A DAY FOR GIVING

North Texas Giving Day and the nonprofits who benefit

110 donations made every minute

$1,625,891 from East Dallas donors on NTGD

7,769

Donations given by East Dallas

Top 9 charities in our neighborhood were large organizations or private schools

$2,062,919

3 NONPROFITS, 3 APPROACHES, 3 SUCCESS STORIES

Nearly 8,000 neighbors donated to a variety of North Texas charities last year during North Texas Giving Day. The event, held this year on Sept. 22, is a huge fundraising opportunity for the area’s nonprofits. As you might expect, much of the attention is given to the local behemoths: places like the Dallas Arboretum, Promising Youth Alliance and the Dallas Leadership Foundation. These three groups combined brought in more than $455,000 last year.

But several East Dallas groups — ones without PR firms sending out press releases — manage to wrangle a large number of donors, sometimes grossing more individual donations than the big nonprofits.

A Duck Team For Dogs

Odds are you’ve probably never heard of Duck Team 6 Street Dog Rescue, but you know why its cause is important. Loose dogs have become a huge issue in Dallas, and it showed when it came time to donate last year. Duck Team 6 received 434 donations — the most of any East Dallas nonprofit (St. John’s Episcopal School came in second with 337). The last two years Duck Team 6 has been on top of the list of individual donors during North Texas Giving Day (NTGD).

Yvonne Ybarra, president of Duck Team 6, says her nonprofit depends on social networking to drive donations.

“We have a really engaged supporter base. They are definitely following us, so they know when this is coming up,” Ybarra says. “The majority of our donors are our current followers and supporters and they spread the word to their friends and family.”

The key to nailing a social media-driven fundraiser is timing, Ybarra says. You don’t want to begin too early. “Then people tend to tune us out.” But a few weeks ahead of time you need to start reminding people. And then when the big day actually arrives, you hit them hard.

“It’s kind of like all hands on deck on the day. We take shifts to make sure someone’s always on social media.”

It also helps when you can form a friendly rivalry. The first year Duck Team 6 participated in the NTGD, it was neck and neck with a bat sanctuary the entire day. Both groups started having fun with each other online and it earned them more attention.

“We were just feeding off each other. We both raised so much more money because of it,” she says.

That money helps the group with its core mission — rescuing dogs from the street and finding permanent homes for them — but it also helps with outreach and a spay and neuter program. Ybarra says education has become a huge part of what Duck Team 6 does.

“We’re trying to give the people all of the knowledge that we can to help this problem,” she says. “We don’t have as many capture attempts as we once did because, at the time, we were trying to handle everything ourselves. Now we’re trying to spread things out by doing more outreach. And our outreach requests have gone through the roof.”

A DO-GOODER COFFEE SHOP

Duck Team 6 wasn’t the only group to have a big day last year. Union Coffee, located off Dyer and Greenville, received 155 donations, sixth most in East Dallas.

The Rev. Mike Baughman, community curator for the neighborhood coffee shop, says much of the support his group receives is from coffee shop regulars, people Baughman calls “do-gooders.”

Baughman gave the customers the nickname because 10 percent of sales from Union go to other nonprofits and charities around the city. Every year the coffee shop selects three causes to donate money to, and filters through them every four months.

“That’s long enough so that we can really get some of our customers to really fall in love with that cause and work with it once we’ve moved on to another one.”

The coffee shop has donated money to the Junior Players, Project Transformation, Capes 4 Kids, Cafe Momentum, North Texas Tornado Relief and United Methodist Disaster Relief, to name a few.

“When we adopt a cause, we do more than just raise money for them. We intentionally raise awareness and engagement for them. Every time a person makes a purchase at Union, they are told about the cause they’re supporting,” Baughman says.

So, why donate to a coffee shop that filters money to other nonprofits? Well, that’s not all Union does.

