A large-scale fundraising initiative seeks to strengthen Arizona nonprofits, a sector contributing approximately $22 billion dollars per year to the Gross State Product according to an Arizona State University Lodestar Center report. 

AZ Gives Day, a program started by the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits and Arizona Grantmakers Forum, enables Arizonans to make a difference in their communities by “paying it forward” and donating to various local 501(c)3 organizations, ultimately resulting in a healthier economy and thriving communities. 

The day-long fundraising marathon sponsored by FirstBank, Freeport-McMoRan Foundation, Arizona Community Foundation, SRP, and many other Arizona businesses, has raised more than $30 million dollars for state and local nonprofits since 2013. And just last year, despite recent economic downturns via various rippling effects post-pandemic, Arizona Gives raised $7.3 million dollars – the efforts’ highest ever fundraising haul.

The Arizona Gives team believes the need to donate is bigger now more than ever. This campaign helps all Arizonans alike find, learn about, and contribute to causes they believe in, enables nonprofits to share their stories and engage with the community, and raises awareness about Arizona nonprofits. 

Whether Arizonans would like to donate to top-tier nonpartisan research groups like Common Sense Institute Arizona or offer support to philanthropic grantmaking organizations like the Arizona Flinn Foundation, over 1,000 charities are eligible for impactful donations through AZ Gives. 

The marathon will take place tomorrow, April 4, 2023. To learn more, visit their website:.

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Cox Communications, the largest private telecom company in America, is involved in two initiatives this month as part of its ongoing effort to meet a “great need” among  low-income students and their families in Arizona during the pandemic. 

In its latest effort, Cox partnered with the Arizona Cardinals and State Farm last week to give 150 computers and one free year of high speed internet to 150 families in Phoenix. Families in the Phoenix Elementary and Roosevelt school districts are receiving the free computers and one free year of Cox’s Connect2Compete high speed internet.

“As schools continue to find ways to educate kids outside the classroom, we don’t want to see kids get left behind just because their family can’t afford a computer and an internet connection in the home,” said Susan Anable, Cox’s southwest vice president of public affairs.

All of the students selected qualify for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or live in public housing.

Access to technology at home is critical to the quality of a student’s education, yet many students in America lack internet access, Anable said. One-third of households with children 6 to 17 years old do not have high speed internet in their homes, to Cox. 

To address the need, Cox offers an option for low-income families with school-age children through its Connect2Compete . Qualifying families can receive home internet with wifi for $9.95 a month. 

Of the parents enrolled in the program, 91 percent agree that low-cost internet service at home gives children a leg up for high school graduation.

Cox Charities accepting grant applications through May 29

Cox also announced last week that it is accepting through May 29 for grants up to $10,000 each from Arizona nonprofits that work with youth and education. 

Now more than ever, nonprofits are relying on giving to be able to continue to support children in their communities, said Anable, citing a new report conducted by the Arizona State University (ASU) Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation. 

The , which surveyed 449 Arizona nonprofits, portrays a sector struggling under the weight of the pandemic:

•        Nearly 80 percent reported a reduction in normal services
•        Eleven percent are not operating at all
•        Almost 40 percent of all arts and culture nonprofits are not operating
•        Just under 20 percent will not be able meet payroll in eight weeks
•        Only 5 percent report they are operating normally

That’s why supporting them is so critical right now, Anable said. 

“Continuing our history of supporting the communities in Arizona where our employees live and work, Cox recognizes how vital our youth and education-focused nonprofit community is to provide vital support for children in our state. At a time when donations are down sharply due to the pandemic, our 3,200 employees are extending a helping hand.”   

Last year, Cox Charities distributed nearly $570,000 to more than 100 youth and education-focused nonprofits across Arizona. Cox Charities funds are raised through employee-driven fundraisers and personal contributions throughout the year, as well as community fundraising partnerships. 

For the guidelines and grant applications, go to: .

Cox has almost 3 million customers in Arizona

As the largest private telecom company in the U.S., Cox has 6 million residential and commercial customers. Cox has about 20,000 employees nationwide. Total revenues in 2016 were $11 billion. 

While Cox operates cable systems in 18 states, almost half its customers are in Arizona where it employs more than 3,200 workers. In metro Phoenix, it serves more than 2.5 million subscribers and in Southern Arizona approximately 400,000. 

