Impact100 Sonoma to award record-breaking funding for nonprofits

In celebration of its 15th anniversary, Impact100 Sonoma, a women’s collective giving organization, is awarding a record $350,000 in grants to valley-serving nonprofits in 2024.

The organization was founded in 2009 by women who wished to empower other women to invest in local nonprofits in support of the Sonoma community.

Impact100 launched with the idea of 100 members each donating $1,000 towards one nonprofit serving Sonoma Valley. This year’s funding raises the organization’s cumulative total since 2010 to $4 million, a record for the second year in a row. Membership has grown from its initial 110 women to around 330 donors.

Impact100 now awards funding to multiple nonprofits a year, rather than donating $100,000 to one selected organization. Eligible nonprofits must be those in service of the valley but are not required to be locally-based.

Co-President Claudia Sims said their donors consist of a diversity of women who are younger and older, working and not working, and wealthy and not as wealthy.

When Sims joined the organization, she wanted to donate to nonprofits that needed funding the most, and those that she trusted.

“I knew the big ones, but I didn’t know the small ones. Another goal of mine, and one of quite a few women that move up here, new to the community, they will say, ‘I would like to give time, but I would like to get to know the nonprofits in this community so that I can decide which I’d like to donate to, not just money but time,’” she said.

During the nonprofit selection process, members of the Impact100 grants committee conduct site visits and get to know the local organizations that are in need of support.

Kathy Bloch, grants oversight committee chair, said the idea behind funding a nonprofit was that it would allow the organization to “do something different, something bigger.”

In 2020, Impact100 began awarding multiple Impetus Grants of up to $25,000 to nonprofits, a shift from its former model of giving $100,000 to one organization.

“We ended up getting more and more members. So, in addition to them being able to give a $100,000 grant, we were also, with the additional money that we had, able to give smaller grants to other nonprofits say between $5,000 and $15,000,” Bloch said.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, everything changed for Impact100.

“We were actually in the middle of our grant process, which involves reading applications, meeting in two different kinds of groups ― there’s the financial review and the grant review, and then they have site visits where they go out and meet the nonprofits. All of that stopped with the pandemic,” Bloch said.

The organization decided to divide up that year’s pool and give an equal amount to the 23 nonprofits that were still in the grant process.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we actually talked to a lot of the nonprofits to say, ‘What do you need? What needs to be different?’ The world seems to be different right now,” Bloch said. “At that time, I’d say really basic things like food and housing were the most important thing.”

The awarded organizations were grateful to receive smaller amounts of funding on a as-needed basis, and that their fellow nonprofits were given support as well. Impact100 has since continued the new model of awarding up to $25,000 to each selected nonprofit.

For Impact100’s 15th anniversary year, it is offering the Encore Grant, a multiyear award for one nonprofit to receive a second consecutive year of funding.

“The Holy Grail for a nonprofit is to have a multiyear grant. And so, if you are a recipient, you can get it for this year and then next year, maybe even for a third year,” Bloch said.

In 2023, Impact100 awarded a total of $337,400, up to $25,000 each to 16 valley-serving nonprofits. Organizations such as 10,000 Degrees, Cancer Support Sonoma, Food for All/Comida para Todos, Friends in Sonoma Helping, Homeless Action Sonoma, Just1mike, Sonoma Community Center and Sonoma Ecology Center received between $9,689 and $25,000.

Teri Adolfo, executive director of Cancer Support Sonoma (CSS), a nonprofit offering integrative therapies for individuals and families facing cancer treatments, said she may be Impact100’s biggest cheerleader.

“We have been turned down by so many other funding agencies because we're so small and it really takes the people who live in the community to understand how important a small organization like ours is and they do,” Adolfo said.

The $25,000 grant was awarded to support increasing outreach to under-served cancer patients and to provide adjunct treatments otherwise unavailable in the valley. With the help of Impact100, CSS was able to open a new facility with a larger capacity to offer more services.

CSS opened its new facility at 585 1st Street West on April 1, the first time the nonprofit has had its own unshared space.

CSS offers services such as acupuncture, naturopathic consultations, oncology and therapeutic massage, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, ayurveda consultations, Jin Shin Jyutsu, support groups and counseling.

With its increased capacity, Cancer Support Sonoma will expand services to offer oncology yoga, medical oncology, an End of Life Doula program and qigong, a form of traditional Chinese medicine involving coordinated body-posture and movement, breathing, and meditation for health and spirituality.

“What I always say is it's Impact100 Sonoma and organizations like the Rotary of Sonoma who has really enabled us to thrive and grow. And when COVID hit so many nonprofits went under and we just hung in there,” Adolfo said. “We continued to pay our rent even though we couldn't open up. Most of our providers were considered gig providers. So we weren't even getting unemployment.”

As a mostly volunteer organization, the CSS team was grateful for Impact100’s donation which funded a part time executive director, a part-time patient navigator and another staff member to help promote CSS’s program for the Latinx community. The program involves outreach to Spanish speaking individuals and translates CSS’s literature to Spanish.

“So it was Impact100 who gave us this $25,000 grant that really helped us get a little bit of a foundation under us so that we could really explode into what we're doing.”

CSS’s End of Life Doula program provides a doula to support a dying patient and their loved ones during the end of life process. Unlike hospice, the doula doesn’t provide medical care but rather offers many important services including emotional, physical and spiritual support.

The program is dedicated to a former CSS client, Susan Lundquist, whom Adolfo loved dearly. It was made possible due to the generous support of Lundquist’s family who donated $10,000 to launch the program.

“She meant so much to me. She would have just loved this. So it really means a lot to us to carry on her name,“ Adolfo said. ”She just ― to the very end she was life. She just glowed every time you saw her.”

Because of the support from organizations like Impact100, CSS is able to continue its dedicated care for patients in need.

“So, they are so critical to Sonoma Valley. I cannot say enough about how important they are to us and to all nonprofits in the Sonoma Valley,” Adolfo said.

With Impact100’s former model of awarding one organization with $100,000, some nonprofits may have been less inclined to apply for such a large sum of funding.

“But now, it's up to 25 and particularly last year we had so many new ― or new to us, you know, who had never applied before and so many smaller ones who applied for less than $20,000 or $25,000,” Sims said.

Impact100 has a NextGen membership, which encourages younger women to join. NextGen members can be sponsored by other Impact100 donors if they are unable to donate.

NextGen Co-Leaders Amy Gallagher and Emma McCulloch said, “NextGen is a group of young, like-minded, hard-working individuals looking to be a part of enriching this community and valley through philanthropy.”

“We work in tandem with the Impact100 group at large to give back, focusing on women owned businesses and the youth of Sonoma Valley,” Gallagher and McCulloch said. “It is extremely gratifying to build friendships that are grounded in philanthropy and a shared care for our community of Sonoma.”

The 2024 awarded nonprofits will be notified at the end of April and grants will be handed out during the annual awards celebration on May 4. The ceremony is open to the public.

To learn more about Impact100, visit, https://www.impact100sonoma.org/.

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Molloy at emma.molloy@sonomanews.com.