Four Latino Fundraisers Up Their Game With Affinity Group Help

Long-time fundraiser Armando Zumaya founded Somos El Poder, a member organization for Latino fundraisers, in 2022. The goal was to offer professional development resources and opportunities for fundraisers to connect with one another. Since then, fundraisers from roughly 140 organizations have joined the group. Last year, Somos El Poder produced its first in-person conference for members. Two years after its launch, Somos El Poder is helping fundraisers professionalize their development programs and raise more money. Here are their stories, as told to the Chronicle. Their words have been edited for clarity and brevity.

‘We Were Speaking the Same Language’

In 2021, Vanessa Herrara launched the fundraising program for Latino Outdoors, a nonprofit that organizes outdoor exploration opportunities for Latinos. As the development manager, Herrara was confident in her grant-writing skills, but knew she had a lot more to learn. She was looking for resources to strengthen her own skills and bolster the fundraising infrastructure of Latino Outdoors. When she heard about Somos El Poder, she called Zumaya to learn more. “It felt like we were speaking the same language, culturally,” she says. Since she joined the group, Latino Outdoors has expanded from a staff of four full-time employees to 13.

I started attending Somos El Poder online workshops, and then they announced their development certificate program, La Vanguardia Academy. I decided, instead of just going to these ad hoc things, I’m going to do this program. You’re in a cohort, so you get to know folks as much as you can while you’re in an online workshop.

It’s skill building, so there were workshops on grant writing, cold calls, speaking with prospective donors, what to do once a donor has agreed to give a gift, and how to continue that relationship with the donor. There’s a lot of conversation going back and forth. It’s not your traditional cut-and-dry PowerPoint presentation. It is very interactive — lots of questions, lots of role play.

There are specific things that we learned in class on Wednesday and I put in practice the next Tuesday. What comes to mind is a workshop on federal grants where we learned that you can count volunteer hours as matching funds. There are calculators that determine how many dollars one volunteer hour is worth in each state.

This seemingly random thing made such a huge difference for my organization. A few weeks later, I was writing a grant application for the New Mexico Outdoor Equity Fund. We had been a previous grantee of them, but the grant had changed: Now we needed matching funds, and we were unsure if we could come up with them. Then I remembered the Vanguardia workshop. Volunteer hours didn’t provide the entirety of the matching funds we needed, but it made it so we just had to come up with $5,000, instead of $20,000.

We were able to apply for this grant and eventually received the grant funding again for another year. It allowed us to grow our programming in New Mexico. Now, we can cover the costs for more expensive activities, like an overnight rafting experience for Latina girls, stand-up paddle board excursions for families, and outdoor rock climbing, downhill skiing, and snowshoeing.

Since joining Somos El Poder, I feel more confident in my skill set and more confident in my gut instincts. At Latino Outdoors, we all work remotely. I really appreciated being a part of a community through Somos El Poder, where we can have conversations about fundraising best practices — but not in any kind of competitive way. It really helped me realize I do know what I’m doing.

Spotlighting Latino Donors

In 2021, Monica Vasquez opened a letter from a former Eisenhower Health patient that enclosed a check for $86. Handwritten in Spanish, the letter read, “This isn’t a lot, but I give it with lots of love.” The gift got Vasquez thinking: How many more Latino donors were willing to make gifts like this?

Vasquez, then director of donor engagement and events at Eisenhower Health Foundation, a nonprofit hospital in California’s Coachella Valley, started researching her community’s demographics and putting together a case for launching a small-dollar fundraising program aimed at Latino former patients. She pitched the idea to the president of the foundation and the chief executive of the hospital and got the green light in 2022. With the help of Somos El Poder, Vasquez has cultivated the skills she needs to build a program dedicated to winning large and small gifts from the Latino community in the Coachella Valley.

I presented this idea about raising money specifically from the Latino community, not knowing how or when to do it. The foundation and hospital leaders said yes to the concept. Almost immediately, I joined Somos El Poder and started taking advantage of the online courses and being able to reach Armando directly. I talked him through my thought process as I designed the program, and he told me about lessons that he had learned along his fundraising career. I was able to gain so much knowledge from the Somos El Poder community, and I continue to. There are times when something isn’t working out the way I thought it would, and I get discouraged. But then I go to these Somos El Poder classes, and I get re-inspired.

In Somos El Poder classes, the presenters literally speak your language. I attended a webinar about how to build a grateful-patient fundraising program. The presenter gave me some ideas about how to talk to prospective donors. Recently, I attended another webinar led by a fundraiser who talked about how she inspires working-class donors to give and the type of events that she organizes.

You would think that someone like myself who has extensive knowledge of events would find it easy to plan them for my program. But when you step into the role of a fundraiser, you want to be clear on not just the type of event that you’re going to do, but who you’re going to invite and what you’re going to say to them.

Armando helped me recruit an advisory board to build the fundraising program that became Latinos in Philanthropy. There are 10 board members, all very successful business people within the community. In January of 2023, I held a reception for the advisory board. They invited their friends, and I invited other members of the business community. I pitched the idea for a program to raise money from Latino former patients and community members, and it started to inspire people. They wanted to be part of this.

Jesus Menera

I launched my first fundraising project in October of 2023 at my second gathering with members of the local business community. People kept saying, “I want to be part of Latinos in Philanthropy.” It just started snowballing. My goal was to raise $500,000. I gave myself until June of 2024 to reach that goal.