Cox Communications is the largest division of Cox Enterprises, a family-owned business founded in 1898 by Governor James M. Cox of Ohio.

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Steps of Love, an Arizona-based nonprofit, has partnered with AIM Peñasco, a civil association in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, to expand educational opportunities and break down barriers to access by offering tutoring, transportation, health care assistance and more.

“The growth of our program has been purely word-of-mouth,” said Claire Bashaw, executive director of Steps of Love. “We have established some really good credibility in the community, basically families who are really having trouble meeting their kids’ and their family’s needs.”

Bashaw runs the operation stateside, but she credits one Kathleen Duncan with the success of the organization’s pilot program in Puerto Peñasco, .

“[Kathleen] and her husband own and operate Duncan Family Farms, which is one of the largest organic baby greens farms in the nation,” Bashaw said. “When the farm really took off, she found herself of means for the first time in her life, and she was a new empty nester, and she had been vacationing in Rocky Point for many years.”

Duncan spent the next three years — from September 2012 to November 2015 — volunteering three days a week at an emergency children’s shelter in Puerto Peñasco. During that time, she met Bashaw.

“I had become part of Steps of Love; it was a brand new, very small nonprofit that
 a woman I had met had formed just to support a little children’s home in Sonoita, on the border
 caring for like six kids,” Duncan recalled.

The two decided their efforts would be better spent if they worked together, and they put a plan into action.

“I was ready, after three years going back and forth, to go out
 and really launch an effort, launch a program to help kids out in the community, not just at this little shelter,” Duncan said. “I formed a local advisory group when I formed the civil association, and they have really guided this.”

A civil association is essentially the Mexican term for a nonprofit organization.

Duncan said she saw the poverty present in Puerto Peñasco and realized that, although many nonprofits and aid organizations were helping families get access to shelter, food and health care, one issue was not being addressed — education.

“So many families are being forced to choose between sending their kids to school and meeting their basic needs,” Duncan explained.

The Mexican constitution guarantees a free public education until high school, but, as Duncan put it, “Free does not mean accessible.”

“You can have a free grade school right down the street from you, but if you don’t have a birth certificate, because you were born in poverty and not in a hospital
 you don’t exist in the government; you can’t register for school,” she said. “You don’t exist as far as the government’s concerned.”

Money is a barrier to many children being prepared for school. Just like in the United States, students need to bring backpacks with notebooks, glue sticks and other everyday school supplies. 

“Some kids just have to work,” Duncan said. “They have to be out on the streets, hustling, washing windows, selling gum on the corners with their parents, just contributing to the family income.”

For kids in those situations school is often not an option, and even kids who can make it to school most days sometimes fall behind, which can mean expulsion.

What is the solution? For Steps of Love, education must be approached holistically.

At its start, the organization had limited resources that became stretched thin as their student population grew, so in the second year they opened two homework clubs in the community. The clubs function like Boys and Girls Clubs in the U.S., where kids can come study, receive tutoring and be safe from outside dangers.

“We have a whole team,” Bashaw said. “We’ve got a social worker, we’ve got a community outreach person, we’ve got several administrative employees. The families’ needs are assessed
 some families need just a little, some families need a lot.”

If the children are hungry, Steps of Love provides food vouchers; if the family can’t afford cab fare — there is no public transportation — the organization offers vouchers; if families can’t afford school supplies, Steps of Love provides those, too.

“We’ve partnered with dentists and doctors who now see our kids for free,” Bashaw said.

Whatever barriers are preventing families from providing their children with education, that is what Steps of Love and AIM Peñasco want to fix, she said.

Bashaw said the program grew from 72 kids the first year to 588 the third year. The first round of 19 high school seniors graduated high school, and all 19 of them started college in the fall. There are now four homework clubs in the community, and the program has at least a 98 percent retention rate, Duncan said.

Bashaw and Duncan both agree, the community itself is key to the success of the program.

“While we are funding this program in Mexico, we are still empowering that local team to empower their own community,” Bashaw said. “We’re allowing them to drive the programmatic development — for them to understand what it is that their own community needs. And by offering educational access and academic resources to these kids, we’re allowing them to break their family’s cycle of poverty.”

