On August 8 at the Vue 17 event space, Wells Fargo held an educational event to teach nonprofit leaders how to apply for grant funding through Wells Fargo Gives, the corporation’s competitive grant-funding program.
Any nonprofit leader in the St. Louis area was eligible to come to the event, whether they’d been previously involved in Wells Fargo’s charitable programs or not. By bringing nonprofits together, Wells Fargo Gives aims to increase its philanthropic impact in the St. Louis area and to connect nonprofits with Wells Fargo employees.
Wells Fargo’s charitable efforts are two-pronged. It is investing $5 million per year in efforts to bridge racial and economic divisions in the region, and it also encourages its own employees to go out into the community and volunteer. Each Wells Fargo employee gets 16 hours per year of paid community service time.
“Before I started working here, it kind of blew my mind that people here could actually get this benefit,” said Elisa Tomich, a communications consultant at Wells Fargo. “So every Monday, if I wanted to take two hours for eight weeks to go volunteer at a school, I could go do that, and that would count as work time, actually.”
At the Wells Fargo Gives event, the giving and volunteering components of Wells Fargo’s philanthropic efforts were combined. Executive directors of St. Louis area nonprofits came to see if Wells Fargo grant funding might be available for their organizations (Wells Fargo Gives provides $275,000 per year to St. Louis nonprofits). Wells Fargo employees also were able to find new places to volunteer.
“Wells Fargo Gives is so important to us because it allows us to meet nonprofits, and so when our team members, say, ‘Hey, I’m interested in volunteering,’ we’ve got a rolodex of places they can get involved,” said Vanessa Cooksey, head of Community Affairs at Wells Fargo Advisors.
The corporation has hosted two to four Wells Fargo Gives sessions since September 2014, and in that time they’ve managed to reach “over 556” organizations, Cooksey said. In that time, the need for support from nonprofits in the St. Louis community has increased, while those nonprofits have often struggled to grow and meet that demand.
“When communities have greater need, the organizations that respond need greater capacity to serve them,” Cooksey said.
To do so, Wells Fargo Gives directs much of its grant money towards general operating expenses for nonprofits, as opposed to specific projects or events. “They appreciate that,” said Cooksey. “It gives them the flexibility to build their capacity to serve more people, versus being limited to only being able to fund a specific program or a specific event,” which donors often prefer.
In addition to the growing need for nonprofits to do more with less money, said Cooksey, the focus of St. Louis nonprofits has shifted towards programs serving the area’s youth and elderly populations. And many nonprofits that send staff to the Wells Fargo Gives events realize they’ve been working towards the same goal without working together.
“Last year in September, when we hosted one of the sessions, we had five breast cancer organizations attending the same session,” Cooksey said. “They didn’t know each other. And so at the end of the session, we always leave time for networking, and it was really cool to see them all kind of huddled up in the side of the room.”
Thanks to Wells Fargo Gives, those organizations were able to connect and combine their resources.
Bringing together dozens of nonprofit leaders in the same room, Cooksey said, is efficient: “instead of having 100 30-minute meetings,” she said, “we can have one 90-minute meeting.”
“It has actually encouraged collaboration and networking among the St. Louis nonprofit community,” Cooksey said. With Wells Fargo Gives information sessions and grant funding, she said, nonprofits are “finding ways to have a greater impact in the community, particularly when dealing with fewer resources.”
For more information, visit https://www.wellsfargo.com/about/corporate-responsibility.