It schedules events around each cause. When Union donated money to tornado relief, it organized volunteers to clean up and do roofing work on damaged homes. When it supported Junior Players — a group that brings children from all over Dallas together to work in the arts — Union hosted a get together so the young performing artists could talk to local artists who are making a living in the art world.

Charities all over East Dallas and beyond will be raising funds during this year’s North Texas Giving Day, set for Sept. 22. Head over to NorthPark Center to see the fundraising madness in live action, or donate online at northtexsgivingday.org.

One of the other things Union does is kind of intangible, Baughman says, but it involves creating connections. A few years ago Union launched Capes 4 Kids.

“Once a month Union turns into a cape-making factory. [Volunteers] create as many kid sized capes as possible and then they are delivered to children with chronic illnesses by volunteers dressed as superheroes.” That idea started with a customer who didn’t know how to get it off the ground, he says. “We were able to connect them to resources and people ... to make it a reality.”

Baughman says one of Union’s core values is apostleship — the coffee shop is connected to the United Methodist church — which is “kind of a ‘churchy’ way of saying entrepreneurship.”

Because of that, Union reaches out to the community in a variety of different ways. It started the Spoken Language Arts Movement, or S.L.A.M., the second Saturday

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Sore Throat Rashes of every month. The night features high school and middle school students performing spoken word poetry. Union also recently launched Flow, an organization that works for gender equity in the city.

It has opened the coffee shop space up to LGBTQ-friendly church services, an open storytelling night called The Naked Stage and monthly talks about race called The Conversation.

NTGD helps Union do all of that, Baughman says, because the donations help the shop cover operational costs. Most coffee shops aren’t normally as large as Union is. But most coffee shops don’t also turn into cape assembly lines every month.

A Creative Space For Writers

Unlike the previous nonprofits, The Writer’s Garret isn’t one of the new kids on the block. The literary learning center located in East Dallas recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. The group helps foster the love of writing and reading, especially in school districts where students don’t always get oneon-one attention, according to Audrey Turner, assistant program specialist.

The Writer’s Garret has always had a variety of programs to offer. The Word of Mouth Reading Series was established in 1995 and has brought a number of authors to the metroplex. The Writers Community and Mentor Program (C.A.M.P) offers college and graduate schoollevel training to those whose financial or time restraints prevent their pursuit of a traditional university degree.

Turner says that the garret recently set up a scholarship program for people affected by cancer and have started special programs for veterans and their families.

Those programs have been successful for the nonprofit and they largely depends on donations.

“It’s huge,” Turner says of NTGD. “It’s one of our biggest days, definitely.” Last year the group received 119 donations, which was the ninth most on the day.

Like Duck Team 6, Turner does a social media push and email blasts leading up to the event, and makes sure she and volunteers go all out on the day of the event. But they also have an old-school form of outreach. Much of the work done by The Writer’s Garret is done at schools and libraries, and that creates good word of mouth for the group. “We are fairly small in size, but we do reach a big audience.”

The dual outreach worked last year — that was Turner’s first year with the nonprofit.

The group hopes to go bigger this year. Turner has received more volunteers to help ask for donations and spread the word when the big days comes. “We started to get ready for this in June,” she says.

Her team has even discussed attending the event in person, which can lead to more funds.

If they do, Turner says her group will have some tough competition to deal with.

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STORY BY KERI MITCHELL | PHOTO BY DANNY FULGENCIO

When Kelly Ritchie was hired at Woodrow Wilson High School three years ago, she discovered a problem with the school’s vaunted International Baccalaureate (IB) program.

“I met with a lot of students who couldn’t explain IB or why they were in it,” she says.

“The community was confused about the requirements and also what the benefits were. There were teachers here who didn’t know about IB and didn’t support IB in theory but were working with our students, so that was creating real problems because of the disconnect.

“We had a handful of seniors who had made it that far but weren’t sure what they were doing or why they were doing it.”

From a marketing standpoint, Ritchie knew that IB was a hit for Woodrow and for the district.