Running a program like this is not cheap, but it is far from impossible, Duncan said.

The first year’s budget was $30,000, and Duncan and her husband funded it themselves. This year, the budget was about $250,000.

“We never imagined it would blow up as it has and the need would be so great, and we’d have this huge waiting list, but we have rapidly outgrown my ability — and my husband’s ability — to kind of do this privately, and for me to lead our efforts on both sides of the border,” Duncan said.

That’s how Bashaw came to be executive director of Steps of Love, giving Duncan a chance to step back from her hands-on role.

According to Steps of Love, it costs about $34.80 per month to support one child in the program. That funds the homework clubs, the team’s salaries, direct educational expenses, transportation and other support.

“In that community, that’s a lot of money,” Duncan said. “But for here? You know, to change a kid’s life, give them a different future for $35 a month?”

Duncan said the families in Puerto Peñasco told her education brings them hope because education provides a future for their children.

“Kathleen always says that
 you could be the richest person or the poorest person, but in the end, what you want for your child is a better life,” Bashaw said. “And these kids struggle so much because of the lack of resources and support, and they are faced with insurmountable barriers in their lives.”

Steps of Love has entrusted the local team  to run AIM Peñasco day to day. The way Bashaw and Duncan see it, the community members have to be the ones championing the effort to educate their children.

To participate in the program, every family has to find a way to give back.

“Nobody wants to just take and wait for somebody to take care of them,” Duncan said. “Some of our families have so little in terms of resources, but everybody has things to give: their time — we have dads that will help fix roofs on other kids’ houses; a dad that’s a welder
 a mom that can sew and sews other kids’ uniforms; someone that makes tortillas; some that have cars will give transportation to those that don’t.”

The students give back to the community, too. Older kids tutor the younger, and the program has hired two of its own college graduates to teach after helping them earn their teaching certificates.

“I always say, I truly believe that every human being should have the right and privilege and opportunity to get the best education possible,” Duncan said. “And to know that, three-and-a-half hours away, these kids are not getting a chance or any kind of hope for a better life
 How can you not do whatever you can to change that?”

Steps of Love has high hopes for the future of its program. Duncan said she hopes to offer vocational education to adults who want to find a career, and intensive English language courses to help children broaden their opportunities.

Bashaw said it is important to give the children of Puerto Peñasco what they truly deserve.

“If we just give them the chance to learn, they will be that much less likely to be in a desperate situation — to find themselves needing to cross the border or find work elsewhere,” Bashaw said. “We are letting their own community empower themselves
 we have taken it upon ourselves to .”

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The SCALE UP Program is a Tucson-based initiative to help local businesses become more sustainable, saving them money on utilities, providing educational resources and offering financial incentives while reducing energy use, water consumption, waste and emissions.

The program was launched by the Local First Arizona Foundation, the sister organization to nonprofit Local First Arizona (LFA) focused on creating strong, self-sufficient local economies, in partnership with the Tucson 2030 District, a public-private  dedicated to creating a high-efficiency building district in Tucson.

“When it comes down to it, the Local First Arizona Foundation is about creating a better economy that benefits all Arizonans,” said CJ Agbannawag, program manager for SCALE UP.

“We believe that it’s important that, when we’re talking about sustainable economies, we also need to be considering what it means to have a sustainable environment and a sustainable community,” he said. “And we realize that business ownership and the way we run a business has a big  and on your community.”

SCALE UP — Sustainable Communities Accessing Lending and Expertise Upon Performance — launched in 2018 as a pilot program for Tucson, funded by the Arizona Office of Grants and Federal Resources.

“We wanted to put a twist on the traditional type of energy efficiency workshops and water efficiency workshops to see if [businesses] can have better follow-through
 and actually make these bigger implementations and investments in their buildings so they can be more sustainable,” Agbannawag said.

In the , 11 locally-owned Tucson businesses went through a six-workshop series covering topics including energy efficiency, water conservation, waste reduction, transportation efficiency, benchmarking and , a volunteer effort by LFA to connect citizens with businesses and provide educational opportunities to the community.

