as an independent nonprofit organization in 2020.
As we look ahead at the next 20 years, Central Texas will be a diverse “global majority” region. For decades, we’ve witnessed the impact of historical, structural and systemic racism on people of color and our communities, creating deep disparities where people of color fare worse than their white counterparts across most social and economic conditions. The Central Texas social sector is vital to providing adaptive leadership and resources that support our local communities. To do this effectively, we must critically examine our own organizations’ role in perpetuating existing disparities in the communities we serve, and proactively shift mindsets, practices, and systems that embrace community wisdom and advance community potential.
Join Us This Fall
As Mission Capital commemorates our 20th anniversary in a virtual environment and leans into a Season of Celebration, we hope that you will join us this fall for the below community events that are at no cost to our nonprofit community:
A Place Like Home: Story-Telling for the Global Majority – Oct. 26
What We’ve Learned – Oct. 27
Good Measure Event: Advancing Equity thru Data & Evaluation – Nov. 4
Digital Rights, Data & Technology – Nov. 16
We would also like to invite you to try one of our newest offerings. This is part of a new line of equity workshops that we started rolling out last year:
Power, Privilege and Shared Leadership – Oct. 21
For more information visit our 20 Years, Season of Celebration page.