But she also knew IB couldn’t succeed unless the program had total buy-in — and not just from eager parents.

“If you’ve got a child being drug through this program by the parents, it’s almost impossible to finish,” she says.

Ritchie knew her task: Make the IB program’s value to students live up to its hype.

WHAT IS IB ANYWAY?

Woodrow was the catalyst of IB curriculum in Dallas ISD, which has spread to eight other schools since 2009. The rigorous program previously was available only at select private and charter schools in Dallas.

When IB launched at Woodrow seven years ago, a parent-led “Choose Woodrow” campaign was in full swing, and public school families were exploring ways to attract other families back to DISD. The district needed a marketing plan, something exciting that would refocus parents’ interest in Dallas public schools.

A group of parents, teachers and administrators approached DISD with an idea: What if Woodrow became the incubator for the IB curriculum in Dallas? What if that working group could raise enough money to complete the lengthy application process and devise a curriculum to meet IB’s stringent requirements?

Would DISD fund the teacher training needed to offer the program and help promote it throughout the Dallas area?

The Woodrow IB group had a powerful ally with firsthand IB experience: Mike Morath, then DISD board member for the East Dallas/Preston Hollow area, graduated with an IB degree from Garland ISD and loved the program.

Morath backed the idea, the Woodrow IB group completed its fundraising and curriculum planning, and DISD provided the necessary tactical and financial support.

And in 2011, Woodrow became DISD’s flagship IB school.

The IB website defines the program like this: “(IB) is a nonprofit educational foundation offering four highly respected programmes of international education that develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills needed to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world… The IB has a hard-earned reputation for high standards of teaching, pedagogical leadership and student achievement. We work with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.”

IB students simply read more, write more and work harder than students in other programs, and the learning is said to be more holistic. Instead of students asking “Why do I need to learn this?”, the program is structured to make obvious what students can do with their newfound knowledge.

STOP. LOOK. LISTEN.

Once Woodrow was certified for IB, neighborhood parents’ unofficial PR machine kicked into high gear, students flocked to the program, and IB in Dallas public schools was off and running.

And then Ritchie came onto the scene.

She quickly identified the opportunities and the issues: To make things right with Woodrow’s program, the program’s promotion needed overhauling. That meant correcting misconceptions.

“There’s a perception that this program was for a particular demographic,” Ritchie says. “That’s absolutely not the case. Those statements come from people who don’t know our students. In the junior class, our [IB] minority students outnumber our white students.” intrinsically motivated, can meet deadlines,” she says. “It’s not, ‘Here, your test is going to be on this, be ready on Friday.’ ”

Her IB diploma candidates include students who will be the first in their families to go to college. Some have little to no support at home; some have parents who don’t speak English.

Skin color, family size, extracurricular portfolio — none of those characteristics determine whether a student will succeed or fail in IB, she says.

“There’s really no mold for IB,” Ritchie says. “It’s very much based on motivation. That’s the unifying factor for all of our students.”

The student who succeeds in IB will have “a love of learning, be

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“Those students may not earn the diploma, but it doesn’t matter because they’ve done something that students in much different situations couldn’t do or chose not to do,” Ritchie says.

Earning the diploma requires not just completing the program but scoring high enough on exams. Students who earn the diploma can be awarded as many as 24 credits at many colleges, and Ritchie says her graduates have used those credits to finish college early or

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Only 10 Woodrow graduates received the diploma in 2014 and 2015, the first two years with seniors who started in the IB program as freshmen. That number doubled this year — 21 earned an IB diploma — as did the number of juniors who opted to continue on the diploma path — 62 this fall, compared to 29 in fall 2013.

Those numbers should grow over time, but the diploma numbers themselves do not drive Ritchie, nor does she exit students from the program who don’t show potential to earn the diploma, as many other IB schools do to increase their passing percentages. The diploma is not the be-all, end-all of IB, she maintains; it’s icing on the cake.