“Each of the six workshops, we pulled in community experts, because there’s already a lot of these great resources out there in your community,” Agbannawag said. “We had slides that facilitators presented on with information that was aggregated from the community and also from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and then we provided a workbook with quick lists of resources for all the different topics.”

The workshops provided checklists that businesses could use to benchmark (evaluate) their sustainability practices and track their progress. The program also offered an incentive package of resources, including energy rebates.

“There were actually some custom incentives as well,” Agbannawag said. “For example,  here in Tucson, they offered a custom rate for businesses. If they saved 10 percent on their efficiency, they could get a 10 percent discount on their corporate membership through the bike share program.”

The program’s purpose is to educate business owners, offer perspective on sustainability issues and create understanding about important questions: Where does the energy come from when you turn the lights on? Where does your water come from in Tucson?

“We wanted businesses to take ownership for these sustainability plans,” Agbannawag said. “There are a lot of auditing-type services out there where someone will come in and do an energy audit for your business, but then those plans just kind of sit on a shelf.”

SCALE UP encourages participants to create a sustainability plan and follow through on it, using resources and advice from industry professionals, government officials and utility experts. The program also lays out all the different incentives and rebates utilities offer, making it easier for business owners to sift through options.

“At the end of each topic, businesses had to benchmark their buildings and benchmark their business practices,” Agbannawag said. “Things like, ‘How many LED light bulbs do you have? How many gallons-per-flush are your toilets?’”

Businesses also had to benchmark their buildings using the  online tool, tracking the progress of energy efficiency improvements and comparing past and current usage.

“The pilot was just in Tucson, so it worked with Tucson Water, Tucson Electric Power and the City of Tucson and all the different municipalities down here to get the information specific to the area,” Agbannawag said. “But the plan is to eventually expand it to the rest of the state.”

The Arizona chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a national environmental health , was a major partner, he said.

“We also worked with the Pima Association of Governments, because they have a lot of great transportation resources in Pima County, including the folks that run our local bus system and streetcar system, from ,” Agbannawag said. “We also had other local nonprofits, like Watershed Management Group, which is a local water coalition here in town; they participated. Technicians for Sustainability was a partner as well; they’re a local solar installer. So we had a pretty broad range of partners that assisted in this program.”

Ultimately, the LFA Foundation hopes the program makes business owners more aware of what is going on in their environment and their community, as well as the impact their businesses can have, Agbannawag said.

“Secondly, we want to help these businesses to reduce their utility spending so they actually have more money freed up to invest in their building in other ways or to invest in their company in other ways, so that they can be more environmentally-friendly and have better economic performance,” he said.

Finally, participants were given exclusive access to a revolving loan fund from the nonprofit  (CIC) in Tucson, allowing businesses to take out low-interest loans for sustainability projects. The loans were matched up to 20 percent by a grant from a CIC investor.

The pilot program businesses saw “a pretty big spectrum of improvements across the board,” Agbannawag said.

For example, Pop-Cycle, a sustainability-focused bicycle shop, operates out of a historic building in Tucson that the company believed to be inherently inefficient, Agbannawag said. But after completing the SCALE UP program, Pop-Cycle saw the building’s lowest energy bill in 20 years, he said.

Right now, SCALE UP is in a planning period, hoping to receive assistance from the state and the City of Tucson to continue the program.

“We’re taking what we’ve learned, we’re identifying other partners, so that way when we do relaunch the program we can pretty quickly expand it,” Agbannawag said.

SCALE UP wants to take a cohort of businesses through the program every quarter — four cohorts per year — and complete at least two more sessions before expanding to Phoenix and elsewhere in the state, he said.

Climate change and water shortages will create new financial challenges for local businesses, and learning to be more sustainable is a smart way to prepare for that and offset the economic impact, Agbannawag said. Consumers should be aware, too, he said.

“At Local First, we tell people all the time to vote with your dollar, to support the local businesses, because they have the decision-making power here in our state, and we want to keep our money here to support our tax base in Arizona,” he said.

“If you’re a consumer that wants to be more sustainable, find the businesses — like the ones that went through SCALE UP — that are supporting green projects and sustainability projects, and support them as well, and let them know that they’re doing a good job.”

***

Business owners can email CJ Agbannawag for more information about upcoming SCALE UP workshops or to add themselves to the contact list for future cohorts.

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