In a couple weeks, it will be Christmas in the world of North Texas nonprofits. Sept. 21 is North Texas Giving Day, the nation’s largest community-wide giving event that raises money for nonprofits in the region. Nonprofits are encouraging their donors to participate in early giving, should they be inclined to give more or are unable to give on the 21st.
Details are below on one nonprofit encouraging early giving — specifically, how far even the price of coffee and breakfast at Starbucks for two goes when you donate by the end of Sept. 15.
Next week I will include a roundup of nonprofits to consider giving to on the 21st, but I would love to know your favorites. Please email me your North Texas nonprofit recommendations and why their cause is important to you.
If you’re currently feeling existential, and your core motivations, core values or “why” you were put on Earth aren’t currently clear, the NTX Giving Day website has a quick quiz you can take to discover your passions. All you have to do is click on the five images that resonate with you the most deeply, and they’ll email you a list of recommended nonprofits to give to. If only the answers to all of life’s questions were this accessible.
In other news, nominations open on Oct. 1 for the The Lawbook and Association of Corporate Counsel- Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter’s 2023 DFW Corporate Counsel Awards. So if you would like to nominate an in-house lawyer for the pro bono and public service award or the achievement in diversity and inclusion award, start brainstorming what they’ve achieved in these areas and in their professional careers and why else they are worthy of this award so that answering all of our questions in detail on the nomination form will be a breeze (life hack: the more detailed you get, the more likely your nominee is to be named a finalist).
The nominations for The Lawbook/ACC-Houston’s Houston Corporate Counsel Awards will open Dec. 1, so Houston folks, if you want to start brainstorming who you might nominate for their 2023 pro bono and DEI achievements, you can never start too early.
To get a sense of who has been honored in the past and what they’ve achieved, check out the profiles of the 2022 DFW winners, Juli Greenberg of GM and Mark Berg and Barry Thomas of Pioneer Natural Resources. The ACC-Houston winners in 2022 were Rishi Varma and Jude Andre of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Amy Blumrosen of Baker Hughes.
Lastly, this fall, the Texas Lawbook Foundation will begin profiling law firms and their in-house clients for notable partnerships they’ve accomplished for pro bono cases or diversity and inclusion efforts. If you have one you’d like to pitch, please email me.
The Latest
— Michael Hurst of Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann has joined the board of directors of Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas, a nonprofit partially funded by the Texas Access to Justice Foundation that protects the rights of low-income Texans in 114 counties in the DFW area and beyond by providing pro bono civil legal services. Hurst also currently sits on the board of New Friends New Life’s men’s advocacy group, the Dallas Bar Foundation and Genesis HERO. In 2018 he served as the president of the Dallas Bar Association, where he also founded the DBA’s Justice Forever Fund and served as chairman of the DBA’s Equal Access to Justice campaign.
— Speaking of LANWT, in advance of North Texas Giving Day the organization is currently offering donors the opportunity to double the impact of their contributions. Any donation of at least $1,000 made to LANWT now through Sept. 15 will go toward its dollar-for-dollar matching gifts campaign, which doubles the impact of donors’ contributions. To put dollars into context, LANWT says that even $25 provides simple legal advice for one client, a $50 donation helps create complex forms for legal advice, $150 funds negotiation assistance to prevent a family from becoming homeless and $250 covers the cost of obtaining a protective order for a domestic violence survivor.