IB’S IMPACT SPREADS TO FEEDER SCHOOLS

IB isn’t just for high school students. An affiliated program also is offered for elementary and middle schools.

In high school, students apply to become part of the IB program, however, for elementary and middle schools, the program is baked into the entire curriculum.

The presumed ability to raise the bar for all students encouraged Woodrow feeder schools J.L. Long Middle School and Robert E. Lee and Lipscomb elementaries to become IB schools. (Hillcrest High School and schools under its umbrella — Franklin Middle School along with Preston Hollow and Kramer elementaries — also have signed up as IB schools. DISD magnet Harry Stone Montessori now has an IB academy for its seventh-

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eighth-grade students.)

Woodrow, Long and Harry Stone are the only DISD schools authorized by the International Baccalaureate organization; the rest are in various stages of candidacy, which lasts at least three years as campuses work to implement IB instruction and philosophies.

IB schools accomplish two goals, says Tracie Fraley, executive director of Woodrow and its feeder schools: “attract people back, and raise the floor for everyone.”

That’s what Tiffany Yackuboskey says she has observed at Long over the past four years.

Yackuboskey was the school’s 2015-16 IB coordinator, but when she started at Long, she taught remedial classes. IB at Long is just as much for remedial students as it is for advanced students, she says. It doesn’t put them on the same level, but it pushes all of them to their own next level.

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Long hosted a student-led IB showcase last year for the community, and Yackuboskey marveled at the crowd’s diversity. People anticipated that an IB program at Long would “speak to” more affluent families in the East Dallas neighborhoods and “get them back in our doors again,” she says.

Those families were present at the showcase, but so were a lot of Spanish-speaking parents, who followed student translators through the classrooms, and parents of deaf and special education students. Teachers handpicked these parents’ children as shining examples of IB’s success.

“We don’t just learn math over here; we see that math happens in social studies.”

Yackuboskey remembers thinking: “These are the possibilities we’ve been waiting to see.”

As people walked through Long that night, they observed projects showing off IB’s holistic ideals. In one classroom, students had been asked to write a screenplay, with an accompanying movie poster, on what would happen if the moon didn’t exist.

“One kid incorporated Channing Tatum and Donald Trump into his story,” Yackuboskey says. “You can see how that type of learning in the classroom is way more impactful than if the kid just took notes on what the moon does and then took a test on it.”

IB instruction “gets the kids to take their learning to a deeper level that isn’t a multiple-choice test, but could be covered in a multiplechoice test,” Yackuboskey says.

Lipscomb principal Roxanne Cheek is seeing those effects at her own school, where “across the board, our students are thriving.”

Cheek says Lipscomb ranked in the top 10 percent of 200-plus elementary schools across the district this past year, with scores “above and beyond what they were the previous year.”

The “holistic approach to everything” is the key, says Keith Peeler, Lipscomb dad and chairman of the school’s site-based decisionmaking committee.

“We don’t just learn math over here; we see that math happens in social studies,” he says. “It’s the blending of it all. I don’t hear my kids struggling with one subject anymore.”

WHICH STUDENTS ENROLL IN IB?

At Long, Lee and Lipscomb, IB is for everyone. By the time students reach Woodrow, however, the program’s rigor steepens. The 95 students who will enter the program as freshmen this year were chosen from roughly 175 applications.

Those applications come from throughout Dallas. In Ritchie’s three years at Woodrow, about a third of her IB students attended Long, another third attended other DISD schools, and another third are private, charter or homeschooled students before they enter.

Ritchie and her team look carefully at the applicants — their writing skills (“The program is heavily writing based; there’s no real redemption in regard to that,” she says); their grades (“Sometimes a pattern leaves us wondering if they’re very serious about their work”); absences (“You really need to be able to be on campus absorbing material”); and indications of behavioral issues.

That said, Ritchie says she tries not to exclude students solely on their eighth-grade selves.

“We’ve extended invitations to kids who haven’t fit the exact mold you would expect,” she says. “We’ve talked to students personally, and

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