As of January 2024, I have raised just over $100,000, and I’m still continuing conversations with a few donors who can give $10,000 or more. A couple of people are looking to give $50,000 to $100,000. I wasn’t expecting that. My original idea had been to build a grateful-patient program for Latinos. I still plan to do that, but it’ll take me a little bit longer. Now, I’m concentrating on sitting down with business owners who can give at the major-gift level.

Somos El Poder gave me the tools to know who I should be cultivating as donors. It also helps to know that other organizations are doing what you’re doing. It reinforces that yes, we are on the right path, and it’s okay to do what we’re doing. Somos El Poder helped me tune into the Latina in me.

Professional Development Help

Two months before the Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA, prepared to kick off its first capital campaign, its director of development and executive director headed to the Somos El Poder Conference in Pasadena, Calif. The then 37-year-old immigrant rights organization had grown considerably since 2016, when the election of Donald Trump touched off a flood of contributions.

Historically, the nonprofit earned most of its funding from state grants, but its three-year, $65 million capital campaign would seek to win major gifts from individual donors. It was a daunting task for a development team that had only four fundraisers. Julio Martinez, director of development at CHIRLA, knew his team had a lot to learn, so he turned to Somos El Poder.

On our development team, there are a lot of young staff members who are in their first jobs after college. Somos El Poder has become another resource that we use to train both new fundraisers and those who are experienced but want to update their knowledge. Right after attending the organization’s Fundraising Con Ganas conference in April, we registered three staff members to attend La Vanguardia Academy. Being in a space with other, more experienced fundraisers helped our first-time fundraisers see themselves in that role and understand the responsibility it requires.

I went to the conference with our executive director, and it helped us both understand the value of expanding our development team. We decided to hire two more people to grow our individual giving program. At the conference, we learned about how a prospect researcher role could fit within our development department. Hiring a prospect researcher is especially important for us now because we’re in the middle of a capital campaign to raise funds for our new headquarters here in Los Angeles. It’s a great opportunity to expand the individual giving program so that our capital campaign project could be primarily funded through those gifts.

We looked at our donor base from 2016 on, and researched individuals’ giving capacities. Then we compiled a spreadsheet that divided those donors by giving capacity so that we can target them at the right level during the capital campaign. Before we launched the campaign, Armando reviewed this spreadsheet and gave us feedback about our plan to reach donors. It was really good to have access to that expertise ahead of the campaign launch.

So far, the strategy has been working. I don’t think we’ve ever received that much support from individual donors. We also got a $20 million grant from the state to kick off our capital campaign. The skills and strategies that we learned at the Fundraising Con Ganas conference has helped us stay on track to achieve our goal for capital campaign. In December 2023, we purchased our new headquarters, so I think we’re slowly getting there. It’s a very exciting time to be at CHIRLA.

‘It Just Seems Doable Now’

Francesca Escoto is the chief operating officer of Allapattah Collaborative CDC, a five-year-old nonprofit that’s working to combat gentrification in Miami’s Little Santo Domingo neighborhood. Climate change is driving some wealthier residents away from Miami’s glitzy beachfront, and some are moving inward to neighborhoods like Wynwood, which is adjacent to Allapattah, home to Little Santo Domingo. Allapattah Collaborative CDC helps businesses navigate their relationships with the city, improve their marketing, and access the resources to keep their doors open. Simultaneously, the group is raising funds to buy real estate in the neighborhood to allow longtime Dominican residents and business owners to stay in the neighborhood while it receives more economic investment.

Miami is a philanthropic desert. It’s a haven for foreign capital and for foreign millionaires. That complicates developing long-term fundraising strategies because you either have to go the celebrity route or you have to go outside of your local community. As a place-based organization, connecting with donors outside of our region requires a whole lot of marketing gymnastics. You have to really up your fundraising game. That’s our biggest challenge: Where is the money that can help us move this thing forward? And how do we tell the story of our organization in such a way that it is compelling to someone who doesn’t live locally?

We came back from the Fundraising Con Ganas conference saying, “We need prospecting.” That was something I understood conceptually before the conference, but I didn’t have a clear picture of how to operationalize it. I’m an engineer by trade, so I need, like, little boxes and arrows. That’s what we got from the conference.

Before we turned to major-donor prospecting, we focused on turning our current funders into bigger funders. We are currently 100 percent funded by government and foundation grants. Our 2023 fundraising goal was $1.2 million. We ended the year with $2.1 million in revenue. Some of that is due to the reputation we have built through program delivery. But some of those dollars we can directly connect back to Somos El Poder. Hiring a prospecting professional helped us sharpen our ask and bring in an additional $450,000 in smaller grants to fund our programmatic efforts.

My goal this year is to diversify our sources of funding so that we have more discretionary, unrestricted dollars that we can then divert into some of these other efforts, like nurturing donor relationships over time. We want to cultivate relationships with people who love the Dominican culture, and who would be interested in the growth of Dominican businesses in Little Santo Domingo and the preservation of its history. We know that those donors exist outside of Miami because Dominicans are in every major area of American life.

I have just fallen in love with prospecting. It just seems doable now. In the past, it just felt like a black box. Over there, there’s dollars — and there’s this dark hole in the middle. How do you find those donors? Learning there are professionals who do that for a living, and I can just pay them to do it — that just made my day. Prospecting has really given us the confidence to put these dreams into actionable plans.