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PostMar 09, 2016#26

Northside Neighbor wrote:Believe it or not, I give well over $100 per year in donations to community development organizations (closer to $1,000) and well over 100 hours per year of volunteer time.
While all service is laudable,I will say IF you get paid $32,000 a year to do it, it does fall into a little bit different category. Maybe you don't and you simply do it all out of an upwelling of generosity, and for that warm feeling of superiority. Good for you.
Northside Neighbor wrote:What I can say for a fact, given that many of the community development organizations in St. Louis are hurting big time financially, is that these organization need our collective time and money now more than ever or they will cease to exist and we will see more negative community outcomes as a result.
And yet after several direct attempts to get you to be specific you have yet to drop the name of a single organization, and what they are doing to make St. Louis a better place. This is a PERFECT forum to get the word out about their missions. Instead you take a very off putting route of telling everyone here that they aren't doing enough, when you don't know them any better than they know who you are and or what you do.

GD normally I try not to sink into these posts... *sigh*
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PostMar 09, 2016#27

While all service is laudable,I will say IF you get paid $32,000 a year to do it, it does fall into a little bit different category. Maybe you don't and you simply do it all out of an upwelling of generosity, and for that warm feeling of superiority. Good for you
:roll:
And yet after several direct attempts to get you to be specific you have yet to drop the name of a single organization, and what they are doing to make St. Louis a better place. This is a PERFECT forum to get the word out about their missions. Instead you take a very off putting route of telling everyone here that they aren't doing enough, when you don't know them any better than they know who you are and or what you do.
Given the thousands of posts and comments here, I figured there was more general awareness of community development work in St. Louis. Apparently, not so much.

OK. Here's a partial list of STL city based organizations. There are other groups working in Metro East, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County.

Old North St. Louis - Old North St. Louis Restoration Group
Jeff Vanderlou - Community Renewal and Development
College Hill - Grace Hill and Lutheran Housing Support
Baden, Walnut Park, environs - Riverview West Florissant Development Corp
Hamilton Heights - Hamilton Heights Neighborhood Organization
Dutchtown - Dutchtown South Community Corp
Tower Grove area - Tower Grove Neighborhoods CDC
Grove/CWE/Midtown - Park Central Development Corp
Carondelet - Carondelet Community Betterment Federation
Ville - Northside Community Housing, Inc.
West End - Cornerstone Development/SLACO
Skinker DeBaliviere - Skinker DeBaliviere Community Council
Historic Preservation - Landmarks Assoc of St. Louis
Community Organizing - SLACO (St. Louis Association of Community Organizations)

The names are pretty self explanatory as far as their mission focus. If you want to know more about any of these, search their names on Google. Most have been around for decades and have their own websites.
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PostMar 09, 2016#28

Northside Neighbor wrote:
While all service is laudable,I will say IF you get paid $32,000 a year to do it, it does fall into a little bit different category. Maybe you don't and you simply do it all out of an upwelling of generosity, and for that warm feeling of superiority. Good for you
:roll:
OK. Here's a partial list of STL city based organizations. There are other groups working in Metro East, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County.

Old North St. Louis - Old North St. Louis Restoration Group
Jeff Vanderlou - Community Renewal and Development
College Hill - Grace Hill and Lutheran Housing Support
Baden, Walnut Park, environs - Riverview West Florissant Development Corp
Hamilton Heights - Hamilton Heights Neighborhood Organization
Dutchtown - Dutchtown South Community Corp
Tower Grove area - Tower Grove Neighborhoods CDC
Grove/CWE/Midtown - Park Central Development Corp
Carondelet - Carondelet Community Betterment Federation
Ville - Northside Community Housing, Inc.
West End - Cornerstone Development/SLACO
Skinker DeBaliviere - Skinker DeBaliviere Community Council
Historic Preservation - Landmarks Assoc of St. Louis
Community Organizing - SLACO (St. Louis Association of Community Organizations)
I've actually only heard of a few of them. I will say the question wasn't what are the various community groups in St. Louis but which ones have you specifically been involved in. That said I think it's best to just assume you have donated time and or money to all these organizations. Hopefully you haven't left any out as the more obscure ones were the ones I was curious about, rather than PCDC, Old North Restoration, or Landmarks Association which tend to get mentioned a lot on the various threads. Feel free to share in the future about the good works they are doing their goals and their financial needs to meet those goals, meetings, fundraisers, etc. I realize a person could just look them up on their website, but for better or worse a big part of a 501c tasks is raising awareness. If you expect someone to find them it will be tough to get the momentum going.
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PostMar 09, 2016#29

Sorry, no I haven't donated money or time to all of these organizations. If I did, it wouldn't go very far.

I did forget to mention another good one - North Newstead Association, serving the O'Fallon and Fairground neighborhoods.

As nonprofits, they do need to work to raise their profiles. They try.
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PostMar 09, 2016#30

Wow 4:55 am. Impressive.

So NN, what you seem to be suggesting is that there's a very good case to be made for an aggregation fund for community and neighborhood based organizations fittings a specific criteria. You're surely right. United Way and Youth Bridge sort of do that, but not specifically for the types of groups you mention.

I think the Missouri Environmental Fund has the best model. http://www.moenv.org/ They make no pretense of being a big stand alone organization. They simply collect money, build an endowment, and then distribute the funds to non-profit groups that fit their criteria. For the donor, you can know you're helping the groups you like as well as the obscure ones you don't have time for while not being bothered with membership mailings. For the non-profit, you just agree to an audit and then money flows your way automatically. It helps the organizations on the ground remain stable and focused.

There are lots of things in St. Louis that would benefit from that sort of fundraising approach. House museums for instance.
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PostMar 12, 2016#31

More:

http://m.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/ ... a3887.html
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